In mid 1975, when I left Sydney to visit the United States, I landed first in New York. Then over several months I zig-zagged my way by car across the country from East to West. By September I found myself driving into Los Angeles on the Interstate 10 freeway from Arizona in awe of the superb engineering of the freeway system itself. Reminiscent of America's 19th century railroad engineering, these wide unimpeded throughways for motor vehicles were carved into the landscape pushing through hills and flats penetrating multi-lane arteries across vast distances. Here, more than anywhere else, it felt as if this was a country where one could really go places.
The freeways followed strict function but I thought of them as exquisite sculptural forms and made them the subjects of my black and white photographs. Their ambiguous form caught in the raking California light made me think of abstract painting that is at once flat and dimensional.
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