My first walk on Baseline Road, Boulder Colorado.
There are about a thousand things to say about what I’d like to do, what I’d like to photograph, what I think I’m photographing, and what I expect to photograph (none of the preceding are actually the same thing).
In the meantime – those thousand things are deeply under-cooked.
The theory of what’s going on (what I think I’m photographing, as mentioned before) needs to marinade in the images I bring back from the field before I’m willing to make any kind of remark about it. Actually, I am willing to say this – putting the theory too much into the foreground, at any point, but especially while the project is still so young and tender, is to risk loosing the “thing” and ending up only with it’s idea.
What I do know is this:
- I intend to walk the roughly 38 miles of Baseline Road, in Boulder, Colorado.
- I intend to make photographs along that line.
- I am interested in the history of the road and its foundation as part of the system of baselines and meridians used to denominate territories within the country.
- I hope to give myself the space to lean about how the creation of a line on the ground relates to the form of the place we live in today.
- I am drawn to the various associations and implications branching off of the concept of a baseline, both objective and social, as well as subjective and personal.
- I find the whimsical confluence of facts and ideas compellingly appropriate: I’m undergoing dramatic changes in my life, the end of the world has just come and gone, we have begun a new year, the primary definition of baseline is “A minimum or starting point used for comparisons.”
What I find most irresistible about this project is this: I don’t know what I will find, neither in terms of the world “out there” that I may learn about and see, nor about what I stand to learn about my self through the process of doing the work. Are they related (you might ask)? – Absolutely!