Zephyr

Zephyr is the west wind, the one the Greeks imagined gentle, a bringer of spring, the wind that in their myths accompanied the return of life after winter. They could not have known that one day its name would reach the other side of the world, to a country where going west was not a direction but a destiny, and where people set out before they even knew what they were looking for.

In America, Zephyr is the name of a train: the California Zephyr, which leaves Chicago and chases the sunset for three days, until the tracks end where the land ends. It is a name with a direction inside it, because west has never been a point on the compass: it is a promise.

Everyone came here to be born again: those panning for gold in the rivers, those after land at the end of the dust, those after a new name under the studio lights, those after the future inside a garage in Palo Alto. Different stories keeping the same faith: that somewhere there is a place where you can begin again, where other versions of yourself can be found. California has never been only a place: it has always been a second chance, the mirage you glimpse after crossing the desert.

These photographs come from there, from the last coast, from the point where the American dream arrives and stops because beyond it there is only the Pacific. California is the end of the frontier, and for that reason it is the most mythological place there is: everything moving west, sooner or later, runs up against this light — a light that does not describe things but promises them, and that leaves palms, motels and empty highways forever on the verge of delivering something they never quite deliver. Then the land runs out, and the photographs begin exactly there: on the edge, where you can go no further and do not yet want to turn back.