New Mexico - and Albuquerque - are all about blank space. Negative space. I am describing minimalism. "You have to like subtlety," one friend said of living in this place. This is a good description of the pleasures to be found here. Or, you will go mad.
This burned tree is in "the Bosque" -- the greenbelt along the Rio Grande -- very near downtown and the industrial heart of the old version of this city. Before they built the big dams up north in the 50s and 60s, the Rio Grande flooded annually, and all of the valley that surrounded downtown ABQ was a floodplain. These old neighborhoods are still farmed w/ irrigation ditches, and there are today bigger houses, a golf course...the rest is a "park" - The Bosque. However, except for bicyclists, most residents of this city do not venture into this "park." It is not like any urban park I have ever known. Like much of what is good about this city, most people barely seem to know it's there. Thus, it is a true paradise unspoilt.
This photograph does no justice to the Bosque at all, which is a healthy cottonwood forest that runs the entire length of the city, crossed by bike and walking paths, and full of coyotes, beavers, rabbits and many large birds of prey, and migrating flocks of cranes, and homeless people. It changes dramatically through the seasons. In the winter there are lots of crows, and it is a hazy shade of grey, brown and rust.
This tree is the edge of the park, but in most places you cannot even fathom that you are in the middle of a city of 3/4 of a million. It is a magical forest.
This is a portrait of my adopted city and its surrounds. Albuquerque is unlike any city I have ever known, an urban desert, in the desert. Here one encounters a complete absence of the typical design flourishes and architectural coherence of distant world capitals, that fill (or assault) the senses and dictate response, in other words the tyrrany of design ... as if this place sprung fully formed from the head of Donald Judd.
This is a place of subtlety. These photographs attempt to portray the melancholic blank negative spaces that define the Albuquerque experience. They were, initially, an attempt to compensate for this city's lack of an urban pulse. This was followed by discovery, and ultimately liberation. This place forces its residents to actively participate in beauty and interpretation, a rebuke to the passive & effortless consumption of typical urbanism "with a view." The empty, powerfully subjective desert surrounds in every direction, indifferent to humanism and human proportions, and Albuquerque reflects its desert and coexists with it without conflict.
New Mexico - and Albuquerque - are all about blank space. Negative space. I am describing minimalism. "You have to like subtlety," one friend said of living in this place. This is a good description of the pleasures to be found here. Or, you will go mad.
ReplyDeleteThis burned tree is in "the Bosque" -- the greenbelt along the Rio Grande -- very near downtown and the industrial heart of the old version of this city. Before they built the big dams up north in the 50s and 60s, the Rio Grande flooded annually, and all of the valley that surrounded downtown ABQ was a floodplain. These old neighborhoods are still farmed w/ irrigation ditches, and there are today bigger houses, a golf course...the rest is a "park" - The Bosque. However, except for bicyclists, most residents of this city do not venture into this "park." It is not like any urban park I have ever known. Like much of what is good about this city, most people barely seem to know it's there. Thus, it is a true paradise unspoilt.
This photograph does no justice to the Bosque at all, which is a healthy cottonwood forest that runs the entire length of the city, crossed by bike and walking paths, and full of coyotes, beavers, rabbits and many large birds of prey, and migrating flocks of cranes, and homeless people. It changes dramatically through the seasons. In the winter there are lots of crows, and it is a hazy shade of grey, brown and rust.
This tree is the edge of the park, but in most places you cannot even fathom that you are in the middle of a city of 3/4 of a million. It is a magical forest.
It is my favorite season in the Bosque: winter.