Ultraviolet Exposure, Asphaltum Zones, 2009 - 2019
For a decade I photographed the asphalt on various portions of one particular country road that I frequent in the Mojave Desert while driving to and from various locations where I play, rest, work, and produce things. I had developed the casual ambition of marking the progressive, yet fluctuating changes of the material that makes up the highly influential system and infrastructure that helps shape and inform our collective experience of landscape. The material that makes up that infrastructure undergoes constant, but gradual transition from daily use and ultraviolet exposure. The relationship that asphalt and its related ingredients have with the physical and chemical transformation that occurs with a timed exposure to sun shares its materials, its processes and modes of transfiguration with the origins of photography. An archive of many hundreds of more images that I have accumulated could theoretically be plugged into replace any given section of the compiled ten-step grayscale.
