Phoenix, Adobe Dam and 35th Avenue, Looking East 1999

Allen Dutton made this photograph in Phoenix, near the Adobe Dam and 35th Avenue, with a camera. It's a study in contrasts, isn't it? Look at how he's framed the scene, one half wild landscape, the other neatly planned suburbia. The tones are so even, almost bleached. The blacks and whites blend into so many shades of grey, it's like a memory fading or a dream half-remembered. What gets me is the way the houses huddle together, each one so similar, yet cut off from the desert by that long fence. It's a barrier, but also a frame, like a stage set. That little golf cart parked in the driveway, for me, it’s like a tiny, absurd symbol of this strange divide, this attempt to tame the wildness. Think of someone like Robert Adams, also capturing the American West, always with that sense of melancholy and ambivalence. It’s all an ongoing conversation, really, this trying to make sense of where we live.