[Recollecting; Looking]
Youngsuk Suh.

Photographs by Alex Meriwether, 2008

As Labor Day signifies a forthcoming New England autumn, I look back to a Memorial Day weekend visit to the Massachusetts seaside town of Rockport, where slabs of stone extend along the seashore in heaps.  They look like an endless supply of beached whales, melting into the ground, beaten down by the sun, hardened into rock.  As they climb further up onto land, the rocks expand into more formidable figures.

I recall looking upon the tourists and visitors scrambling slowly across these rocky surfaces.  In multicolored summer clothing these abstract and awkward beings became the cliche uttered by every skyscraper observation deck visitor — “they all look like ants.”

But to be on the same plane as these ants, and in this natural setting that so overpowers them, the experience is much more surreal.

I of course couldn’t stop thinking about Youngsuk Suh’s series Instant Traveler — subtly manipulated digital images of natural wonders and hiking sites, overrun by visitors.  My snapshots of Rockport couldn’t capture the feeling of being in a Suh photograph, but that was very much what I felt.  His natural expanses are bleak and beautiful, sunlit with objective early-afternoon clarity; the people seemed air-dropped in — out of place and inconsequential extras.

[Arches National Park, Utah, 1] Photograph by Youngsuk Suh, 2002

[Rocky Mountains National Park, Colorado] Photograph by Youngsuk Suh, 2000

More of Suh’s photographs are available for viewing on his website.