We are planning another long photo trip. Right now the plan, which has morphed several times, is to drive from Vancouver, Canada, down the West Coast through Portland, then Sacramento, LA, spend a few days in Orange where I have a long-term project going on, and then end at a palm tree farm in San Diego which we have visited before and I’d like to take a lot of photos in
The trip doesn’t have a theme, like ‘Following the Columbia River’ and I’m a bit concerned about that. I usually have a pretty specific plan in my mind, with an overall goal. Usually something like following a trail, road, highway, valley or river. Something geographic in nature. Something you see clearly on a map. That’s often how I plan.
Lately, I’ve re-read and listened to videos with Alec Soth talking about his travel planning process and Soth says that he has everything planned. Everything. Soth says he knows where he is having lunch on a Tuesday the third week out. In some videos, you can see his photo trip planned out on a big map on what looks like the wall of his studio, with lots of pins and notes on the map, marker or highlighter outlined roads and so on. Almost like one of those evidence maps you see in a murder mystery show, lines connecting all the details that if followed will lead to the truth. I suppose Soth has a list of those special places where he likes to find people dancing, bowling or where civic organizations are going to meet on a Thursday night. He purposefully includes people in his projects, they make their way into mine by accident. That’s something I am thinking about changing, but I worry these photos of people posing with the dead-pan look have become a bit of a cliche in photography.
Alec’s last big project was A Pound of Pictures, which is a set of pretty divergent images, almost what I would call “orphan” images. Images are not connected directly to any narrative. He originally wanted to make a book that focused on Abraham Lincoln, but there is very little about Lincoln in the final set of images or the book. There is one nice image of a plaster bust of Lincoln through a car window, but Lincoln too has that dead-pan look. When talking about this project he seems to be saying the plan, in all of its detail, is necessary - but he fully expects to diverge from it as he engages more subjects where he finds them. He just doesn’t know where on the road that might happen.
So I too have a plan, basically a map, and some general idea of where I’m going. What I am worried about is that I have all these “side shows” happening, little episodes that are designed with the purpose of finishing up things I’ve started. I worried there would be too many interruptions.
Usually, like Soth, I collect information about specific destinations. I look through the local papers online, and if the city has a website look to see if there are any fairs, meetings, parades, foot races, and so on. I often download images from the area as well. Things I see photographed I’d like to photograph. I did this on my last trip, starting in Montreal, winding through NY state and Jersey to Niagara Falls and then back to Canada. The first place I insisted on visiting was the waterfall I saw in a scene from the movie The Last of the Mohegans. The filming took place at Chimney Rock State Park. But I found that this wasn’t the historical place I wanted to see. It was Hickory Nut Falls, not the falls written about in the book. That’s Cooper's Cave, the fictional hiding place Hawkeye and his companions made famous in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel. It’s located under Cooper's Cave Bridge which connects the City of Glens Falls and the Village of South Glens Falls. And that’s where I took several images, picking out one of a picnic table at the paper mill parking lot that now lies on the river’s edge. The space in the falls Cooper wrote about wasn’t accessible and honestly looked pretty boring. But the image of the parking lot was just what I wanted.
I then visited another waterfall along the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. The Falls official website says, “Cotton and silk fabrics; steam locomotives; continuous rolls of paper; airplane engines. What do these things have in common? They were all manufactured in the same place - Paterson, NJ.” In 1792, Paterson was established, America's first planned industrial city (although I thought that Holyoke, Massachusetts along the Connecticut River, near where I went to art school was the first industrial-designed city). In Paterson, everything centred around the Great Falls of the Passaic River. “From the original mills rose industries that changed the face of the United States,” the sign said. But poverty remained, and workers seemed to be little more than pawns for corporations. But very much like the industrial river where I grew up in Massachusetts, the Chicopee River, it’s not a river you grow close to. It’s not a river for swimming, and years of industrial pollutants prevent fishing, and the currents and falls prevent boat traffic. While I grew up on a river just like the Passaic, it was never a central part of our lives. Its waters powered the mills and carried away pollutants from the plants and a couple of generations of my family worked in those mills. But if you wanted water, to drink, swim or fish in, the Chicopee River was not where you would find it.
I originally visited the Passaic Falls under difficult circumstances. A few days after my partner died I left the kids at home and drove his sister to the Newark Airport to take a flight home. Somehow I got lost on the way home and found myself in Paterson. I finally tried turning around in the parking lot next to the falls. There, running out of energy, I had a panic attack, and couldn’t drive any further for a while, so I stepped out and saw this waterfall in the middle of this poverty-stricken industrial city. An unexpected journey, to say the least. Until this trip, I never saw the falls again.
But there is more than that connecting me with the Great Falls of the Passaic River. There is the book of poetry Paterson, by William Carlos Williams, a book I often carry with me when travelling. The book contains a very long poem (actually it’s 5 books published together). There are annotations, histories of individuals mentioned in the poem, notices from local newspapers, stories about politicians and the people of Paterson and lots of footnotes…it’s like an encyclopedia of Paterson. It reminds me of documentation that is part of a conceptual art project. Things are categorized, repetitive, and comprehensive to an almost obsessive degree. The details are bleak. Robert Lowell writes of Paterson, “Paterson is Whitman’s America grown pathetic and tragic, brutalized by inequality, disorganized in industrial chaos, and faced with annihilation.”
Yes, that’s where I had my panic attack and sat in the car for an hour contemplating the meaninglessness of…well…everything. And I was eager to get back there with my camera.
And I have a third touchstone to Paterson: one day while checking movies at the library I came across a film called, yes, Paterson. If you’re an artist, I would suggest watching this film, a 2016 drama written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. The film stars Adam Driver as a bus driver and poet named….again, Paterson, and Golshifteh Farahani as his wife, who dreams of being a country music star and opening a cupcake business. You hear and watch Driver developing his poems while driving his bus back and forth along the same route. You see him looking and taking in what is around him, and making it into art. Throughout the movie, over and over there is a repetition of characters who are twins. To this day, when in the forest, if there are two similar trees standing together, I say to my partner, “twins” reminding him of the movie, and press the shutter button. The poems Paterson (Driver) writes are about simple things, a book of matches or a favourite cake, and overheard conversations while driving the bus. They are about discovering the meaning in the ordinary, commonplace, mundane things, artifacts, edges of places, and spaces not quite defined. The movie, at least to me, was like watching a member of the New Topographics movement write poetry. This film pushed me to revisit the spot that was associated with such a personal tragedy. In my last essay, I wrote about the book The Poetics of Space and how it puts forth the idea that art, and making spaces meaningful, come through memories that are re-experienced through being in similar, vaguely familiar spaces. If you are a visual artist or a writer, you should read that book at least once.
After taking several images from different points of view I finally took one that satisfied me. A quiet image with three people at the bottom of the falls fishing, and then drove away from the falls and Paterson. (Image above)
Finally, the third fall we went to on the trip was Niagara Falls. One reason we went there is that I like Soth’s image of the falls. Soth laughs because his photo is such a pedestrian image, one that every tourist takes, and finds on postcards in every store in town. Yet, even being such a common image he says it’s one of the favourite images that people comment on when they see his book Niagara. I also had another image of the falls in mind too, Frederic Edwin Church's Niagara (1857), a ‘seven-foot-wide colossus that seemed to press viewers dizzyingly close to the waterfall's precipice.’ If you have taken any course in American art and painting, you would know this image. If you like that image of the falls you should look up the many sketches he made before painting the giant canvas.
That night our hotel emptied out, and everyone had scrambled to their cars. A major snowstorm was about to hit the city. There were only a few stops left on our map, but it was time to go. Early the next morning we packed up and drove east, trying to beat the clouds.
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Please, take a moment to sign up for my newsletter. I write an essay every three weeks or so and just send you a message once it’s posted. Also, I really hoped to have more dialogue here. I’d love to hear about your photo trip planning process, and how it works in real life. As you can see, I do a lot of planning, but things always force me to take an unexpected route.
Books about travel, roads and art to look at and read:
Niagara, Alec Soth
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Blue Highways, by Least Heat-Moon
Roads to Quoz, by Least Heat-Moon
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Paterson, by William Carlos Williams
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau
And take a quick look at Ezra Pound's Cantos or James Joyce’s Ulysses, You’ll find a familiar pattern, a journey, broken down into sections. Both of these works are found in many other artworks, including poetry, novels and photography books.
There's also George Tice's wonderful work in Paterson. He photographs in the way that WC Williams wrote: focused on small simple details that develop layers of meaning. https://www.amazon.com/Paterson-George-Tice/dp/0813507197
Thoroughly enjoyed. Thank you, Jim!