An American Road Trip

For 59 days and 11,834 miles between June, July, and August 2015, Daniel and I explored America in our 2003 Toyota Corolla. We slept in a tent when we were able to find a KOA at a reasonable hour, but more often we slept in the car on the side of a road or at a rest stop. Even more frequently, we saw many distant friends and family members on this trip who welcomed us into their homes and made seeing America much easier for us. Not to mention they all showed us an amazing time and we will always cherish their hospitality as the most vital part of this experience.

It was important for us to see America to understand different aspects of our landscape and how it affects American people socially, from state to state. To live in a country of which you are only able to see a tiny part is to not know that country at all. You can not fully understand people as a whole if you've only met people from the same places with the same points of view. It is important to see as much as you can to remind yourself that the world is big and amazing and at your disposal.

                    "...he had this crummy little apartment on 36th street and it was a corner place; a tiny fucking apartment but he had these two windows- it's a proven fact that you need a certain amount of eye room to keep from going crazy, and from this room you could see a building on one side, a building on the other side, but right straight down the middle you could see all the way to the river... and they started building this fucking condo co-op thing right on the river, right in his view and he'd sit there and say, 'Look at that-that motherfucker's gonna put it right in my fucking view and then I ain't gonna be able to see nothing but buildings,' and that building would go up and up and up and finally it was just like a fucking door shuts, y'know?" (Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives p. 223).

This project consists of 100 photos from our trip, in chronological order. Underneath the finished project is a link to an extended folder of 186 photos from the trip, which includes the original 100 photos and an addtional 86, reading more like a documentary of our time.