The March Of Progress
I’m not a fan of the sort of over-filtered and heavily-manipulated landscapes you see submitted to photo contests, in travel articles, and on popular photography how-to sites (and, often enough, here on Medium, of course). They’re often dramatic, sure, but usually in the most showy, blingy sort of way. Do they make me want to see these places? Not usually, no. Do they leave anything to my imagination? Not really, no. Are they “real”? Often enough, yes (surprisingly), but not in any way that draws me in. And there are days I think I’m going to scream if I see another heavily-manipulated photo of bits of Iceland or the Canyonlands or wherever with those overly-dramatic over-saturated skies and high-contrast reflections (almost like subtitles for the hard-of-seeing, I think).
So I like to think that I’m rebelling against all that sort of thing with photos like the one above, but in reality, this was just the product of a frustrating day being irritated by the light. It was neither here nor there, neither dark and moody nor brightly stark, and by the time I got to this place (off US 50 in west-central Utah), I was fed up with it all. But there it was — one of my fave desert / wilderness subjects, that weird robotic march of progress across landscapes in the middle of nowhere. I always wonder where they start and where they end — and what else the marchers see on that long march to … well, somewhere, I guess.
I dutifully took the photo — one of many I took that day in the same light and with that washed-out sky — and moved on. I didn’t think it would be a good photo, and forgot about it for a few weeks. I still don’t think it’s a great photo — and it’s certainly no competition for those award-winning images I keep complaining about — but it definitely strikes me as atmospheric, and it’s evocative of a day spent driving through strange lands (strange to me, anyway) for the first time, and of just exploring the backroads in my Subaru without any particular destination in mind. And if you’re going to have light like this, having a bunch of dark verticals or horizontals sharply-defined against the monochrome haze kind of makes the best of it.
