Scott Conarroe: Photographing By Rail
Scott Conarroe Canal, Cleveland OH 2008 Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery © Scott Conarroe
Hitting the open road has long served as a useful way of renewing the mundane. And it’s precisely how Scott Conarroe created a contemplative, elegiac examination of the North American rail system in “By Rail,” his first solo exhibition at Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery. (A touring exhibition and catalogue of “By Rail” will open at the Art Gallery of Windsor in October 2009.) Conarroe’s suite of 10 large-format colour photographs were acquired over the course of an eight-month road trip in his 1981 Chevrolet van, a journey which began in Dawson Creek, where he grew up and learned to drive, and ended in Toronto, where he now lives. In the following email interview, Conarroe shares some thoughts about his trip, trains and photography.
Justin Mah: In what way did this eight-month road trip inform your work, and would it be accurate to describe your photographs as a kind of artful documentation?
Scott Conarroe: The wonderful thing about making photographs is that I’m obligated to go out and actually be in different places. Without undue coyness, the trip was the work, and the photographs are, as you put it, “artful documentation.” In a way, the elegiac tone read into these pictures is as much about driving as it is about train travel. There is a tradition of photographers, from the earliest geological surveys to Robert Frank to Stephen Shore, heading out on grand exploratory road trips. When I was doing “By Rail” and gas was more costly than ever before and the term “carbon footprint” entered common parlance and my old van was making uncomfortable sounds, it struck me repeatedly that the window for this type of adventure is likely closing.
JM: From the outset of your trip, did you proceed with a clear intention of the kind of images you wanted? Or were these scenes that you discovered while travelling and felt needed to be captured?
SC: I didn’t begin with a thesis or an inventory of sites to illustrate my position. I began with a vague interest in the subject of railways, and was compelled by curiosity. This project was definitely shaped by the railway’s proximity to highways. Tracks typically run alongside the road, making them an integral and constant part of a driver’s-eye-view of the landscape.
Scott Conarroe Cul De Sac, Hawthorne, CA 2008 Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery © Scott Conarroe
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