What is it is that we find so compulsive about the notion of travel? Especially the kind that takes us to remote places that haven’t been visited before. Where does this whish to escape come from and what do we expect to find when we get to other side? More often than not, this desire ties in with a romantic fantasy about untouched wilderness, a kind of virgin landscape we are the first to uncover. Maybe it was the same impulse that drove the explorers when the world was not completely mapped yet. Of course, today such places no longer exist. We are never the first to be in a place and our understanding of wilderness is always shaped by previous occupancy, anecdotes and mediatic or filmic experiences.
The American West has come to embody the concept of wilderness in our collective consciousness. This is partly due to the role images from the early expeditions from photographers such as O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, played in establishing an understanding of these landscapes as ideal. Even now when visiting Yosemite and Zion National Park, we still practice the cropping of roads, habitations and humans as an extension of those early works. The national parks have become museums that are there to preserve the concept of wilderness. Environments so controlled that they operate in a strange paradoxical way; the landscapes are controlled to correspond to what we think wilderness should look like.
For the ‘getting lost’ series I sought out places that embody those archetypes and took photographs at night with the light of distress flares usually used when lost at sea. The photographs were taken on the Bonneville Salt Flats (where the Doner Party first got lost, which lead to fatal delay near lake Tahoe), Death Valley and Craters of the Moon National Monument. The flares become a means of framing and reinterpreting these landscapes, that have been photographed so many times that we are familiar with them before we ever visit. They flares are also signals for the impossibility to get lost, a means to question the feasibility of it and whether if we really did get ‘lost’ it would offer us the fulfilment of our wishes.
The road series is an extension of the getting lost series and tackles similar issues about our understanding of landscape and the desire we associate with it. The immensity of the space gives a sense of flying and observing planet earth from a remote distance. The roads within the landscapes bring this disappearance into the distance into focus and echo the whish to get lost as a means of finding yourself. In that sense this desire could be explained as a form of immersion rather than a dislocation.
They frame a human activity that seems comparatively futile in this enormous landscape yet at the same time it brings it into focus. In some of the images the roads follow the shapes of the landscape and in others they completely ignore it, slicing through it as if it didn’t exist. In that sense they become representation of how we as a society interact with this wilderness. The roads don’t care about the landscape; the landscape doesn’t care about the people driving through it. In that sense they could be read as a picturing of power relationships.
Both the series push the photographic medium to pinpoint how the camera sees the world in a way the eye cannot see. There is light where we see none and under this strange light the landscape begins to appear like a construct. The rocks, the cliffs and the trees, in the images of the road in Yosemite, or that of the road in Zion National Park, begin to appear as part of an architectural model. In the image from Glenn Canyon on the other hand it is the road that starts reading like something modular rather than the landscape. In that sense a mechanism is performed photographically that echoes the one we undertake as visitors to those places.