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Riding Shotgun
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Untitled Highway (Riding Shotgun) is a series of spontaneous, contemporary American landscapes I make while sitting in the passenger seat of a car during long-distance trips traveling at a high rate of speed.
I know these images don’t show the American landscape in the dramatic fashion with which we’ve come to expect, for example, the drama of Ansel Adams’ American West or the grandeur or decay with which American cities are generally portrayed. They are landscapes that explore and document the fleeting. I feel these are very intimate landscapes, the presumed insignificant made significant for just the viewer whose life is going too fast.
These landscapes slow things down. These images still are in keeping with traditional landscapes where the photographer sets up a camera on a tripod and meticulously composes a scene. But our world is too fast-paced and too crowded for that sort of practice now; these landscapes are fashioned to reflect and respond to the speed of our world.
These images were made out of a car window traveling down the Interstate at 65 mph or more. In this type of scenario, there is no time to think, no time to contemplate just like our modern lives don’t allow us to stop and think. Only see and respond spontaneously before the next landscape is served up in the next moment and the process is repeated. As the image-maker, I am like the harried viewer. I don't ask myself the questions that would normally go through my mind, or through the mind of any artist: Is this an acceptable image to make? Is it relevant? Will others like it? Will it sell? I just react to what's in front of me for that second. (For that 1/5000 of a second and then it’s over!)
In a matter of a few hours you can be hundreds of miles from where you started. Think of all of the landscapes you've passed! Thousands? Tens or even hundreds of thousands? Trees/natural setting. Urban settings. Natural settings with a small human encroachment: a light pole, a guard rail, a sign post. (It’s impossible to completely erase the human hand.) I have nearly 1,000 of these images, and I keep making more. But you only see them for a second before they dissolve from your consciousness: They're gone for good, replaced by the next one and the next one and the next. Many people's response would be simply to blank out, to stare.
The landscape has changed because our lives have changed. No vistas. It's closed and fast, civilization has encroached everywhere, and so snap snap snap. But the world is still beautiful. It has now become the job of the image-maker to compose in an instant.
I know these images don’t show the American landscape in the dramatic fashion with which we’ve come to expect, for example, the drama of Ansel Adams’ American West or the grandeur or decay with which American cities are generally portrayed. They are landscapes that explore and document the fleeting. I feel these are very intimate landscapes, the presumed insignificant made significant for just the viewer whose life is going too fast.
These landscapes slow things down. These images still are in keeping with traditional landscapes where the photographer sets up a camera on a tripod and meticulously composes a scene. But our world is too fast-paced and too crowded for that sort of practice now; these landscapes are fashioned to reflect and respond to the speed of our world.
These images were made out of a car window traveling down the Interstate at 65 mph or more. In this type of scenario, there is no time to think, no time to contemplate just like our modern lives don’t allow us to stop and think. Only see and respond spontaneously before the next landscape is served up in the next moment and the process is repeated. As the image-maker, I am like the harried viewer. I don't ask myself the questions that would normally go through my mind, or through the mind of any artist: Is this an acceptable image to make? Is it relevant? Will others like it? Will it sell? I just react to what's in front of me for that second. (For that 1/5000 of a second and then it’s over!)
In a matter of a few hours you can be hundreds of miles from where you started. Think of all of the landscapes you've passed! Thousands? Tens or even hundreds of thousands? Trees/natural setting. Urban settings. Natural settings with a small human encroachment: a light pole, a guard rail, a sign post. (It’s impossible to completely erase the human hand.) I have nearly 1,000 of these images, and I keep making more. But you only see them for a second before they dissolve from your consciousness: They're gone for good, replaced by the next one and the next one and the next. Many people's response would be simply to blank out, to stare.
The landscape has changed because our lives have changed. No vistas. It's closed and fast, civilization has encroached everywhere, and so snap snap snap. But the world is still beautiful. It has now become the job of the image-maker to compose in an instant.
