A solitary bench on the cold edge of a Minnesota lakeshore sits frozen in time, its frame glazed with a thick coat of ice. In Jessica Lange’s “Highway 61” series, this scene becomes more than a document of winter—it is a meditation on memory, loss, and endurance.

The photograph’s stark contrasts render the ordinary bench into something elemental, both witness and artifact of seasons and stories now past. The shoreline, littered with jagged ice and rocks, draws the eye toward the endless water and distant lighthouse, each element standing guard against the encroaching silence.

Above, an immense sky expands the scene, cleaved by a single contrail, capturing a fleeting human trace, a reminder of movement that contrasts with the bench’s rooted stillness. The bench, sheathed in ice, appears as a monument to waiting, persistence, and the invisible presence of those who have come and gone. Its emptiness speaks to the absence that so often haunts stretches of Highway 61: vanished neighborhoods, abandoned farms, lost gatherings, and the quiet ache of what once was.

Lange’s affinity for this route and its landscape, cultivated since her childhood in Northern Minnesota, is evident in the way she frames the scene—each detail reverberates with the weight of personal and collective history.

The photograph channels a sense of solitude that is both intimate and universal, a lyric pause on a journey through America’s heartland. It embodies the underlying tone of her “Highway 61” work—melancholy, reverence, and the resilience of the forgotten or overlooked.

Lange’s choice to work in black and white strips away the distractions of color, sharpening the emotional terrain and accentuating the stark textures: icicles hanging like memories, shattered ice underfoot, and a horizon that promises new journeys beyond the current freeze.

This image—sharp, honest, and unadorned—invites reflection on time’s passage and the endurance of place. It is at once a tribute and an elegy, capturing both the fleeting and the enduring along one of America’s most storied roads.