Forty Eight States
Forty Eight States is the culmination of three years of travel through the United States by train, car and plane and decades of travel through all forty eight states. For this series, I have retraced old routes and memories from the Fifties on -my own train set at eight, riding the rails pregnant with my first child, working on the team that consolidated the seven bankrupt railroads into Amtrak. Recurring sounds from the past are the train whistling and the railcars coupling when the wind was right in the evening. Endless possibilities, missed opportunities, fleeting intimacies, reflections on a life.
The road trip is my defining passion and an iconic rite for many Americans. I think my photographs capture a timeless America - one that is no longer there as it was in the Fifties, yet remains through the linkage of knowledge, memory and photograph. Each image does not represent each state, but rather serves as a metaphor for all states. I selected forty eight images for this interpretation, but many more strong photographs are available from this series.
The images are both specific and conceptual. I think in Forty Eight States the American landscape is seen well vertically and framed, not in the more traditional sweeping horizontal (i.e. "landscape!") mode. Perhaps they can be seen as photographic updates of the Hudson River School, or paintings by Frederick Church and Thomas Cole. They evoke a dreamy, romantic yearning for the land and what it means to be an American in the landscape, sometimes part of and sometimes estranged from the places we hold in our memories.