The sign reads ���Ritchie & Warden,��� not that it matters.
The individual letters are beyond recognition, in the
normal linguistic scheme of things. The legibility of the
stem, curve, or loop of a letter, and its conventional role in
making meaning, of forming
into a word and a sign
for something, has been
obliterated, paradoxically,
by the intense scrutiny of
the camera eye. The visual
triumphs over the verbal,
unleashing a different type
of metaphoric play.
When Saylor first came to
Vermont to accompany
his daughter skiing, he
photographed the entire
sign, its words spelled out
in full, only to ignore it on
the resulting proof sheets.
He passed it by on the road
numerous times, without
giving it a second thought. But once he photographed the
first detail, framing, cropping, and decontextualizing a part
from the whole, he returned many times, making the twelve
hour trip by car just to chase down another extent, yet,
still-to-be-discovered, composition. Within a delimited set
HYLAND
