SURFACE STREETS
“Would I had never been born!”
--- Faust
Anyone driving in Los Angeles shares Goethe’s sentiment when they’re sitting in the daily vapor-lock traffic that now enjoys landmark status in the city. How does one cope? NPR? Music? Books on Tape? Photographer Meg Madison took a cache of outdated Polaroid film and for a two-week period recorded every time she got in her car while performing the daily driving chores that go along with being a mother of two and a part-time dog rescuer.
Madison then labeled her Polaroids with the date and time and in some cases
the purpose of her car trip (“for dog food,” “for more hair
dye”) and then digitally enlarged the images into midsized prints. The
result is a series of images that detail the ready vistas available from her
car: from tail lights to a bent radio antennae, reflections in windows, parking
lots – all the day to day stuff that most of us take for granted. But
given the outdated film and then the digital enlargement of the images, these
photos of driving ephemera take on an abstract, otherworldly quality.
Madison, who grew up in New York and attended film school at San Francisco
State University, is now a working photographer and mother (not necessarily
in that order) in LA. About Surface Streets she says, “I
like the way pictures can be fragments of memory and driving in itself is such
an unconscious part of our lives in LA that it takes on a dreamlike quality. So
my images are the actual recording of those moments and objects that you encounter
as you drive through the city, but seen as isolated images captured in passing,
they take on an entirely different, totemic quality.”
Surface Streets is composed of 149 individual photos all taken
with an SX70 Polaroid Camera. The digital enlargements were printed with
archival Ultra Chrome pigment in the same brilliant colors of the original
photos and include the white borders and the larger white bottom space where
her hand-written text was added.
For additional information about Surface Streets contact the
Kristi Engle Gallery (323) 258-2385 or Meg Madison, directly at meg@megmadison.com
John McCormick
2006