This project is a sequence of 32 images made while traveling between Springfield and Chicago, IL, on Interstate Highway 55.
Traveling this route, I watch the passing landscape for three hours from a passenger-side car window, daydreaming and photograph the trip. As a passenger, I don’t have to watch the road, but when I do, I see the future ahead and the past behind. When I look straight to the side I see the place where I am now. The trip for me becomes a transition through time and space.
The dominant feature of this landscape is the flat horizon. People often describe this environment as boring, but for or me it is the opposite. As I watch the passing landscape closely, the subtle changes in elevation form multiple horizons that move together, passing at various speeds. The far horizon is a stationary background that moves slowly along with me. The middle ground, receding, mirrors my own speed of motion, and the foreground is a blur. This effect is easiest for me to perceive when I concentrate on the landscape directly parallel to my direction of travel and pretend as if it does not extend beyond my narrow field of view.
There are layers of rhythms. Passing corn rows flicker by. Power lines rise-fall-rise next to the road as if they are drawn directly on the sky. Birds travel in cloud-like flocks and orderly lines, or sit evenly spaced on wires. High-tension wires slowly dip and almost touch the tops of agricultural irrigators. Utility poles and mile markers punctuate the blurred words of passing signs. Vehicles speed past in the opposite direction, car windows and tanker trucks reflecting the road, the sky, and fields. Trees close to the road form patterns of flashing light, moving past so quickly that they become transparent and net-like. On the far horizon, soft clusters of trees in the prairie groves drift along slowly like ocean ships. Cliché but true, all of this together has a musical quality.
When I travel someplace new, I have daydreams of anticipation. But my daydreams between Springfield and Chicago are daydreams of memory. I’ve grown up here and my memory is mixed with memories I see in the landscape.
The route itself is a history of things known but absent. An entire race is present only in placenames and the knowledge that present roads are based on their footpaths. The prairie groves have traditional names, often forgotten now, of settlers from the 1830s who displaced aboriginal inhabitants, having themselves displaced other aboriginal inhabitants. The tallgrass prairies have disappeared as well, present now as agricultural fields with vibrant black soil, eternally black, an accumulation of thousands of seasons. Strip mines tell of the coal below, accumulated over millions of years. Everywhere things are decaying and transitioning: cornstalk residue in the fields, old buildings and farms, a rural landscape becoming urban. I know these things unconsciously in my daydreams as I watch the landscape while traveling through it.
When I remember the trip I begin to daydream again and my memories become a single image. My mind wants to recall every detail at once. I review, sort and edit all of my photographs from the trip, superimpose them on each other. The fragments of movement build into some sort of logical sequence that represents my memory of traveling on I-55.
Traveling this route, I watch the passing landscape for three hours from a passenger-side car window, daydreaming and photograph the trip. As a passenger, I don’t have to watch the road, but when I do, I see the future ahead and the past behind. When I look straight to the side I see the place where I am now. The trip for me becomes a transition through time and space.
The dominant feature of this landscape is the flat horizon. People often describe this environment as boring, but for or me it is the opposite. As I watch the passing landscape closely, the subtle changes in elevation form multiple horizons that move together, passing at various speeds. The far horizon is a stationary background that moves slowly along with me. The middle ground, receding, mirrors my own speed of motion, and the foreground is a blur. This effect is easiest for me to perceive when I concentrate on the landscape directly parallel to my direction of travel and pretend as if it does not extend beyond my narrow field of view.
There are layers of rhythms. Passing corn rows flicker by. Power lines rise-fall-rise next to the road as if they are drawn directly on the sky. Birds travel in cloud-like flocks and orderly lines, or sit evenly spaced on wires. High-tension wires slowly dip and almost touch the tops of agricultural irrigators. Utility poles and mile markers punctuate the blurred words of passing signs. Vehicles speed past in the opposite direction, car windows and tanker trucks reflecting the road, the sky, and fields. Trees close to the road form patterns of flashing light, moving past so quickly that they become transparent and net-like. On the far horizon, soft clusters of trees in the prairie groves drift along slowly like ocean ships. Cliché but true, all of this together has a musical quality.
When I travel someplace new, I have daydreams of anticipation. But my daydreams between Springfield and Chicago are daydreams of memory. I’ve grown up here and my memory is mixed with memories I see in the landscape.
The route itself is a history of things known but absent. An entire race is present only in placenames and the knowledge that present roads are based on their footpaths. The prairie groves have traditional names, often forgotten now, of settlers from the 1830s who displaced aboriginal inhabitants, having themselves displaced other aboriginal inhabitants. The tallgrass prairies have disappeared as well, present now as agricultural fields with vibrant black soil, eternally black, an accumulation of thousands of seasons. Strip mines tell of the coal below, accumulated over millions of years. Everywhere things are decaying and transitioning: cornstalk residue in the fields, old buildings and farms, a rural landscape becoming urban. I know these things unconsciously in my daydreams as I watch the landscape while traveling through it.
When I remember the trip I begin to daydream again and my memories become a single image. My mind wants to recall every detail at once. I review, sort and edit all of my photographs from the trip, superimpose them on each other. The fragments of movement build into some sort of logical sequence that represents my memory of traveling on I-55.
