Katelyn Curtis Week 5 post

             Along Some Interstate Highways: Amy Stein’s
             Stranded

                                                           By: Katelyn Curtis



                              


                              


                              

 "Since the nature of the event is itself thoroughly ordinary, the variety of people affected by it is transformed into a question about the variety of everyday experience for these everyday Americans."


Anne Stein chooses to drive for hours on a random interstate looking for people that their car has broken down or where their car has ended up after they are done with them. She uses a medium format camera and pulls over at the first opportunity she gets. She's shooting the images as a portrait itself, capturing the worry and irritable faces at the unforeseen incident. All this in a nutshell, she's comparing it to the "negligibly everyday occurrence and incisive discourse on contemporary culture and political reality." The incident itself throws the fragileness of society perception people have  out the door for this brief incident and when people think they are comfortable in their "reality" the situation brings them right back to the true reality. This happens to everyone, no matter the class, or how much money someone has.

Stein likes to compare the misfortune and fortune of the incident, also paralleling with the country social perspectives and culture. People like to think of the country as the land of opportunity, to make it from a lower class, to higher, and even the richest of people to an even higher place. People like to control their outcome in life, but situations like this prove that we don't always have control to what happens, and neither do we in the class/opportunities we are born to.

I'm really enjoying all the faces in her series. How they respond to their environment, the situation of potential danger of being abandoned on the road, and Stein coming out of no where to take their picture in this intense time. She shoots from a lot of variety of angles which makes the series more dynamic to look at. Her concept really makes you stop and think about these photos and how it is true that not everything can be controlled.