Every other Wednesday, Salon.com is featuring The Big Idea: a look at architecture and design ideas to build a future around. Their recent posting led me to the book Skyways & Ice Houses by photographer Catherine Opie. Since the late 1980s, Opie’s interest in the motif of the visual road trip has resulted in photographs that simultaneously document and question the self-constructed identities of the people and places that characterize America. Opie’s American cities series explores the historical specificity of architectures that are often taken for granted. Her take on the Twin Cities’ vernacular landscape has resulted in 26 panoramic black-and-white images of skyways as well as 14 large-format colour images of ice-fishing houses.
