SLP proposal—Ruth F.

180 Days

Since the beginning of the semester, I’ve been thinking about this project in terms of both theme and format.

Thematically, I was fairly certain from the get-go that I wanted to focus on travel, or—if not that, exactly—then on place over the course of time, which could be understood as a different form of travel. I worried a bit that the idea was clichéd; on the other hand, there’s a reason (or two) why the photobook has been linked to travel almost since its inception. There’s nothing inherently disgraceful in participating in a long artistic tradition, and it makes a certain amount of sense to work with an idea that’s long occupied my attention both as an amateur photographer and also as a scholar. I’ve taught classes on the American Road and on travel writing; I’ve written papers on travel literature; I have thousands upon thousands of travel photos I’ve taken over the years.

In terms of format, I spent several weeks intrigued by the idea of making a scroll, rather than a modern bound book. At the Getty, in early January, I was entranced by a mediæval scroll that laid out the parallel histories of England and France; as a form, a scroll is ideal for conveying the idea of continuity or progression—and this progression could be chronological, geographical, or both. A road trip of some kind, laid out in one continuous strip (as Kerouac did, in typing the manuscript of On the Road), would be logical. Or, to combine multiple interests of mine, I could make a scroll of one line of the London Underground, with both historical and contemporary photographs of each station.…but this was all starting to sound very complicated, and also very dependent on my either already having the photos I needed on hand, or on my using a lot of found and borrowed images, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

Then last week, my dog woke me up at 3:00 in the morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. In the fog of insomnia, it occurred to me: I travel every day. Quite a lot. If asked, I would say my commute is pretty boring, visually—but on the other hand, it’s visually distinctive enough that if I’ve been zoning out, I can almost always instantly tell where I am on my route when I come to, even at night. And what would I discover if I really started to pay attention to what I saw along the way, thinking about it like a photographer? And then shaped my impressions into a book? The project had a lot of appeal in terms of how it might shake up my photographic style, as well as how it might help me resee what I spend so much of my time doing.

I’ve abandoned the scroll idea—I don’t think it’ll work well with this project. I’m back to a conventional bound book, although the shape it takes will depend in large part on the pictures I end up selecting for the project. I’ve had a few different sequencing ideas, even pre-image:

• · I could simply set my tripmeter, stop every 5 miles, and take a picture of whatever I find; these would, obviously, be printed in geographical order;
• · I could choose subjects at will, but still print them in order. If were to do this, though, I’d have to decide: do I make my book a one-way trip? Do I create a two-stories-in-one format, with the outbound trip starting from one side of the book, and the return from the other (the reader would then flip the book over to read the second “story”)? Or do I do a round trip, but interweaving the two directions, so that the outbound trip appeared on odd-numbered pages (the most visible ones if one were to read the book western-style), and the return trip on even-numbered ones (the prominent pages if one were to read the book from the “back,” like a Hebrew book)?
• · I could abandon geography altogether—a move than in some sense violates the concept of the trip, yet in another captures the kind of fragmented vision resulting from the incessant repetition of the commute. After all, at this point, no matter where I am, I’ve seen it all before—and I’ll see it all again. Geography and time don’t match up, in this particular interpretation.

I already have about 40–50 possible exposures for the project—pictures I’ve taken in the past, and ones I’ve taken since coming up with the idea. I’ve therefore got landscape shots from fall and winter, and will be able to get spring. I have pictures taken through my windscreen while driving, pictures taken from the side of the road, and pictures of the inside of my car. I have morning shots and evening ones; dry weather, and rain. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to get snow. There’s a lot of potential in this, I think.

By the end of this semester, I will have spent approximately 180 days driving this route.