Ordinary Oases

From 1978 to 1981, I photographed the culture, architecture, and landscape of gas stations in more than forty states. We see customers and workers in postures and actions peculiar to gassing up or otherwise utilizing the station. Architecture and signage, both corporate and vernacular, beckon passing drivers. Regional and municipal landscapes hold gas stations, each with its own landscape of designed plantings or scrappy volunteer growth. Of necessity, stations are also outposts for networks other than petroleum, as seen in telephone booths, mailboxes, and power lines. All these spark recognition and recollection, accruing elements of a nonlinear American narrative.

Photo by David Freund

I chose not to attempt an overarching structure for my unsystematic survey. I created a narrative that does not rely on chronological or causal conventions, but rather examines how one experiences or pays attention to disparate events, then intuitively shapes them into a personal, affective narrative of place. Put another way, my thread is not this, then that, nor this, therefore that, but this and also that.

Dialogue among the numerous themes touched on seemed best served by diptychs, combined in short sequences to achieve meaningful, manageable, and accessible form. In Gas Stops these short visual passages, analogous in my mind to poems or songs, settled into a consistent pattern of four diptychs, followed by a blank page facing a photograph of a gas station chosen to illustrate an architectural idea. Each such grouping, evocative and descriptive in its own terms, exists within an overall sequence that aims to inform, move, and surprise the viewer—and give them something to do.