I-25
This project was born out of the monotony a long commute – specifically, twice weekly drives on I-25 between Albuquerque, NM and Las Cruces, NM, a round trip of more than 500 miles. I began documenting my trips using a pinhole camera and paper negatives to record the landscape as I experienced it, capturing both long exposures from the moving car and static images at various roadside locations. The New Mexico landscape feels to me so much like the ocean - a vast expanse of ground and sky anchored by the constant horizon. Paul Virilio wrote, "...the gaze of the West was once also the gaze of the ancient mariner ... sea and sky apparently without limits, the ideal of an essentially different, essentially singular world." The automobile makes these wide-open spaces infinitely more accessible to us today, but there remains the appeal of the exotic, the unknown, in these empty landscapes.