 |
| Amtrak a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50 acrylic 8 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches |
In 2005, I began photographing US Highway 50. My focus was a section of highway known as
the Loneliest Road in America that traverses Nevada. Raised in Utah and Nevada, I grew up crossing
the Great Basin. An area of interior
drainage, the rivers never make it to the sea.
Instead, they vanish in shallows of stagnation. The Great Salt Lake is a good example of
this. My parents lived at opposite ends
of the 500 mile divide of mountains and valleys. Highway 50 was the connection between
Fillmore, Utah and Reno, Nevada. In 2012
I extended the highway theme to include Colorado. This past fall, I covered the rest of the
highway on a road trip that took me all the way to Maryland. This is not a project to be completed in a
single season. It will likely involve
the rest of my life, but I really like the idea of covering the breadth of the
nation from the vantage point of a single highway.
I wanted to capture all the towns along the way. As I traveled, I realized that kind of
exactness would never actually happen. Maps
never entirely capture the idea of habitation.
What constitutes a town or community is not always straightforward. With all the clusters that happen along the
way, the abstraction of a map was necessary. I missed some towns because I didn't know I
missed them. Sometimes I turned around
to fix the mistake, and sometimes I didn't.
Then there was the problem of cities and the surrounding suburbs. I confined cities to skylines and downtown
intersections. I didn't hit museums or
spend much time dining out. This wasn't
about tourism, although it often touched forgotten places, the kind of places
only known to those coming home to houses shadowed by freight trains on tracks
that preceded miles of automotive travel.
Heading west out of Kansas, the sun had just come up. In Granada, Colorado, grain elevators bathed
in morning sunlight. I pulled over just
in time to catch a passing Amtrak. I
didn't realize or imagine that Granada had been the site of an internment
camp. That knowledge came to me later at
a rest area. However, I recently caught
it on my way home from Maryland. There
wasn't much. There never is. The only standing structure was not from the
past, but rather the reconstruction of a guard tower. Signs at the entrance provided a brief
history. The Granada Relocation Center
also known as Amache held 10,000 people of Japanese ancestry from August 1942
to October 1945. This was one of ten
camps that held 110,000 prisoners. Two
thirds of the prisoners were American citizens.
The interesting part about the figure is that another internment camp
has the number at 120,000. I noticed the
discrepancy because there happens to be a camp not far from where I live. Out in the desert of west Millard County, Utah
are the remains of the Central Utah Relocation Center also known as the Topaz
Internment Camp. Whatever the number,
wartime seemed to inflame racism, a racism that many are never willing to
acknowledge.
 |
| The reconstruction of a guard tower at the Granada Relocation Center, also known as the Amanche Internment Camp. |
 |
| The Central Utah Relocation Center, also known as the Topaz Interment Camp. |
