 |
| Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series. |
You know those marvelously itinerant people who go to Iceland or Thailand after college and aren't afraid to ride a chicken bus around a mountain with no guardrails? Those people fascinate me. If I wasn't so PhD-student-broke and so prone to motion sickness, maybe I’d wake up one day feeling particularly ballsy and then I’d be one of them, boarding a train and a plane and a fishing boat and then riding a grizzly bear into the Alaskan tundra in search of Bob Ross's friendly ghost. But until that day, I'll continue to love photographers like Vancouver-based
Nick Hance McElroy, who takes pictures the way I would on a tremendous adventure (whether or not he's on a tremendous adventure himself).
 |
| Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series. |
Most of his photographs are human-less, and the ones that aren't never allow more than a single road-trip companion or new-found friend to enter the frame. Dogs and ponies and snow-covered sheep populate his pictures, which are imperative or instructional, ordering us to "walk it off" or showing us "how to be alone."
 |
| Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series. |
 |
| Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series. |
The photographs aren't always beautiful. A metal pail full of severed doe heads becomes the aesthetic equal of a tiny white house with red flowers and a red roof, or a blue car on a snow-blown hill. Each friend, vista, and carcass is treated with the same loving, unhurried attention.
 |
| Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series. |
 |
| Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series |
 |
| Untitled photograph from the How to Be Alone series. |
 |
| Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series. |
