Headache Road (2009-2010)

Concept

This is travel photography, but not the kind of travel that you usually do for fun, and not the kind of photography that is well-suited to travel. Stay alert! Do not become sleepy or get lost. For the duration of this project I spent a lot of time on the road, commuting for work and school, covering more or less the same routes with great regularity. The "headache" of the series title does refer to common annoyance of the commute, but was more specifically inspired by the disorienting appearance of some of the images, combined with the realization that I had been getting migraine headaches, often triggered by car travel.

Process

The images in this series were created using an 8x10 view camera with a homemade digital scanning back, which sometimes accompanied me in the passenger seat of my car. The nature of the camera brings with it some unusual visual tendencies, such as native monochrome (color blindness), a heavy vignetting effect, sensitivity to the invisible spectrum, and a wave-like record of motion.

Outcome

A number of the images in this series were originally intended simply as test shots during the process of assembling and refining the scanning camera. It didn't take long before it was readily apparent that the camera, with all its limitations and pecularities, had something of a mind of its own. Whether intending "test" shots or "serious" efforts at photography, the scanner imposed a certain level of unpredictability, and a singularly ominous/mysterious aesthetic.

In retrospect, it seems ironic to have spent so much time putting together a camera (in particular a view camera, the very definition of photographic control), only to end up with comparitively little control over the images it produces. That may sound like a complaint, but working with a process reliant on experiment and chance was a refreshing departure from the increasingly rigid techniques that I had employed during the previous two years.