{ Eric Tabuchi }

So I don't know if these are necessarily great pictures, or if it's just my own fascination with dilapidated gas stations, or an admixture of the two, but I do like these photos. Tabuchi seems to work often with large series, as he has three sets of abandoned or recycled gas stations and two called "alphabet trucks" (in which he photographs 18-wheelers which have a single letter painted on the back, one for each letter of the alphabet). I don't know why I find dilapidated gas stations so intriguing. Maybe it's because they remind me a little bit of home, as there has been an old abandoned station in High Point at the corner of Eastchester and Centenial for as long as I can remember. Or maybe it has to do with something being completely void of the only function it was ever intended to have, occupying this space that no one really wants or knows what to do with. And then there's the radicallized juxtaposition of the urban and the natural: the "progress" that gas stations embody (the catalyzing and perpetuation of the automobile) and the fingers of grass that have broken through the cement (the old, slow forces we relegate to yards and parks). Whatever it is, I think they occupy a unique cultural space and I think Tabuchi does a beautiful job of calling attention to that in his photographs.


More...