STATIONS: An Imagined Journey

In Stations, Michael Flanagan's images and texts weave together a fictional archaeology of time and place, where the past asserts itself as an unfathomable mystery at the heart of everyday life. An album of lost photographs serves as our guide to the stops along two antiquated railroad lines winding through Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. In this ancient American landscape, marked by Civil War battles and earlier settlements, we follow album and railroad on a journey from past to present, as Lucius Caton pieces together his sister Anna's love affair with their cousin, the photographer Russell McKay, out of the fragmentary clues she embeds in the album. Anna is an artist, eccentric, elusive and beguiling, whose life remains a dark puzzle to Lucius. As the story of her romance with Russell unfolds, we catch a glimpse of Lucius's complicated feelings for his sister.