TWO: Saint Bollard / by Andrew Choate

Bollards are the typically concrete posts that prevent cars from driving into buildings or sensitive equipment, or onto pedestrian paths: anywhere cars are not desired. I have been photographing them for years all over the world. Neither cars nor people are allowed in my photos.

I've never been fascinated by character or plot in writing, but am passionate about context and insight: the immediate. The landscapes I know are populated by bollards, which appear in a phenomenal variety of colors, designs and rhythms, and foreground a comic/absurd element inherent in our hyper-industrilaized landscape. Accompanying these photographs are a series of poems I have written that utilize repetitive elements, often from common phrases or sayings. 

I call these poems "Horizon Poems" because repetition in poetry functions like the horizon line for me. Departures and variations from the repetitions carve out shapes and silhouettes against the horizon, forming the landscape. 

I'm working on writing as landscape, a kind of landscape writing, but I don't want to write about rivers or flowers or be dependent on using "natural" vocabulary. 

When I say landscape I mean something you have to live with, next to, inside. 

The writings I do for the posts on instagram are more like daily exercises, with the requirement that I find a couple of words to misleadingly hashtag.