Track Record

In 2010 I learned my mother had Alzheimer’s disease, and I started taking frequent trips on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor from NYC where I live, to the DC area, where I grew up, to help out.  Staring out the train window on those often melancholy trips, I saw stretches of neglected landscape with crumbling buildings. I saw prisons and off grid encampments. I saw gleaming metal plants still working to process chemicals and commodities for the larger world.  Pollution was rampant in parts, but there were also stretches of semi-rural landscape, where egrets, eagles, deer and hedgehog still found enough purchase for a habitat, and small farms still tilled the land. Once I arrived in D.C, I’d visit my mother in her nursing home, wondering at the mysteries of a mental decline so shattering yet still, on rare occasions, paused by moments of familiarity, recognition, and grace.

I started making pictures out the train window on my trips down, trying to use the frame to make sense of the whole colossal mess.  Before I began making photographs, much of the world outside the train window appeared contingent and ephemeral because there was so much disorder, and the high speeds at which we raced through the landscape made you second guess anything you saw.  But I started to see, in a few of my pictures, that a different world took shape when one used the camera’s powers to freeze time and look deeply.  These pictures, which seemed to find meaning and sometimes beauty in the trackside landscape, were a comfort and distraction during this time when my mother’s illness carried her further and further away, like the landscape receding in the distance behind the train.

My mother died in 2015, and it was around that time I first saw photographer Paul Fusco’s book RFK Funeral Train, which documented Fusco’s journey with the body of Robert Kennedy along the same stretch of track I was traveling, from NYC to DC, to be laid to rest. Fusco’s  images are of the people who had come out to line the tracks to pay their last respects to the fallen senator. It’s a portrait of a diverse America united in grief, and an America that seemed at striking odds with so much of what I now saw out the window. I wondered what those people Fusco had documented would think of what has become of the places they once lived?  What had happened? I imagined that the landscape itself may hold some of the answers and I wondered if there was some throughline from Kennedy’s death to the landscape I raced through almost 50 years later. Adopting the mode of the street photographer, I searched for clues that would make sense of the world racing by the train window. Robert Adams said, “History does not unfold: it piles up.” This is the record of one long pileup. 

All photos made from inside the train, looking out.