fragminis

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Fragminis – this damnable latin kick I am on is probably wearing thin about right now. That’s the problem with trying to pick names for themes. Once you get in a pattern, you pretty much have to go with it. I just hope I don’t ever do a series on something like microprocessors, because I have a feeling that there probably won’t be a latin word that describes them. I suppose that is enough post-modern parenthetical commentary on the commentary.

Fragminis is the word from a dead language that describes a dead building – ruins, in other words. I seem to share with a lot of people a morbid fascination for these remnants of spaces and places that were once the center of so much human activity. But the passage of years and changes in the world leave a lot of these former locii of industry and commerce in a dead-but-not-gone purgatorial state. They are the sunbleached remains not of a single organism, but rather the fossil trace of our collective human activity.

technical details

These photographs are all taken in large, formerly industrial areas. They were taken in the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad yard in Albuquerque, the Union Pacific Railroad yard in Houston, and the Gladding McBean Factory in Lincoln, California. All were taken with ultra large format cameras – either a 7×17 inch camera or a 12×20 inch camera. This gives me a very large piece of film with which to make my gum-platinum and platinum prints.