Peter Croteau Photography
Suspended Bypass Delaware Water Gap Scenic View Backyard Construction Billboard Rerouted Road Parking Lot (Storm Clouds) Highway Graveyard Tree Stumps Delware Water Gap Bus Station Parking Tilled Soil Wind Gap Construction Rubbish Pile Parking Lot (Elementary School) Construction Remnants of a Building Quarry Construction Billboards in a Field, Remnants from a Suspended Bypass Mount Tammany Through Fog Empty Tract House Lots Abandoned Motel Parking Lot (Ace) Remnants of a Billboard, Intersection of Route 209 and US 33 Emptied Industrial Lot Outlet Graveyard Parking Lot (Moonrise) Construction, Sun Through Morning Fog Abandoned Delaware Water Gap Train Station, Interstate 80 New Road Parking Lot (Two Abandoned Trailers) Trailer Abandoned Boiler Works Parking Lot (Gravel) Parking Lot (Almost Empty) Highway Church Building #2 Dealership Graveyard Along Route 33 Preview of Coming Attractions High Tension Towers, Interstate 476 Retired Trailers Corn Field for Sale Parking Lot (Dead Grass) Parking Lot (Morning Fog)
Roadside Sublime
This series of photographs explores the liminal or in-between spaces found along roadsides and how those spaces represent the commodified nature of society. The in-between exists in a couple forms of waste landscapes or drosscapes including wasted spaces; empty dirt lots, abandoned buildings, and ruins. Wasteful spaces; vast expanses of parking lots and voided land for separating areas. Actual waste; consumption, construction, and the expanding reach of sprawl. The photographs are represented in a way to relate to the sublime paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, JMW Turner, Thomas Cole and the Hudson River Painters with powerful skies, high vantage points and processional views to infinity that are meant to give a sense of awe and a sense of terror and delight. The photographs are a duality of a beautiful wasteland and lay in the middle of reality and the surreal. They point out the cultural implications of a beautiful landscape becoming industrialized through subtle absurd juxtapositions and nostalgic lighting. The duality reflected in the photographs is an existential duality that shows the absurdity of our own surroundings. Liminal spaces reflect the free will of man to commodify and sectionalize the landscape in to little units separated by roads on a large grid imposed on a domesticated natural environment. It represents how man gives meaning to the world and how nothing is ordained by divine will in a godless but beautiful landscape.
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