Photographer Joshua Dudley Greer explores America’s fascination with, and endless connection to, roads in his photo series Somewhere Along The Line…
Whether running to or from somewhere, escaping or returning, roads bind and epitomise our relationship with space and time. Acting as a window of hope for some and an escape route for many, this man made marvel simultaneously entwines us physically with nature and rips us away from it. In Joshua Dudley Greer’s photo series, Somewhere Along The Line, this idea is tangible as the photographer captures America’s vast and often desolate landscape and the roads and people that travel upon them.
“By leveling mountains, mowing down forests and circumventing rivers, we have created an easily accessible, anonymous landscape that allows us to enact our fantasies and freedoms, but may also be loosening the bonds that tie people to one another and to place”
The photographer is concerned for the state of our relationship with nature, posing that roads may be interfering with our experience of Earth and it’s beauty. However, one might argue that roads allow us to experience nature where we once would not have been able to. When I think of road trips I remember the flashes yellow and blue as the unforgiving sun beat through the window and the relentless green that stretched seemingly past the horizon and into forever. I remember the small towns that dotted the roads, old and unchanging. Farms and lakes and rivers and NATURE.
“The ideas of mobility, prosperity, community and growth, cornerstones of the American Dream, still motivate many of us to strike out on the road in search of something beyond what our daily lives provide”
Greer has managed to capture this essential feeling of nostalgia and melancholy in his work. Reflecting on the American Dream and what this means for our connection with not only nature, but with each other is paramount as he looks both back on history to discover their origins and forward with seeming caution at where they will lead us (pun intended).
“The boundaries that line this landscape, whether real or imagined, are examined by looking at the separations between public and private space, the individual and the collective, and the countervailing ideas of home and escape”
Roads represent both memory and opportunity, regret and excitement, disaster and fate. A paradox worthy of endless discovery. See more on Joshua Dudley Greer’s site.
*All quotes have been taken from the photographers statement on his site.
Roads represent both memory and opportunity, regret and excitement, disaster and fate. A paradox worthy of endless discovery. See more on Joshua Dudley Greer’s site.
*All quotes have been taken from the photographers statement on his site.
