until further notice…statement

selections from Overpass

Observation Start: 20101215

Observation Completion: 20180301

When I relocated to Vermont in 2010, I became interested in the Department of Transportation website where there are several webcams which capture continuous images of current road conditions in various locations throughout Vermont. I began to collect these images, which are otherwise ephemeral, in that they exist only for a time on the website, changing instead to other images, documenting the passage of night and day and the changing of the seasons.

This documentation project is now in its seventh year, entitled until further notice…

until further notice.. has evolved into an investigation of photographic images captured by automated cameras on the internet, exploring the conditions of photography when the human perspective is removed and images are captured mechanically and regularly, for purely pragmatic purposes. Some of these images are quite mysterious, and the many of them take on the qualities of aesthetic beauty, capturing remarkable early dawn and dusk atmospheres or the anonymity and passage of countless headlights on the highways, day after day, year after year.

Through this project, I am learning to balance creative control. I have to live with the fact that many images pass me by, since I cannot glue myself to the webcams and must live my life. When I check the cameras periodically, with the knowledge of the arc of the history of these images, selecting each new image becomes a type of personal curation and I select new images to add to the collection based on a combination of curiosity and formal concerns. Once I’ve saved the images, I can go back to the collection at any time to reorganize and curate a new set of images based on a fresh personal narrative, idea, and/or aesthetic perspective. In this way, the passage of time becomes my own photographic dreamscape of a numinous and personal landscape vision. Not all moments reveal themselves at once.