I made these landscapes the year after I graduated law school. I was living in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, and clerking for a Judge in Doylestown, about 60 miles away. Each day I would make the commute using one of two main routes. Corridors.
I had graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with an MFA only four years before I began my clerkship. I moved to Philadelphia and got married the year after that, during my first semester of law school. Only three months before I started my clerkship, I had been a student, living with my wife in a two-bed apartment in the City of Philadelphia. By the time I started my clerkship, I was an employed attorney, living in a house in the suburbs. My son was born two months after that. A lot had happened in what felt like a very short time. Doors had been opened; doors had been shut; my route had been changed.
As I commuted to and from work, I became fascinated with the landscape. Not too long ago, much of this land was predominantly rural or mom & pop retail stores. Now, national chain stores were moving in along with new residential development. There were inconsistencies as a result of the changes; hiccups in the flow of the route. As I drove, the landscape appeared to be in a constant state of transition. Maybe landscape along a corridor always is.
Not long after I began my daily commute to work, I started to make these photographs. My commute, which had been almost an hour each way, grew to an hour-and-a-half or sometimes two-and-a-half hours, as I stole time away from my other obligations to photograph. I would leave my home even earlier in the morning only to arrive at work slightly later than usual; I would tell my wife I was working late so I could take more time on the road; I would take longer lunches and revisit what I had seen that morning on the way to work. I felt guilty. I had a wife and a new baby at home, and I had full-time job to attend to. But I also felt a competing need to record what I was seeing, to bear witness to these landscapes in transition before the changes were lost to more changes. For me, making these photographs was a necessary indulgence; a door from my previous life; a hiccup along my life's corridor that has not changed.
Special thanks to Cynthia Blackwood and Ryan Heiser at the Frame House; Ravid, Pete and James at PHOTOLounge (CBOP); and David Cohen for his web design. For Rachel & Max.
All photographs in the Corridor series are printed at 11" x 14" in editions of 25. Photographs may be purchased by contacting The Frame House at 215-635-1140. A portion of all proceeds will be donated to the Cheltenham Art Center.
Jonathan Scott Goldman
Summer, 2007