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Scott Conarroe Trailer Park, Wendover, UT 2008 Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery © Scott Conarroe |
JM: The sky features quite prominently in your photographs, illuminating the landscape below in a manner that seems painterly. I suppose this is another reason for you choosing to work in long exposures?
SC: The painterly effect you describe has to do with latitudes of light. I tend to work with sky that’s about as close to dark as it is to bright; when the tonal transition from sky to landscape is less abrupt than we are accustomed to seeing in photos, the visual sense of unity is greater. I suppose it is slowness and deliberateness in the process that sometimes comes across as painterly.
JM: On a personal level, your photographs—the outcome of an eight-month adventure—must resonate strongly with you?
SC: On a personal level, “By Rail” is my first mature body of work. Someday, I hope to look back and enjoy “By Rail” for its charming naiveté, but right now it is involved with so many breakthroughs in my career and personal life that I have trouble considering it apart from them. In 2008, when the bulk of “By Rail” was shot, my long-term relationship disintegrated, I was received as a guest at some very fancy institutions, I was detained as a possible “terror threat,” I bathed in rivers and oceans and truck stops and hot springs, and I lived in the same van that I did as a ski-bumming tree-planting kid a decade ago. A lot happened in my world and that’s all tied up in this project for me. (1026 Queen St W, Toronto ON)
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Scott Conarroe Loop Canyon, Chicago, IL 2007 © Scott Conarroe Courtesy Stephen Bulger Gallery © Scott Conarroe |
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