This Train (2006-2010)

Installation Views

The photographs in This Train are a subset of Highway Kind, a body of work made while living with my son in a van. We traveled for eight months out of the year beginning when he was 6 months old until he was 6 years old, and we would reprise these extended road trips each summer until he turned 11. When Casper’s obsessional attention turned to trains, I decided to photograph them. I would set up my 4x5 camera along the tracks, often following tips posted online by railfans and arriving at designated scenic views of ingenious innovations; trains looping over mountain passes or tunneling through the rock. We would wait, sometimes all day, for a train to come through.

These pictures inadvertently reveal the dark shadow cast over the American West. They trace the genocidal path of westward expansion into unceded indigenous lands. They record the labor of Asian immigrants, excluded from citizenship, who built the railroads and died in the thousands from disease, unsafe working conditions, and suicide. The trains signal the dawn of the Anthropocene due to the carbon emissions of the first steam engines. This knowledge was hard to reconcile with my child’s unfettered love of trains.

While making pictures of the trains, I also photographed our shared life on the road. The result is an album of a queer itinerate single mother and son, expanding the notion of what family might look like. These sets of photographs are set in tandem, a coupling of two contradictory myths in the family album and the American landscape. The work engages dichotomies, the embedded violence in the landscape, and an internal opposition between home and the road, family and journey. This Train is a love letter to my son and a personal means of advocating for other ways to be together as families and as a part of the world at large.