"The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.
- Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
For years, I traveled on road trips throughout America taking photographs. Only recently, I made the connection between my desire for the road and the fact that my father, for the past thirty years, has traveled these same routes as a telephone pole salesman. “May the Road Rise to Meet You” chronicles the past two years of my dad and I traveling together so I could see the road from his perspective. Additionally, I went back through his old files and notes looking for clues to the places he went in the past. In revisiting those places from his early career and photographing them, I put myself in my father’s shoes when he was the age I am now. In the process, I rediscovered my father as a man separate from his role in our family and the alternating sadness and freedom of a life spent alone on the open road.
In sequencing the project, I began with a snapshot of my dad as a young man and end with him in present day nearing retirement. By interweaving visual hints of my presence throughout the project, I have re-written history to be there with my dad all those times he was away from home. Much as a family album is an idealized record of a family’s history, this body of work pretends that we were always together.
