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Scott Conarroe Monorail Station, Miami, FL 2008 Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery © Scott Conarroe |
JM: Railway tracks connect your photos together, whether in images of the open prairies in Saskatchewan or a monorail station in Miami, Florida. Why use the railway as a connecting motif? How did this idea even come about?
SC: In 2006, I noticed that tracks were often finding their way into my pictures of other things. They were so consistent in my projects from Vancouver and Halifax and London that I couldn’t ignore a rather intense, albeit sidelong, interest I have in railways. In “By Rail,” the tracks are a “unifying device” in that a range of geographically and culturally disparate environments are seen as a cohesive statement, because each photograph has a piece of railway somewhere in the frame. In a way, this is as true across the physical landscape as it is in the photographs. Miami is a profoundly different place than somewhere like Cochrane, Alberta, and yet a railroad has the same dimensions and construction in each place. There are variations in language and currency and time throughout this continent, but train tracks illustrate a certain type of constancy.
JM: Your images were shot on an classic 4 x 5 camera, and often in long exposures, up to the 15 to 20 minute range for Canal, Cleveland OH and Cul De Sac, Hawthorne CA. Can you discuss your choice to shoot in long exposures?
SC: I use long exposures for a number of reasons. The pragmatic explanation is that they are necessary in the subdued light and deep depth of field that I prefer. Conceptually, I like that scenes change continuously while I photograph them, that they look different at the beginning of exposure than at the end. Long exposures increase a photograph’s autonomy because the truthfulness of its negative doesn’t portray a specific instant that appeared a certain way, it portrays a compilation of moments; they underscore the camera’s roles of abstractor and editor as well as recorder. And long exposures introduce an element of chance into the precision that view cameras are capable of.
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Scott Conarroe Prairie Tracks, Saskatchewan 2008 Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery © Scott Conarroe |
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