On Roadsides
All Alysha wanted for Mother's Day was a trip to Camping World to look at RVs, so that's what we did. What we didn't know was that in Texas there are blue laws, those are the laws in the south that prohibit entertainment or leisure on the Lord's Day. The same law that says you can't but whiskey on a Sunday also means you can't buy a motorcoach when you should be at church. So, out of protest, we took the kids to the Snake Farm down the road.
Two months later, we had a 30 ft Winnebago and found ourselves on the road to escape the heat of Texas. It's been over a year now, and the Pandemic has made our Winnie invaluable. This is a selection of images made from the road, usually shot without composing through a windshield as the world goes by. Other times from RV parks or points of interest along the way.
This project is also a way for me to pay homage to some of the earliest work I was exposed to and influenced by. Photos by Arthur Freed and Lee Friedlander in the Time Life book Documentary Photography depicted images shot from moving cars or through windshields. I first saw those images around 1997 not long after graduating high school and I've enjoyed bringing that style into my modern practice.
And finally, I was inspired by this quote from one of my favorite books, "I realized these were all snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives" -Jack Kerouac, On The Road