The Parting of the Ways
Dry grass on a craggy knoll seems to stand tetchy and defensive in anticipation of a sharp breeze to come. Cutting across the hillside are ancient scars forming two sets of ruts that cross each other and meander as though the riders of the innumerable wagons that carved these lines had wavered, unsure of which path to take, or indeed, to press forward at all. As with the rugged pasture, the stark sky offers no comfort. Nonetheless, an indefinite rectangle lingers on the horizon next to a softly glowing spot of sun.Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? - Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route
Julie Shafer’s, Just North of Guernsey, 2018 opens an ongoing body of work considering the Oregon Trail, specifically a fork in the path located near the town of Guernsey, Wyoming that has come to be known as the “Parting of the Ways.” At this point, about halfway along the 2,700 mile route, settlers were confronted by two impossible choices: a shorter path through a sagebrush desert that lacked a source of potable water, or a lengthier route established by animals and used by Indigenous peoples to move through the Rocky Mountains that offered water, but few other guarantees of survival. In this space, Shafer finds a sense of the unknown that is known and through it, lays bare photography’s deceptions.
As Fred Moten eloquently ponders in Stolen Life, I examine Julie Shafer’s ongoing series, Parting of the Ways, wondering "how to tell the story of a rupture that has broken the ability to tell and how to have that telling be free and be in the interest of freedom" (42)? Utilizing a critique of critical Enlightenment ideas, this site seeks to analyze Shafer’s work as it engages with ideas of emancipation, liberty, and freedom. If, as Hannah Arendt argues in “What is Freedom?” “we first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves,” (148) I ask how Shafer’s work in remote and unforgiving landscapes that are the sites of astonishing human acts of destruction, peril, and risk might interrogate American ideals of liberty? Arendt argues that “men are free – as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom – as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” For Arendt, freedom is expressed through the phenomenon of virtuosity and the decisions that one makes through their own free will (153). Yet what responsibilities must be coupled with free will to ensure equitable relations to power and protect what are necessarily communal–water, air, farmable land, ecosystems, and open terrain? Finally, in the act of documenting mystified sites of the western frontier, I question how Shafer’s photographs untangle the rhetoric of freedom from the knotty puzzles of the sublime?
Like the Oregon Trail itself, this Scalar site allows users to explore Julie Shafer's project by taking a number of different paths. We begin at the junction known as "The True Parting of Ways" in a remote part of Wyoming, near Highway 28.
- You may continue to follow Denise Johnson's essay on the project by following on to "Plains";
- Read an essay by Julie Shafer about their engagement with the landscape by moving to "Paths"; or
- Listen to an interview with Julie Shafer concerning their research and the making of the work by selecting "Diverging Paths"; and
- Check back! More content will be added.