About Occupied Roads
The subject roads of this project relate to the depopulation of the rural Midwest, where abandoned and vanished farmhouses result from the increased mechanization of farming. People now work and live in towns and cities, and speed across the countryside without really visiting it. To echo Ed Ricketts, where the people have gone is obvious: they are in cars. Thus these views of vehicles intruding in the bucolic scenery, close yet distant, carrying a populace separated from the land.
To express the density of traffic I have collaged photos together. And forgive me, I have taken the liberty of changing the colors of the vehicles from the dead grays and blacks preferred by Americans to the lively colors a merciful god would have chosen.
For this project (and others) I didn’t want literal transcriptions of the original scenes. I wanted the sense of abstraction found in black and white, but I wanted to avoid the static serenity of black and white. I wanted instead color and its life, movement and sense of modernity. To achieve both, I used exactly that part of an image that’s left out of black and white, the pure or “free” color. This free-color form retains the abstraction found in black and white, gains the advantage of color, and cedes only nostalgic associations.