The road is paved with dreams.
And the landscape slowly digests the energy radiating from the pavement.
American Ghosts is an ongoing series I started in 2013. My objective with this project is to capture the evolving American landscape through the window of a moving car. When it’s time for a photoshoot, I pick a destination and rope a friend into driving me around. The drivers around us on these expeditions think we are up to no good, but I’m too lost in the landscape to notice. Even though people trust what they see in photographs more than they should, they don’t trust photographers, and haven’t since the invention of the camera.
The U.S. Highway has long been used as a symbol of our values as a nation—freedom, liberty and expression of the self in mobility. There are few things branded as more patriotic than pavement. The highway is a beautiful, endless dream, a speedway to the unknown. We as Americans spend a lot of time planning for the potential of our destination, a vision of perfection suspended before our eyes like a pair of glittering contact lenses made of diamonds. The idea that achieving a future goal will bring unfathomable satisfaction is an ever present distortion—sharp, beautiful, illusory.
I share a love affair with the open road. I was born into its privilege and taught the value of the pursuit. Whether we want to or not, we all start the pursuit the moment we enter this cultural environment. We continue it even after realizing its futility. And the residue left on the roadside along the way is forgotten by those who leave it and is often overlooked by the passerby. Nevertheless, it fertilizes the soil.
There are entire communities along the side of the road that are impossible to enter. There are also open invitations where those who came before found a destination of sorts. The landscape retains the memory of all who have touched it, and it narrates an alternative history of a nation. Ours is a history of industry, construction, demolition, making do with what you have, DIY-marketing, pasting over complexity, oversimplification, forced clarity, economic impetus, survival of the fittest, nature.