(Places, April 2015)
“Just on its own, Micah Cash’s photograph, ‘Pickwick Landing, Downstream,’ offers plenty to ponder. Sober harmonies of hue and tone and texture. Rust cracking the enamel of modernity. A sign ruled for an absent message. A frame within a frame, a view blocked, a working landscape classicized. You needn’t have been to Tennessee.
“But I have been to Tennessee, grew up there, in fact. I learned to swim in Watts Bar Lake, and I’ve spent a lot of time on the TVA reservations, so I can tell you something else about ‘Pickwick Landing, Downstream’: I can tell you why the back of a sign is something to take a picture of.”