Approaching New Year, MO Hwy 65, 2013
This collection of images was shot using a digital 35mm camera while traveling one way from one city to another to see family between Christmas and New Year's Day. All the images were shot from the passenger's seat (of course) while in transit and seemed to capture a sense of melancholy and nostalgia for me that always seems to be a part of such travels back to and through the midwest, where I spent most of my childhood and teenage years. The high-key imagery as a result of the overcast day and the recent snowfall seemed to capture perfectly for me a sense of the elusiveness of memory. I was thinking a lot about memory and how transitory it can be, as well as malleable, in the form of mostly blank or white canvases passing in front of my eyes in a series of stills. Moments of blur and color would suddenly fill the frame and I'd snap only to be followed by stretches of empty space. This was also a conveyance of nostalgia for me in that for the last 13 years I had been living in dense cities where long stretches of the open horizon were not part of the everyday landscape. And the feeling of travel in general, that there is a destination, a beginning, a middle, an end - and the symbolism and reflection that comes at the end of of a year in general - how that seems to intensify in some ways as one ages - the sense of needing to somehow document the feeling and journey seemed imperative. Looking back at the images, I found more meaning in arranging the images to reflect the imperative sense of motion and progress, the need to be purposeful yet not quite having arrived (questioning to some extent whether or not one will end up where you plan) and offset it with the deep desire to rest, to take in, to dream, to wander, to remember.