A Dark Topography
By Max Cooper
31 Dec 2007
When people ask me what kind of things I shoot, I have a hard time answering. I generally end up listing my ingredients like a waitress in a seedy diner: Trains, roads, trucks, gas stations.
It's hard to say what these photos actually include. What's worse, it is impossible to describe what each photo leaves out: How the wind blows down the empty interstate, how your hands look in the light from a gas station, how your teeth chatter from fear and a freight train's rumble.
I can say that these photographs are about darkness. I do my best to create a scene in which the subject is elusive and the landscape is empty. Here in the Appalachians on the North Carolina/Tennessee border, you can't throw a rock without hitting something elusive and empty.
Some nights I think there's more to it than that. It's about faith, maybe, in the face of all that darkness. The whisper you hear when you count off the seconds of the exposure. Maybe it's about photography itself, a medium whose default state is darkness. Maybe it's about the residue that humanity leaves in a place, our asphalt, shifting lights, and strange signs.
Other nights I am doubtful. This work is void, a document of aborted communications. The colossal, illuminated cross is just another road sign with its bold and simple declaration. An engine's three headlamps, and the arcing lights there by the tracks warn no one, because no one is there to warn. I photograph the runaway truck ramp head on, knowing the interstate behind me is empty.
If nothing else, this work is topographic. It documents place, here in the mountains, where place is all we have. These are our roads, our streetlights, the things we see at night. These are the words we paint on our barns when the Lord moves us. And this is the darkness we seek to illuminate.
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