vicki scott

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.

january 26, 2022

When I was a child, I lived in a subdivision and was homeschooled and rarely allowed outside of parental supervision and generally tethered to my mother. a bike ride down the dead-end street required a walkie talkie so she could always be one click away; this was ostensibly for my safety, but it really was so I never got too far off the leash. The only thing that really ever kept my mind roaming was that my bedroom window faced the one undeveloped area in the subdivision, to the West. It was a simple field with some distant trees; it was just the one place that hadn't been clear-cut to build more identical boxes yet.

I began my photographic career in that field 15 years ago, shooting pictures of sunsets with a Sony Cybershot. I wanted to explore the "distant forest", which really was a stand of trees 200 feet away. I wasn't allowed, but it put the bug in my head that there were things to explore outside of the suburban routines I was allowed to have, and when I took my van trip a decade later, I credited that field with giving me the desire to explore the unknown.

Way off in the distance, visible just over the treetops of the field, were some regularly-blinking radio towers. I don't remember how many, just that I tried to figure out their patterns, kept the blinds open to watch them blink when I couldn't sleep. I didn't know where or how far away they were, but it was comforting to not know: look, Vicki, there is a universe even beyond the field; there is the regularity of blinking lights and steel towers beyond the ennui of this subdivision. It instilled a sense of peace in me when my home became abusive to stare at the distant lights, far away from my subdivision, and know that I can explore those too. Someday.

It's someday, and I am exploring, and every blinking-red light tower draws me in and calms me in a way nothing else can.

january 4, 2023

one of my favorite parts about living in a small town is that not every single surface has been power-washed clean of any trace elements of humanity. Most mid-size American cities, especially out West, feel as though they're in the middle of a bleach-wash cycle, systemically rooting out anything that doesn't look like a pre-planned element, eradicating art for the sake of tranquil sterility (and advertising space).

Reno, in the year I lived there, knocked down dozens of small motels to make space for more gray slab 5-over-1s and strip malls, simultaneously eliminating the only affordable places to live in the city and displacing hundreds while also destroying some of the only buildings that made Reno feel like... Reno. Murals in Reno are 50-foot affairs approved by a city planning board that must be as vibrant as possible without actually satisfying anyone or making any kind of statement beyond "respect everyone", and any actual street art is painted-over and the artist arrested with haste. Every fucking city feels like an Instagram-ready backdrop on a movie set, and not a place people live.

On the other hand, small towns where life has remained, feel more human. Lived-in. Yes, that does mean they look messier and sometimes depressing, because life in America is depressing, but it also leads to moments of joy. For example, why bother painting the mountains on a $60-a-night motel? Because we're people and we like to make pretty things, and it's pretty. It's as though the concept of embarrassment at art for the sake of art hasn't quite made it all the way out here yet.

feb 16, 2022

The automobile is, to me, the personification of American culture. There is no place on Earth where cars have played a larger role in shaping every single facet of our lives. This mostly made things worse, of course, but it's still undeniable that every street lined with cars, every gridlocked intersection, every 10-lane highway screams something about America in a way that very few other things can.

Because of our car-centric culture, I believe cars can say a lot about the world surrounding them, precisely because they so accurately reflect the circumstances they were born into. While fashion has largely remained an ouroboros for the past 60 years and architecture has stagnated and operates on a glacial timeframe (with the exception of hideous 5-over-1s that will, I assure you, only get uglier with time), the language of automotive design moves fast and remains very much alive.

When a car is designed, it says something about its era that very few consumer products do. The jet age of the 50s, the bright techno-futurism of the 80s, the military paranoia of the 00s - it's all reflected most strongly in the cars of their eras. Specific vehicles right off the lot say specific things about their buyers (Schwarzanegger and the Hummer, anyone?) As cars age into different hands, slowly working their way down the food chain of buyers, they say new things about each one of those people, too. (For example, want a shorthand for a character who's a desperate wannabe finance bro? Give him a 15-year-old BMW 3 Series.)

And that's ultimately what makes this image so interesting to me. It says nothing - it's two cars in front of a repeating background - and yet I guarantee you every American who sees this image will vividly imagine something wildly precise based on the statements these two cars make. Historical vignette, modern-day drug deal, sad 00's statement on planned obsolescence, it could be any of these. I have my own reading; what matters less is the exact one you have, and instead, your awareness that our vehicles speak volumes about America, for better and worse.