Police Auction

Police Auction
119 pages
Introduction text by Karen Elliot
Edition of 100 / available here
PDF

Well, I had to postpone a road trip to California to buy a Crown Vic from a police auction, so I wound up taking the trip on Google Maps Street View instead. I photographed it with the same gear and setup I would have used if I were actually driving by, so these are likely the exact photographs I would have made regardless.

Police Auction treats Street View less as found imagery than as a substitute road trip: the route remains real, the decisions remain photographic, but the journey itself takes place entirely through an existing image of the world. What began as a workaround becomes a question of whether physically being there would have changed the photographs at all.

“Dimitri told me these photographs came out of a road trip that did not happen. He planned to fly to Los Angeles to buy a Ford Crown Victoria Interceptor from a police auction and drive it back. Simple. He mapped the full route there and back, with the idea of following a very specific path while looking for nonspecific things. Some places felt obvious to him and had to be included, like Littleton. But the main structure was the route itself, and the decisions were simple: the right time to turn right, the right time to turn left.

He uses Google Maps constantly for projects. Sometimes it’s practical, a way to keep working when he cannot get out on the road. Sometimes it’s a quiet, meditative task: taking a long stroll down an unfamiliar street, hoping for something worth seeing, and something worth seeing again for the first time.

These photographs bring to mind Richard Prince, but that’s a cop out. It’s too easy. Closer to Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, sure. Reproducing a photograph might be the simplest explanation as to what — exactly — is going on here.

It was perhaps too ambitious to start. It’s a long way, coast to coast, and you can just do it for free on the computer, in your free time. The pictures were made with the same setup he would have used on the drive: a Canon 6D with cheap glass and a wired trigger. This book is that plan changing while the method stayed the same.

I asked if he still intends to do this same route in real life — a companion to this book. He said something True Detective-ish about how the road is still going to be there even if the buildings all fall down — and how he’s still wanting that cop car that haunts his dreams.”