IN THE SHADOW OF AN IMMOVABLE OBJECT

Adrian Moens

I started photographing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) shortly after finding its convenience as a means of getting myself where I needed to go –– not while driving over it, or across it, but by walking beneath it, and within and around its shadows. As I looked through my viewfinder at the BQE, I often found insight into the structure, by contextualizing it, and by isolating parts and pieces of it within its frame.

The more time I spent under the BQE, the more curious and enamored I became of it. The seemingly infinite lengths of concrete trusses became like the ribs of a massive creature. The intervals of car and truck tires running across the seams in the roadway reverberated in rhythmic pulses, like a voice plucking the strings of a massive throat, speaking the garbled language of a city on the move.

Every object in its interior belly, even the recently discarded, is encased in a thick dust that I imagine will one day be its own, completely visible geological layer. Abandoned cars are appropriated for the transient sleeper, ramshackle and temporary cardboard windbreaks shelter the homeless, and abandoned mattresses seem to float and drift down the river of asphalt like filthy, corroding rafts.

As I continued to walk to work, I started to question how the BQE had shaped other city lives. Surely this massive object, whose trajectory clambers through so many Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods, has made a very literal impact on the lives of those in its path. An expanded vision of this project emerged, and I realized that this new vision would require research and a recontextualization of the BQE as I had originally seen it.

The BQE has civic, political, and urban geographic implications that would take more than twenty-two images to explore. I see this photo essay, which seeks to objectify the BQE as a physical structure, and to explore the landscape beneath it, as the first chapter of a much greater project.