september 11, 2021
one of the things that has been... interesting for me as I revisit my work is that so many of my photographs from last year prominently feature my van. Now at the time, that made sense - I wrote 32,000 words about my relationship to that vehicle and road-tripping in it across America - but in retrospect, a lot of the photos served the writing because I needed them to, and that meant landscapes with a little van in them. Now, as I go through my catalogs and I want my words to serve the photographs, the van stands out as an odd inclusion in pictures that could have stood just fine without it.
However, there are still a few shots where it works, and I believe this is one of them. I believe cars say things and while my Hiace is an odd vehicle that most people don't know what to make of, it does, to me, represent one thing. Its friendly little toaster-oven design, its weathered appearance, the association of the Great American Road Trip in a big ol' van represented by such a foreign, strange object for U.S. highways = It's at once distinctly foreign, yet familiar. It feels like a spaceship, and it's no Enterprise. It's a beat-up X-Wing or a Swordfish II, meant for excursions to new planets and locales, exploratory missions to where people have already been in the hopes of finding something.
And the most interesting images I have of it are where I set foot into the great unknown to explore and found nothing but ruins, because it changes the tone of an image like this dramatically. What could be sterile, dead, an image of the wastes of humanity baking in the desert, now has life. Someone is here to visit, and even if they find nothing, life still exists. Onto the next planet, then.
