The photo above was taken from the Wisconsin River bridge in Wisconsin Dells, May 2011. Part of my Strange Landscapes series.
I went on the first shoot for my personal project on Monday. I had a bad day at work and really didn't feel like going, but I'd been planning it for about a week. I'm a sucker for excuses - it was cold, I was tired and I only had an hour or so to take photos. But I bribed myself with Starbucks and a reality check - if I was going to attempt to capture the Dells in the off-season, I only have a few weeks to get started before the tourists flood in on Memorial Day. I forced myself to go through with it, and I'm glad I did. Once I got started it was hard to put the camera down and pull myself away. I had a fantastic first day and it gives me a ton of motivation to continue the project. I wound up with a dozen or so photos that I'm very proud of, with more to come on my Flickr in the next few days.
I used to pass the sign above every single day in the two years that I worked on the strip in the Wisconsin Dells. I always thought it was interesting but I had never gotten out of the car to take a real look at it. I parked in the public lot and for the first time realized how inaccessible the Dells is by foot - the strip is fine but sequestered from the rest of the city, which consists of spread out and sprawling water parks and tourist traps. You really have to drive from one place to another, which is pretty ridiculous. Getting to this spot I felt like a little kid on monkey bars, jaunting from one spot to another.
Anyway, it wasn't until I got in front of the sign that I realized what was behind it - a huge electrical complex thing situated between the river, dam, and railroad tracks. I had passed that sign a million times before, driven on that road twice a day for two years, and had never seen what I was seeing from the sidewalk. I guffawed and got to work.
The rest of my short time there was exactly the same way. Maybe it sounds cliched, but it wasn't until I really stopped and looked at the Dells that I started to see things, to really see them. I expect this project to operate in much of the same way, not only a process of technical discovery with my camera but hopefully a process of personal discovery, teaching myself to look at things and really see them.
I'll leave you with a quote I used in my thesis:
"I had heard of the Wisconsin Dells but was not prepared for the weird country sculptured by the Ice Age, a strange, gleaming country of water and carved rock, black and green. To awaken here might make one believe it a dream of some other planet, for it has a non-earthly quality, or else the engraved record of a time when the world was much younger and much different. Clinging to the sides of the dreamlike waterways was the litter of our times, the motels, the hot-dog stands, the merchants of the cheap and mediocre and tawdry so loved by summer tourist, but these incrustations were closed and boarded against the winter and, even open, I doubt they could dispel the enchantment of the Wisconsin Dells." - John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America, 1962
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