Crossings

Diptychs: KXL Crossings

Crossings

180° diptychs views at Keystone Pipeline road crossings.

In Crossings, land use, public policy, and transparency are examined through the undisclosed Keystone Pipeline route –as revealed by Google Street View, the dispassionate and automated documentarian of our nation’s roadways. The 180° diptychs compiled here are composed of opposing camera views from each intersection of the Keystone pipeline corridor with Google’s roving camera. This is a historical moment, captured incidentally, immediately accessible for a year or so, and then replaced at the next passing of the camera.

These are historical moments, captured incidentally by the passing Google camera. Without rhetoric or hyperbole, we witness the pipeline corridor from the roadside — largely the only public access to the 2,000-mile project. Undeveloped stretches are delineated by petroleum pipeline markers on fences bordering forest or agricultural lands. An existing easement, to be repurposed or expanded, may appear as a dirt track vanishing into the brush. Construction zones are seen crossing woodland, wetland, and farm alike, in all stages of development, from timber and brush clearing, to bulldozing, trenching, and pipe welding. According to the company building the project, the pipeline route data has been withheld for national security reasons, while here we find the Keystone revealed in a very public fashion – hundreds of feet in breadth, stretching from horizon to horizon.

What are we to make of this hidden landscape? Is it a terrorist target? A transportation corridor for extracted resources destined for world markets? A rural and largely agrarian community being bisected physically, economically, politically, ecologically, and administratively? An endangered native prairie, scrub, marsh, and forest being sacrificed to “progress?” A far-away abstraction divorced from our personal reality? Mile by mile we confront these questions as the corridor unfolds.

Keystone fine art photographyA portfolio selection of Crossings and the Voluntary Evacuation Zone series can be found at Thomas Bachand Photography.

Images and KML files are for personal use only. Distribution and posting to the Internet is not permitted without written permission. All site contents ©Thomas Bachand 2014.