I shot this photo after working a job outside Reno on Thursday. I am constantly driving places and wanting to pull over and stop to take a picture. If I did, I’d never make it anywhere. It was so rad to stumble upon these old lines in the middle of this empty field. This photo makes me just want to follow those tracks and find out where they lead…
Catlin told me to stop taking pictures of power lines, but I cant. I see them everywhere and I am always intrigued by how they have become kinda this antiquated part of the landscape. Where as before they would be seen as foreign or in contrast with the landscape, now, for the most part, they blend seamlessly into the background, becoming a standard part of the great American landscape. Furthermore, these are interesting because they suggest that we are still very much bound to hard technology and energy. Our phones, and ipods may be wireless, but the infrastructure that supports them is still very much rooted in a system of non-sustainable energy. With all the wireless inventions these days, it is easy to forget where all that power comes from, and come out with a sense that we are somehow more sophisticated then a bunch of naked apes with headphones.
Richard and I had a conversation the other night about the role of art in society. I lamented over the tough life of a starving artist struggling to make his art, and how a visual artist has so much competition from a saturated free image market, that is barely possible to make a living. Richard said that the role of artists isn’t to self-sustaining, but to awaken the souls and senses of the populace. To get society to think about things in new and different ways. It stands to reason that the difference between an image creator and an artist, is that the artist uses his point of view to say something. These images of power lines and roads and train tracks speak to me, they resonate, they point to an emerging American aesthetic but im not sure if it is all the way formed yet. I hope to travel the roads in the spring and delve deeper into these…
Other than that, I sit in the cupboard under the stairs, plotting my return to media fame…
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