Road(Side)Trips

The Roadtrip is such an ingrained and pervasive part of our collective American experience that speaking about your travels instantly inspires envy, awe, longing, and guilt, often all at the same time. This need for the open road seems to be inextricably tied to our very DNA, instinctually causing us to dream of what might be, no matter our fiscal realities or how comfortable we may have made our homes.  The American identity may be tied to the hallow promise of a house of our own and a nuclear-perfect family, but our spirit often calls to us, revealing how discontented we are in our sedentary habits. We are, at our core, a restless people. The automobile serves as the vehicle for our soul, and the roadtrip is our spirit’s fuel. Photography, too, grew along with this obsessive need to travel and explore, and with it the snapshot served as an artificial proof of our travels, inseparable from our lengthy tales of these roadtrips upon our return. Yet, at some point, our proof of these adventures pale in comparison to the experience itself, the enthusiasm and gloss long lost, stories paled by time, our memories lose their high resolution, and our tangible proof starts to pixelate. The cycle begins again as we turn the ignition on our next trip.

Curiosity has led me to this project. I wonder why we visit and photograph what we do, as our most treasured memories of these places often hold little meaning to anyone else. Travelogues, advertisements, and years of suggestions from trusted friends influence the waysides of our meanderings and the proof that we’ve created a shared experience resides in the snapshots we take. But what of the memories? The experiences? How can we preserve these better when the photographs alone do not? These records, rendered by another companion of the iconic roadtrip, an early digital camera powered by a Nintendo Gameboy, represent how little memory is held in these snapshots. Originally black and white and only capturing a meager 0.014 megapixel of visual information, I’ve digitally hand-tinted these images in vibrant, saturative colors that exist in my memory, hoping to instill more of the intangible awe and wonder that my travels provide me.