It is not the type of photography I’m really drawn to, which might explain why the Ed Ruscha Challenge was actually good for me.

My reading of his 26 Gas Stations was peppered with thoughts of the constancy of these gas stations in an in-motion world. Rather like the grain elevators of Frank Golkhe, they are fixed monuments – in Golkhe’s case to sustenance, the harvest and production, in Ruscha’s case to the road and the automobile.

I saw them as suppliers of liquid nectar to vehicular bees.

I’m working on a piece with my daughter Emma, charting her 16th year. And the challenge got me thinking of her as a monument in my life, a fixed responsibility around which a large part of my life revolves. And then to see the world in motion as it matters most to her – the places she values. The places in which she feels she ‘belongs’, worlds whose boundaries she traverses in her own way.

I learned a lot about my lack of technical proficiency in pulling this project off. I had not realised, for example, just how exact you have to be in distance and perspective to take a human subject seamlessly from frame to frame. So perhaps, if Emma will oblige me, we might try it again.

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