Alphabet Truck © Eric Tabuchi
Kids and parents often resort to playing the Alphabet Game to avoid complete boredom during long automobile trips. Photographer Eric Tabuchi has taken the idea a couple steps further in his cool, limited edition artist’s book, Alphabet Truck.
Tabuchi has photographed trailer trucks on empty highways, each bearing one letter of the alphabet. His set of 26 trucks is perfectly uniform in scale and composition and lighting. Uncanny. The project also serves as a sort of visual typology of truck typography.
The blurb from the book’s publisher is full-on philosophical artspeak, with a healthy dose of humor:
With this edition of Alphabet Truck, Eric Tabuchi completes a work representing several thousand kilometers traversed over these past four years. The missing link between The back of trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara by John Baldessari, and Auchan, the letters of Claude Closky, Eric Tabuchi pushes the burlesque or compulsive logic of his piece in an almost derisory search for what could constitute its Danish and Japanese origins. Through language (Alphabet) and displacement (Trucks), Alphabet Truck therefore questions, beyond its formal aspects and references, the notions of membership, identity and coeducation.
Tabuchi seems to be a king of this kind of serial photography; he’s also done a series of 26 gasoline stations à la Ed Ruscha.
You can find more information about this project and the book at his MySpace page.
Sources: Eric Tabuchi
