johnson – New Landscape Photography

www.NealParkerJohnson.com

My body of work, entitled Please Pay Here, is a project documenting the landscape and design of urban parking infrastructure — from a single layer of yellow-striped asphalt to multi-level concrete enclosures. It’s about the domination of urban space — a necessity of design and planning.

My photographs are taken mainly at night or after hours, when the working commuters abandon their parking stations and leave behind an empty and hollowed garage. It’s at this time that the cubed stacks of concrete layers begin to come alive. The loneliness of the empty spaces exposes the ambient entrails and cast shadows of the memories of the workday.

— Neal Johnson, Louisville, Kentucky, USA

www.DevonJohnsonPhotography.com

I create work that deals with the complexities, legacies, and myths surrounding history. My focus is documenting landscapes that have been altered by past events. Many of these historic sites have been desecrated by modern development, a byproduct of our neglect for our collective history.

These images, from the series An Independent Line, serve as a critique of Northern Virginia’s unchecked suburban sprawl, which has erased much of the area’s history. The subject of these photographs is the Manassas Gap Railroad line, which would have run from Gainesville to Alexandria but was left incomplete due to an economic downturn in the 1850s, similar to what we are experiencing today. Large sections of the 34-mile-long line survive; however, tract housing, shopping centers, and modern roads have decimated the majority of them.

— Devon Johnson, Fairfax, Virginia, USA