Tempe, Arizona, 2024
Archival pigment print
11 × 14 in.
June 9, 2025
This tangle of discarded metal—assembled with such a sense of disorder that it takes on a sculptural quality—exemplifies the way that cast-off material, found on the fringes, can invite the greatest freedom of imagination. William Jenkins has experienced limited mobility in recent years, but still dedicates himself daily to photographing with his smartphone around his neighborhood in Tempe, Arizona, and posting the resulting pictures on Instagram, under his handle @pushingmywalker.
During his long and distinguished career, William Jenkins served as the Curator of Twentieth Century Photography at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, where he organized one of the most influential photography shows of the last 50 years: New Topographics—Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. The phrase “New Topographics” became a shorthand for a whole approach to visual thought. The photographs in the exhibition focused on the interstitial places created by urban sprawl and, as a kind of rejoinder to romanticized depictions of the North American landscape, directing attention to parts of the landscape that were little-considered.
The shift in focus towards parts of the landscape that were created as byproducts of industry and suburbanization highlighted how insight could be gained by examining parts of our surroundings that weren’t necessarily made to be looked at. While often characterized as a foregrounding of stark and unremarkable locations, this image demonstrates that this mode of seeing also allows the inquisitive eye to discover moments of intrigue in the unassuming.
