Planes, Trains and Automobiles

The first time I visited this railway track in the hot Californian
desert, I knew it had visual potential, but I needed a month or so to
let the cocktail of what I could achieve marinate in my own mind.
My predilection is to avoid the static or the mundane. A plane
defies gravity, so that helps in a single image, but I knew the car
and the train could not join it. My visual leaning was to have a sense
of movement elsewhere and that’s where the idea of dust being
kicked up from railway workers offered a solution. The light would
be my partner.
Once the premise is there, it is about scalpel-sharp precision in the
detail. Let’s not have any car, let’s have a vintage 1953 Ferrari, and
let’s not have any girl holding the image together, let’s have Cindy
Crawford. It is possible that some of my work over the last 10 years,
particularly with wildlife, has been imitated, and filmmakers have
every right to do so. I celebrate a good picture like everyone else
and there are some very able cameramen out there. But I don’t
think this photograph is going to be imitated in a hurry and this
gives me a little smile.