Diptychs in Fresh Works - Two

Radar House, Radar Road, Sedgwick, Maine, MMVII

I photographed this odd, blocky building without knowing what it was, and as I did so I was thinking about how to make the simple structure less banal. While the lushly growing lupines and other plants, the peeling yellow paint and rusting metal doors framed a compelling subject, I wanted to approach it creatively. I was not content to simply document it. So I decided to photograph this diptych shooting the building from the two corners, which would give a glimpse of both sides of the building, along with the front. In the back of my mind I was thinking of David Hockney’s photocollage of a desk, a more complex composition that shows the top, sides and front of the furniture.

I was later told this was a World War II radio house for a radar installation, but recently I learned this is not quite right. Built in the postwar, the 1950s, this was the Sedgwick Z-6BB Radar station, that had an unmanned radar tower and equipment to transmit data to Charleston Air Force Station in Charleston, Maine. The Sedgwick station was a Bendix model AN/FPS-14 radar, placed to fill in gaps in radar coverage from the larger installation at Charleston.