The photo is of an object, a sculpture titled Cadillac Ranch, created by a group of young architects/artists named Ant Farm. I was a member of the group and supervised the installation in June 1974.

The photo was taken at a party to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Cadillac Ranch. It is late afternoon on June 21, 2004, the Summer Solstice. It is a social gathering reflecting Anthropos’ desire to commemorate and mark time passing. Twelve Anthropos can be seen in the photo. The location is a wheat field just west of Amarillo, Texas, alongside Interstate 40, but set back 150 meters from the highway. The site could be the geographic center of the North American continent: latitude 35.18724, longitude 101.9869.

The nonhuman is represented by the ten cars which have been stripped of their functional mobility and transformed into art objects, frozen in place, inserted into the ground, and lined up as an evolutionary diagram—the rise and fall of the tail fin, 1948–64. The automobile, an “extension of man” as Marshal McLuhan said, perhaps has been the most powerful shaping force in transforming the surface of the planet during the twentieth century, at least on this continent. The Cadillac was the top of the General Motors product line and considered “the Standard of the World” during the 1950s. The 1959 Cadillac sports the largest tail fins, possibly representing a pinnacle of the automotive bell curve.

Several “Times—Before and After” are represented here: times before and after the tail fin; the time before the peak of the automotive bell curve, which stretches back to the late nineteenth century, and the time after, an unknown future of changing technologies of mobility; the time before and after the transition of photography to a digital medium. The vertical line in the photo marks it as an artifact of pre-digital photography, because this panoramic view was made by combining two drugstore prints. The line also divides the 1956 Cadillac and the 1957. Two additional cars are not visible to the left. Dark clouds on the horizon portend severe weather, and, in fact, the party ended when rain, along with hail the size of tennis balls, fell from the sky.