The Weekly Photograph #15
Roadside Trees
Entry #15 from The Work
Rocky Gap, West Virginia
2017
pigment print f. 8x10” film
40x50”
Here we see a tree guarding a rocky crest overlooking U.S. Route 19 near Rocky Gap, West Virginia, forming a mise en scène resembling a contemporary play. This image is from the Highway Arbor project, a series studying trees along highways and byways. Being a type-study, each subject is connected through he presence of a road, usually empty. Like many of my projects, this series began with observing a recurrence of things — subject, context and impression — which I did not listen to at the beginning. It was through their repetition and continued impression on me that I began making the pictures. I could no longer resist their power over me. The trees became my companions as I sought out other people and places to photograph throughout the American Realm. Each one began to mean something to me. I had to photograph this sensation. I often see the work I do in photography as bouncing between the extremes of the literal and figurative. The literal is the tree, the road, the signs. All that which is described. The figurative begins where the literal leaves off. What does this setting mean? The relations of one tree to another, how it relates to the road, the feeling it conjures. The shapes of nature in contrast to the manmade road. Indeed pictures hold up endless ways to explore the figurative. During long stretches of time driving, it is difficult not to begin to anthropomorphize, to attribute these trees human characteristics. In cities we have parks deliberately constructed and trees planted according to the phenomenological goals of urban planners. These arboreal roadside companions seem to eschew any of that. Instead they stand as objects of serendipitous beauty, unintentionally placed yet completely appropriate.
John Sanderson
New York City
1/2/2025
Grab a copy of THE GROVE, my new photobook and poem through my website for the New Year.
Journal introduction from The Work
The American landscape in my time. Thousands upon thousands of miles traversed in search of pictures.
They become pictures when I see something.
Something which cannot be explained in words, only related to on some level of empathy.
Feeling with the light, subject or an arrangement of the two.
Driving, walking, searching deeper and longer for that which eludes me.
What I search for is unattainable.
But what keeps me coming back is the Quest, for those moments where a picture lines up with my imagination.
It is a complete circle.
"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield." -Tennyson
In other news…
See/listen to new interview with Urbanautica’s Urbanaut Podcast