View the gallery containing a portion of the images for this project
I’ve been working on a project for just barely under a year. The project began after a semester of casual shooting with not much in mind other than a few loose themes and ideas. One photograph included a subtle detail that made me think a bit more.
The photograph, made on March 27, 2019, is a panorama of an old full-service gas station shot just before sunrise. The garage was filled with junk at the time, including an old Shell sign, which likely was the gas station’s original sign. Stuffed animals lined the old shelves in the former shop, and a small “Route 66” sign was displayed on the window of the garage.
That small sign made me start thinking about where I could go with it.
Originally, the project was going to be a series of panoramic images similar to this first one, made into 6x12 panoramas similar to what you would shoot with a Hasselblad X-Pan or 6x12 medium format camera. After shooting a small handful of panoramas for my final project, I realized quickly that it was too limiting. I’m all about limiting myself with my artwork, but this was one limitation that was a bit too far.
I found myself wanting to shoot more than just panoramic contemporary landscapes of the Mother Road. When I would go to a location to shoot a panorama, I found myself shooting other scenes just as they were. Causal, but still carefully composed like the panoramas.
All the while, I knew one thing was missing in this project. Humans. I’m very good at making photographs without people, but i’m awful at including them. I’ve barely done street photography, let alone ask a stranger to take a portrait of them for my personal work. This was something I knew I needed to work on to really pull this project together and springboard it into the next major phase of its process.
Fast-forward to 2020. I’ve been shooting more film than digital, and actively trying to make sure my film and digital photographs can sit together without being clear that one photo is digital, while another is film. I went shooting with my friend Ashley in and around downtown Bloomington. We ran into some people on a couple different weekends, Ashley or I asked to take a photograph of them. Needless to say, a couple of the photographs are thanks to Ashley being there with me.
After I got those rolls of film developed that contained those portraits of strangers, I scanned them in right away. I was enthralled by the photographs. Not only because they came out, but also because they showed me I was really, really on to something with this project.
A major goal with this project is to depict the real contemporary landscape of Route 66 within Illinois. There’s plenty of tourist activities, many of which will definitely be included in this project in one way or another, but the reality is that the towns that line the Mother Road are intimate, humble towns, dotted by the larger cities like Springfield and Bloomington, and bracketed by St. Louis and Chicago. People are part of the landscape, too, which means that I must include people in order to tell this story in a way that will impact people more than just photographs of old cars and vacant lots.
While I’ve made a few projects already, including one large-scale project in 2018, I truly feel that this project is my first project worth pursuing. It’s a story that I’ve become connected to, from my time living in Bloomington, to my undying love of Chicago, to my fascination with car culture in the United states. This project is going to be more than just telling the story of Route 66 in Illinois, but it will be connected with who I am as a photographer.