Highway Kind (2006-2015)

Highway Kind is a larger series comprised of the work in This Train and other photographs that document my life on the road with my young child. It covers the years following the 2007 economic crisis, a time when many people were forced to sleep in their cars, live in national forests, and camp on BLM land. I photographed fellow travelers, people who were either hard on their luck or who had taken to the road voluntarily, testing American virtues of freedom and self-determination against the vagrancies of train hopping trains and wilderness squat- ting. The series culminates with photographs of cars, both as a fact in the landscape and as a manifestation of American identification with car culture. Alongside pictures of cars and the road, I photographed the mechanics who maintained my old van. It was only through their expertise and grace that I could continue these trips. This work marks the end of the three decades I spent making photographs on the road and demystifies the romantic call to wander. It examines the stuff of the road both literally and in its wider mythology, the cracked pavement, rusted-out cars and road worn tires, and the greasy underbelly of the violence of westward expansion and our naïve optimism as young Americans.