Driving Desire
The Los Angeles freeway system is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can drive on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The rhythm takes over. -Joan Didion: Esquire Magazine August 1976 The freeways become a special way of being alive. The extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical. -Reyner Banham; Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies In Los Angeles, driving is a daily prayer, a morning renewal and an evening reprieve. Twice a day it is the space between home and work. For some, driving can be Zen, a time of control, solitude and power, a meditative state that can only be achieved behind the wheel. For others, driving is a time filled with anger, anxiety, fear and loathing to be avoided at all costs. The freeways have come to define Los Angeles, becoming the grand monuments of a city connected by the automobile. This series deconstructs the omnipresent Los Angeles freeway system into its component parts, the built environment and the drivers that inhabit it. This work finds solitary drivers in unguarded moments as they speed toward unknown destinations. The color photographs are meant to feel similar to images of surveillance, voyeuristic moments with information that leads in many directions. Are these drivers experiencing transcendent moments or does the drive simply numb the senses, their blankness nothing more than boredom? The idea of their car as a second home, a place of privacy and comfort breaks down as we enter the drivers space. The black and white photographs examine the freeway through the tradition of formal landscape photography. Film was my medium of choice for the structural photographs since analog is thought of as a true representation of the world, a faithful rendering of the world before digital manipulation entered our lives. I deliberately used an extended shutter speed (up to 4 minutes) to alter time and space, in order to allow the cars to move through the frame and disappear from the scene. In any give frame, 5000 cars might have passed in front of my lens without registering their presence, or existence for that matter. For the images of drivers, I used a digital camera to capture people as they sped along, some with no destination, unaware they were being photographed in their private worlds. The color is meant to render the drivers in a cinematic style, transforming them into an anonymous "everyman" of the highway.
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