If you’ve been following along, either here or on either Instagram, maybe you’ve seen that I’m doing a project called America At Work, specifically for publication here on Medium. It’s not just a cool assignment, it’s sort of the Mecca journey of photography. Traveling by car across America’s vast countryside, getting away from the usual haunts and discovering the heart of the country through the lens of a rangefinder camera… what photographer hasn’t dreamed of it? It certainly has been a life-long dream of mine, ever since I first saw the work of Robert Frank.
It has been a distinct privilege to get to do it, but I discovered a few days into it that there’s two distinct parts to it: the needs of the project, but also my own journey. Two needs are being met — those which get the project done and those that help me on my own path. that second part has been a much-harder-to-describe part of the journey that still evolves even as I confront it in writing.
So, now that there’s 6,500 miles and 18 states in my rearview mirror (and a lot of logged thinking hours), here are some of the things I’ve found myself discovering about my own photography as I’ve wheeled around the country:
