For me, the best thing about the photo is that it is an illusion that portrays an illusion. I can look at the desert and mesas depicted beyond the edge of the roadway and believe that they are separate and apart from the built environment, and that there is an “edge” beyond which the built environment does not penetrate. In truth, the road is not the limit of humanity’s impact on nature, but a boundary line that has effectively killed the “wilderness” by hemming it in and reducing it to pockets of “landscape” amongst an endlessly linked basket-weave of zooming cars. I don’t think that I can comfortably call the mesas a reflection of “wilderness/nature” if my feet are planted on asphalt while I look at them… or can I? The composition makes me question whether what I am seeing is “wilderness” at all, because it so effectively makes the concepts of “wilderness” and “nature” problematic. I think the photo does this by showing that there IS no “nature” or “wilderness” absent the juxtaposition of places that symbolize these concepts with the built environment, and that “wilderness” and “nature” aren’t objective facts that exist independent of human thought, behaviours and practices, but are rather malleable contingencies that people manipulate for their own convenience when confronted with vistas beyond the “edge” of the built environment that so many human beings live in and navigate on a daily basis…