On the rails 2016

Alfred Freddy Krupa made this photograph of train tracks vanishing into the distance in a snowy landscape sometime after he was born in 1971. What strikes me is the contrast between the industrial forms and the almost untouched snow. It’s like a study in textures, from the smokestack’s plume to the crisp edges of the rails and the irregular surface of the snow. I keep returning to the smokestack, a vertical grey mark that suggests the weight and scale of industry, a mark of human progress but also a possible omen. And yet, there are bird-like forms silhouetted against the sky near the smoke, reminding us that nature finds a way. The photograph becomes a meditation on contrasts, and I begin to think about the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who also photographed industrial structures, finding the sublime in the mundane. Ultimately, art is a conversation, a dance between what we see, what we feel, and what we know.