Long Drives and Photography
I have been driving down to Florida rather than flying in recent years. I hate I-95. It's a dismal highway. It sucks in Maryland. It sucks in Virginia. It really sucks in North Carolina. It sucks pretty badly in South Carolina. I do what I can to avoid it. I take U.S. 13 down the eastern shore of Maryland and Virginia, cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, then pick up U.S. 17 south of Hampton Roads and take that through the Carolinas (for the most part). It's nearly as fast as I-95 and a lot more pleasant, very little in the way of white-knuckling traffic. And there's the opportunity to take the business route from time to time and see some interesting shore towns.
Going to St. Augustine this way takes me two days, same as if I take I-95. Maybe adds an hour or so to my travel time. I keep telling myself that this trip, I'm going to slow down, take my time, maybe take three days, and make the drive part of a vacation, taking pictures all the way. And every time, when the rubber hits the road, I fail to do that. I make mental notes of photogenic spots, which I mostly forget in specifics even if I remember a general impression.
There are two things that occur to me as a result of this. The first is that I could really use a phone app to mark photogenic spots while driving. Say you're driving along a road and have this app up, showing your route, and you see a run down old house that would make a good picture. Obviously, you don't want to handle your phone while you're driving, so the interface for marking spots would have to be voice-driven. "Siri, Scouter mark old run down house", and the program would create a marker with that spot, that you could review later and plan for a future trip. It would need to have the ability to generate routes, like Apple Maps or Google Maps, too, so that you wouldn't have to switch between it and your directions. I don't know of an app that does this. Maybe I need to learn Swift and make it.
Second thing is about shooting photos of old run down buildings, colloquially, ruin porn. What is it about stuff from the past that has seen better days that makes interesting photographs? Does it really make interesting photographs, or is it a cliche best left alone? I shoot a lot of stuff like this, and there is quite a bit of it along the eastern seaboard once you get off I-95. I had a lot of time to think about this as I sped past countless photographic opportunities at 70 miles per hour. I don't think I came to a conclusion. This debate in my head has kind of been ongoing for a while, but my inability to stop to take photographs while on a long haul drive kind of brought it to the fore. I'll probably keep thinking about it while I keep making these photographs, wondering if they're worth making and whether stuff falling apart is really all that compelling.
One exception to this was a building I found in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina as I had gotten off even the speedy U.S. 17 for some reason. On my way back from Florida in May, I let the GPS take me for a bit of a back roads adventure (I don't remember why) for a few miles, and I stumbled across an old building that I needed to take a photo of. I didn't stop. But when I got home, I retraced my tracks and found the building on Apple Maps, and noted the location. Heading down to Florida in late June, I routed myself past the building and stopped for ten minutes to take some photos. If I did this for everything I saw that I thought might make an interesting photo, I could easily extend my trip to three days instead of two. The question is whether it's worth spending the money on an extra night in a hotel and on another day of meals on the road and if the photos are worth taking.
The argument for shooting these building is that they have character. What does that mean? What am I trying to say when I make these photographs? I think it's probably something about the impermanence of the works of people, how things fall apart, entropy increases, we all die. But maybe it's just ruin porn, gawking at the backwardness of places that have fallen behind.
I'll probably be travelling to Florida a few more times between now and the end of the year. Maybe one of these trips I can give myself permission to take time and make some mistakes taking photos nobody needs to see.
Posted at 11:22 AM
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