Description
Sometimes the photograph tells the story before you ever turn it over. A lonely Standard Oil station sits at the edge of a dirt road somewhere in Arctic Finland. Two gas pumps. A small wooden building. An old sedan with its hood raised. A couple of people barely registering against the landscape. Mountains in the distance—and seemingly nothing beyond them. Then you turn the photograph over and discover that its period caption describes this as the “last gas station” at the end of Finland’s Great Arctic Highway and, wonderfully, “the most northerly gas station for motorists in the world.” Whether that promotional claim could withstand modern geographical scrutiny almost doesn’t matter; it’s exactly the sort of claim that belongs on the back of this photograph.
The photograph is credited to James Sawders of The Workshop, Nutley, New Jersey, whose work is represented in the Princeton University Art Museum. And this is a beautiful photograph: the vertical pumps against the enormous landscape, the tiny human figures and that automobile sitting with its hood open at what the caption essentially presents as the edge of civilization. Even the Standard and Essolube advertising seems wonderfully incongruous out there. Part documentary photograph, part roadside Americana transported to the Arctic, and part old-fashioned travel adventure, it’s the kind of image that makes you want to know what happened five minutes before the shutter opened—and what happened after they filled the tank and kept driving.
A beautifully composed and genuinely evocative vintage photograph of the road running out.
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