By the age of twelve, Gaudiani had visited forty eight states by car and train. Forty Eight States emerged over three years of travel through the United States by train, car and plane and decades of travel through all forty eight states. For this series, she retraced old routes and memories from the Fifties reflecting on endless possibilities, missed opportunities, fleeting intimacies, reflections on a life. The road trip is her defining passion and an iconic rite for many Americans. The photographs capture a timeless America – one that is no longer there as it was in the Fifties, yet remains through the linkage of knowledge, memory and photograph. The images are both specific and conceptual. In Forty Eight States the American landscape is seen well vertically and framed, not in the more traditional sweeping horizontal mode. Perhaps they can be seen as photographic updates of the Hudson River School, or paintings by Frederick Church and Thomas Cole. They evoke a dreamy, romantic yearning for the land and what it means to be an American in the landscape, sometimes part of and sometimes estranged from the places we hold in our memories.
