BY Stephen Horne
“To photograph has long been synonymous with the procedure of isolation and dislocation of an instant from its temporal/contextual mother land.”1 — Scott Connaroe
“To define the present in isolation is to kill it.”2 — Paul Klee
“Nostalgia is part of the problem and it does not contain the solution.”3 — Edward S. Casey
1.What better context in which to explore the topic of emplacement and displacement than by abandoning one’s own fixed abode in favour of a journey, with its characteristics of motion, distance, estrangement and roaming: a passing through that becomes a kind of home, one identifiable as ritual. Last year Scott Conarroe pursued By Rail (2008), a year long photographic project premised as a North American landscape survey, but undertaken thematically as a journey (a road trip) on the one hand and on the other, concerned with documenting a subject: railways and their environs. That Conarroe posed this work from the perspective of a journey situates the artist within our own topic of nostalgia, implicated as it is with the concept and experience of the home-place. The term “journey” is also inflected with myth and tradition, maintaining continuity with other terms I privilege here such as “place” and “aura.”
