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Debuted at Wedge Gallery, Asheville, NC, April, 2006. Statement follows.
These images are about darkness. In each photograph, I have done my best to create a scene in which the subject is elusive and the landscape is empty. Most of the pictures here were taken between midnight and four in the morning, when traffic is light and the sky is at its blackest.
I am fascinated by the monumental aspects of the places I find in the dark. The colossal cross illuminated over I-26 is not unlike a solitary road sign in its bold and simple declaration. Like the circumscribed A on a building’s back wall, these symbols are meant to communicate complex ideas on a basic level. In these photographs, however, no one receives the message.
For me, as I stand on the roadside with the shutter open, the aborted communication of these monuments contains a haunting ambiguity: Are these signs shrouded by the emptiness and darkness around them, or is their strength made more apparent because they stand in spite of the darkness? I don’t know.
But I do know that the human need to illuminate things is as unstoppable as a freight train. With this body of work, I seek to document the evidence of that urge, focusing on places that are unpopulated, where the contrast between light and dark is highest, where things are illuminated only because no one is there to turn out the light.
Max Cooper
April 14, 2006