Former Filling Stations
Artist's Statement
Former Filling Stations is an exhibition of black and white photographs that catalogue the demise and dereliction of the urban petrol station. Frank Eye travelled around Great Britain over a period of six months asking the people he encountered on the way to remember where they used to buy petrol.
This exhibition is of a selection of photographs from the resulting archive of 444 Former Filling Stations that charts these sites in varying states of transformation and neglect. These bleak urban landscapes speak of more optimistic times past.
Frank Eye said," Although many of these photographs have a post-holocaust feel of desolation about them I was not consciously seeking to deal with the holocaust as I had already spent over a year on that topic (Without Trial and Liebesgeschichte). In fact I was trying to get away from the debilitating feeling of dealing with such weighty matters. I hope some of these pictures also show an atmosphere of quiet calm during a period of change, but each viewer will make their own interpretation. Some of the forecourt sites are now in residential use. That is happier than the empty and abandoned places I came across. I admit I had been looking for ways of dealing with Abu Ghraib, but there is no intentional or conscious link here with torture. I decided to work on essential elements in the world, such as water, air and the earth. I chose oil, then the polution aspect of some of these ghost sites hit me. The only connection with politics is that petroleum is a prime political motivator. Was it not one of the motives for attacking Iraq?
That is why the comforting activity of repeated research, contact with the public, and revisiting roads and places where I had bought petrol in the past, was pleasant. I was not thinking heavy theories while I was working, as the typology took away a lot of the room for manoeuver. That was liberating as I had to allow myself to see what the formula would produce. It was revealed in the dark-room.
I owe a great debt to Ed Ruscha whose work TWENTY-SIX GASOLINE STATIONS first inspired me to try this subject during the U.K. fuel protest strikes in August 2000, as an experiment. In those colour photos I first tried to show the unusual aspect of petrol stations with no cars in them, owing to lack of supplies. But the strike was soon over. I spent a few hours on my motorcycle collecting shots which I then cross-processed to give an added feel of something wrong, but I was busy studying and so the photos became a display on a home-made light-box in the end of term show, soon forgotten. Now I think of it, they were made on a colour photocopier at college.
I hope the feeling of the book Twenty-four Former Filling Stations is quite different to the post war optimism of the American dream of the nineteen sixties which Ed Ruscha's work preserved. Although I have read On the Road by Jack Kerouac many times and share its excitement, his Dean Moriarty was basically a bigamous car thief and a junkie. That glamour of the road is I think contradicted by my work, showing a more down to earth reality of new motoring habits and of economic change.
Now the Petrol station project is over I hope to change tack and go in a quite different direction. I am going to explore questions of the gaze and in particular aspects of the photograph which Andrea Dworkin and Laura Mulvey have described in detail and attempt to illustrate them."
Photographs of petrol stations without supplies during the fuel protest