About Passage
The photographs in Passage were created along the corridor between Sacramento and the Bay Area – a route I’ve often traveled via car and via Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor. For many who make this journey on a semi-regular basis, the landscape becomes almost routine. At first glance, the scenery is more functional than picturesque – cluttered as it is with farmland, refineries, and industrial architecture (things that seem almost intentionally designed not to draw a viewer’s eye). This is part of why I have kept photographing it.
Seen from a passenger’s window, the route becomes one single field of view. The myriad forms of clutter (utilitarian, agricultural, and industrial) come to occupy the same continuous frame – the visual borders between them are broken down, and each are given equal weight within the passenger’s field of view. Despite this, each form of clutter remains distinctively itself; and it’s when they meet without fully integrating that I find them to be truly interesting. (A windmill, for example – traditionally agrarian – hosts a cluster of modern cellular antennas endemic of the technological age). In addition, I find that the act of looking is interesting when it is partly impeded – when the window is dirty or the light is wrong.
The work here has two related strands: One follows the I-80 drive and the industrial sites that line it; the other follows Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor, and is concerned less with what lies outside the window than with that window as a condition of seeing: reflections on the glass, the dark interior framing the bright exterior, the slight disconnect between what the eye sees and what the camera records.