The Road, a Landscape

The concept of “the road” has always evoked a long line connecting point A to point B—a path toward a destination, a bridge between two geographies. Here, however, the road expands across its own width, revealing that the margin is just as important as the center. Instead of the clichéd image of a road—where single-point perspective draws our gaze to a focused vanishing point—a new horizon unfolds before us.

Much like the work of photographers from the New Topographics movement, the innocence and purity of the natural landscape are disrupted by a human element. The photographer’s eye has paused its rush, slipped free from the barrier of the roadside railing, and now runs toward the distance. From the metal guardrail at the edge of the road to the white trace on the blue expanse—seemingly brushed by a painter’s stroke—the photograph becomes an abstract dance of lines: lines both seen by the eye and formed by the imagination. The bird of the mind flies from the beginning of the guardrail to that white line, tracing an imaginary path to the sky, until at last it breaks free of the lines altogether and dissolves into the infinite.