This is a project I cannot say that I looked for. Rather, it is about being immobilized, involuntarily confined and not in control; stuck in the all too commonplace bane of modern metropolitan life: traffic that seems to have no beginning, no end, and is incomprehensible as to its life-cycle.
The unsought and unseen has always fascinated me and that is what I face in this world within our freeways and by-ways, not only in Los Angeles but especially here. Stopped in this place of presumed mobility, taking photographs transported me from confinement to freedom, at least in creative vision if not movement.
Thus Gridlock is a series about random views, transporting disquieting space into purposeful moments. It is about risk and chance in this quixotic search to transform and capture light and story at a moment defined. It is about being in the wrong time and at the wrong place, that turns right via my camera.
Los Angeles epitomizes an exacerbated form of what is going on in the rest of America where our cars clog roads and divert our plans to get somewhere, anywhere; inhibiting us from roaming freely around our cities with their many cultural and social offerings, forcing workers to leave their families far too early and return too late each day, and often contributing to a geographical segregation few of us desire. Traffic reinforces our sense of isolation, separates us from where we wish to go, from those with whom we want to be and from life we might encounter. The promise of new metros and wider lanes that will alter the corridors of our lives takes time and money government no longer has and all the while new cars and populations continue to arrive.
As for me, I creep through traffic with a renewed sense of purpose – braking, stopping, shooting, then shifting (until recently), braking, stopping, shooting again and again – capturing a surreal and abstract concrete world of function over form, with little intervention other than strange vegetation fighting to regain its place; construction, graffiti tags and detritus cast from vehicles; a world designed to be invisible as we whizz by.
Sara Jane Boyers
EXHIBITION
Photographs
Sara Jane Boyers (with Sol Hill’s Signal from Noise and Domenico Foschi’s Women)
March 08, 2014 – April 13, 2014
Leica Store and Gallery Los Angeles
8783 Beverly Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90048
USA
http://www.sarajaneboyersphoto.com
http://www.leicagalleryla.com
