Introduction

I found these photographs while looking through images from my college years. They were made around a train yard, at a time when I was interested in graphic design but hadn't yet figured out what that interest would become.

Looking at them now, I don't really see photographs of a train yard. I see an early attempt to understand how I look at things.

Field Notes

Before I learned to design for other people, I was learning to look for myself.

At the time, I was drawn to graphic design, but it was still an unrealized skill. I didn't have a career, clients, or design directors telling me what an image needed to accomplish. I could wander around with a camera and follow whatever caught my attention.

A train yard seemed like a good place to do that.

What interested me wasn't necessarily the trains themselves. It was the visual information surrounding them. Lines crossing lines. Reflections. Numbers. Pieces of lettering. Dark shapes interrupted by light. Industrial surfaces becoming patterns.

The photographs are not particularly interested in explaining where I was. In fact, they seem to resist it. The subject slowly disappears beneath layers of blur, shadow, reflection, and overlapping forms.

Looking at them now, I think that uncertainty is part of what makes them interesting.

The images sit somewhere between photography and graphic design. The train yard becomes less of a place and more of a collection of shapes. A number becomes typography. A reflection becomes a line. A piece of machinery becomes a composition.

I was probably not thinking about any of that consciously at the time. I was simply noticing things.

There is something else I recognize in these photographs now: a kind of freedom that becomes harder to find once creative work becomes a profession.

There was no client to satisfy. No production schedule. No design director. No reason for the work to exist beyond my own curiosity. I could make a photograph because something looked strange, beautiful, or unresolved.

That freedom is visible in the images.

They are dark. They are imperfect. Many of them are out of focus. They don't completely reveal themselves. But perhaps that was appropriate for where I was at the time. The future was just as unclear.

What I find most interesting, looking back, is that I can see the beginning of something that would eventually become a large part of how I work.

I still look for visual language.

I look for the symbols inside a story, the typography that makes a period feel authentic, the small details that make a fictional place believable. I look at objects, packaging, signs, textures, and fragments of information and try to understand what makes them communicate something beyond their immediate purpose.

These photographs were doing something similar before I had the vocabulary for it.

They weren't trying to solve a design problem.

They were teaching me how to see one.