It’s September and I’m 10 out of 16 rolls through my Illinois road trip pictures. This means I’ve met a clean 100 frames, but that doesn’t mean 100 unique pictures. I’ve scanned, culled and done baseline edits to these images so far and thankfully, the “hit rate” is pretty darn good. The images from an artistic standpoint? Well that’s subjective, of course!
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t crazy about certain pictures. There are some photos that I am absolutely over the moon about how they came out, and others that I wish I had shot ever-so slightly different, or, spent more time trying to nail focus or metered a little darker to get the image tack-sharp. But, since this has been such a slow burn to get these rolls developed since the trip in May, it has served as a wonderful opportunity to dwell on the images in a much more organic pace. Folks will always say that a slower process means better pictures, and that’s not 100% true for all kinds of camera-based artwork, but it certainly is true for me in this style of work. It’s hard to employ that out here in Massachusetts, but I also haven’t been shooting too frequently out here.
My trip to Illinois was intended to be a 75% work 25% social visit. I spent most days driving around the country, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, and I was taking these photos. It’s kind of funny getting these rolls back from my local lab and realizing I had completely forgotten what I had taken pictures of. I would remember one or two subjects but overall, not much stuck around in this lull between the trip and getting the rolls back. I think this contributes to the idea that this work benefits from the slower process. It’s also much more financially reasonable for me to drop off two rolls every two to three weeks rather than dropping 16 rolls there. I’ve become a regular at my local lab and I always have a lovely conversation with the woman who runs the lab. These are things that are lost when you ship things out — but that’s not to say shipping your film out is a bad idea! Of course there’s accessibility, not every town has a darkroom lab, and it just makes more sense to ship things off to New York or California or my friend Robert at Brooktree Studios. There’s just that little extra something that comes from droppings off rolls of film and being handed them back in a week’s time.
Thinking about the pictures now, there’s a lot to digest still. The newest ones are still simmering in my mind while the others have reached a point where I’m almost tired of looking at them. I’ve been laughing at myself for some of the cliches I shot but also that those pictures are still important to make. They somewhat serve as a way to not only keep the roll going, but to see if maybe a cliche is actually good for the work. There’s only one way to find out.
I think that shooting these photos has been a kind of cathartic experience for me. Back when I was a journalist driving around this very landscape, I was meeting farmers and people who live out in what would be considered the middle of nowhere, a kind of peripheral landscape that seldom is acknowledged. The whole time, I wanted to take pictures of this landscape and I rarely got the chance to. There was one time in 2020 that I did get to take a picture of a local stock car racer’s car and then that kicked off me shooting a few more photos in the country on my way home. That experience stuck in my head as one that embodies what feeling I strive for when I’m out making new work. A lust to shoot, a genuine fascination with the landscape and my personal connection to that landscape. I think it’s important that I am a local in these, that I am familiar though I was not a rural resident. I was someone who lived in the “big city” compared to these tiny towns miles away from the city limits. But, because I have that experience covering stories about agriculture and rural communities, it served as a foundation for my interest. It doesn’t make me an expert, it just allows me a foot-in-the-door to better familiarize myself with this space I had been surrounded by for my most formative years of life.
As much as I want to go back to Illinois to take more of these, I can’t justify the expense necessary to even drive out there (usually much cheaper than flying). I love driving around the country in the winter and early spring when the trees are bare and the fields are still flat. I love driving around in the fall as crops are being harvested and I can almost hide my car behind the corn stalks on a back road. But, it goes back to that point before — that a slower process can result in better work. I don’t know the next time I’ll be in Illinois, but I know that my partner will probably be tired of the corn fields very quickly — as long as she gets to pick the music and be in an air-conditioned car, she’s happy.
I have six more rolls left to get done, and two of them are at the lab now. I yearn for the day that I’ll be able to make prints of these — not just inkjets but real darkroom prints. There are some that deserve to be printed large and that may have to be inkjet, but a strong 11x14 or even 16x20 darkroom print for some of these would be a dream. Since there’s no project associated with any of these pictures, it’s hard to know what will come of them. But, there’s always the option to exhibit some of them in a theme of rural Illinois but not treated as a cohesive project yet. It’s still early days for these photos, and my boxes of Tri-X sit in the fridge until I can make my next trip out to the empty fields of central Illlinois.