RAILWAY TRACKS WISCONSIN
Whilst doing a spot of flâneuring in Paris one day, I chanced upon Alexandra Sanguinetti’s Some Say Ice exhibition at the Magnum Gallery. Her powerful photos were of a rural community centred around Black River Falls in Wisconsin, USA. The book was the motivation for her work, but her photographs are very personal and distinct.
The inspiration for her work was an extraordinary book called Wisconsin Death Trip.
I managed to track down a copy.
Wisconsin Death Trip is compiled by Michael Levy and is a collection of photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by Charles Van Schaick, who lived in Black River Falls.
The photographs are accompanied by newspaper excerpts that describe tales of grief and hardship, suicide and madness. The stories are remarkable and numerous and are treated with an almost casual matter-of-factness, and the deaths – often by suicide – are frequently bizarre.
Far from being morbid, I found the book fascinating and very revealing as to how hard life was in rural America in the 1890’s.
I have also used Wisconsin Death Trip as inspiration for my photomontages - layering a collection of images that might suggest a narrative and hopefully provoke a response.
All the images are either taken from the book, harvested from the internet or are my own. The texts are almost entirely taken from Wisconsin Death Trip.
I am not trying to illustrate the texts, merely to use the texts as an accompaniment or a dialogue with my pictures.
Each Photomontage begins with a black-and-white image of some railway tracks.
That’s just a limitation I imposed on myself.
