It’s 3.35pm in Beijing and everything is happening. The wide street, bathed in slanted afternoon sun, is filled with traffic. We are in the back seat of a taxi, paused at the mercy of the traffic controller atop his tiered stand, like a figurine on a wedding cake. The edges of the road are clogged with cyclists rushing towards and away from us, but mostly what we see is cars, cars and more cars, including the interior of our own.
The four-wheeled automobile is the subject and the vehicle, so to speak, of American photographer Clark Winter’s Here to There: Photographs from the Road Ahead, which chronicles three decades of road life across the US and beyond. As a youth, Winter was offered a rare place to study at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design under American photography luminaries such as Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. Realising he wanted to know more about the world before fixing it with his lens, he instead took an entry-level job at JP Morgan, who funded a year of education in finance and then sent him across the world to learn about global markets. He took his Leica with him.
In black-and-white and colour, he takes us from the landscapes of Ohio, West Virginia and Indiana to the streets of Madrid, Rome, Pisa, Palermo, Paris, Mexico City and Beijing. Rather than seeking out particular images or motifs, Winter prefers an open curiosity – to look carefully and see what catches his attention. “You don’t know whether it’s your intuition or something beneath the level of your conscious perception, but a tiny bell goes off in your head and you listen to it,” he once told Life magazine.
In Traffic Control, Beijing, China, as in many of his photographs, the windows, doors, angles and purviews of the taxi act as frames within a frame, directing our vision this way and that, like the traffic warden beyond who orchestrates the road. The rear-view mirror ingeniously catches a fellow passenger, who also has a camera and sees yet another view.