ALONG THE PIPELINE

Alaska

Along the pipeline is a project illustrating a deep reflection about landscape modifications made by human. The study doesn’t describe a limited reality, but refers to an entire geographical extension. It concerns of a real line, geographically mapped, able to pass across space and time.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline is one of the most imposing and extended private work realized by human hand. It twists and turns through the entire country, touching different scenarios from Arctic tundra to boreal forest for 1300 kilometers, becoming a daily landscape for herds of buffalo, grizzly and elk.

From Prudhoe Bay, where faces the Arctic Ocean, up to Valdez, where it meets the Pacific Ocean, this project crosses Alaska at the same speed at which the oil flows inside the pipeline - eighty miles per hour.

Along the way are still visible traces of the Gold Rush of the late 19th century. In the last 40 years, thanks to the discovery of crude oil in the Arctic Ocean, a new gold rush is born. Black gold over the years has triggered, directly and indirectly, new landscape transformations.

These images are purely documentary and show the alterations without environmental or political meanings. As the nature of photography is far from solving enigmas, the project became a source of investigation and interrogation whitin ourselves.