After the USA road trip

6000 miles and 350 rolls of black and white film for our two and a half month road trip through the United States this past summer. A pilgrimage for my American wife Nancy Guri, visiting friends and family all along the way with the final destination her home state of Oregon (and her high school reunion in the southern city of Medford); and for me, an opportunity to return to some of the great zoos of the country and also some of its great museums, in particular, of modern art. So, culture, animals, and family was the agenda. We returned to France the end of July, and since then I’ve been developing film in my basement-laboratory in my village in southern France, and doing the contact sheets! Yes, I know, I’m a relic of another era, still using my old cameras (non-digital), still shooting mostly black and white, still doing my own film development, my own contact sheets, my own prints. It’s a long slow process but it’s a rhythm I’m used to. You might call it dark-room meditation. After breakfast, I head to the my basement, out the kitchen, across the terrace, down the terrace stairs, through the back garden and around to the door leading into the semi-daylight basement. There I hang up my black curtains, prepare the chemicals, put on the radio or one of my CDs, and I’m in my own cave-world, emerging out into the sunlight (or the rain as the case may be, but more often sunlight) when my stomach tells me it is time for lunch. If I have a lot of work, I’ll head back about mid-afternoon until dinner.

That’s the schedule I’m in now. I’ve done about a hundred contact sheets, so 250 more to go! Until I get them done, I don’t know how the trip went photographically speaking. The darkroom work is often tedious and repetitive, but then comes the pleasure of taking the magnifying glass and pouring through the contact sheets, looking through each sheet in hopes of finding a photo or two that shines out from the crowd, the photos worth printing. Those get marked with my red crayon. Later I’ll print the selected photos, and the winnowing process goes on—which of those continue to shine? Sometimes a photo that looks good on the contact sheet just doesn’t make it once it’s printed. But sometimes, if I’m lucky, it does!

So now, I’m off to my basement-cave.

PS: That’s me to the left in the photo with a friend Michael, clowning with our cameras in Medford, Oregon.

On the road in the USA

June 24, 2012: 4000 plus miles on the road in the USA. Washington DC, New York, Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas, White Sands NM, Phoenix—and now we’ve come to the green and red oasis of Sedona, Arizona (its famous “red rocks”) where we’re taking a pause before heading on to California and Oregon, staying in a lovely Spanish hacienda with friends Vicky and Kit. We’ve had the good luck to have been able to stay with friends and family much of this journey—including a stay in the beautifully restored Frank Lloyd Wright house of our cousins in Illinois. We’ve camped a little too—though had to decamp rapidly at about 4 am our very first night of camping (along Lake Erie in Canada) when we found ourselves the center of a violent storm.

Along with seeing friends, we’re spending a lot of time with primates! Yes, that’s right, monkeys! I’m doing a photo project on the monkey world and so have taken in every major zoo along our route—next stop, the famous San Diego zoo. We’ve also been stopping at the many great American art museums dotted across the country. Zoos—and museums too—are the same the world over, familiar territory: you enter and no matter what country you are in, you’re right at home, with the animals, with the works of art.

 Time passes both quickly and slowly on the road, in a strange mix of monotony (the endless miles to be traversed, especially in the American Southwest)—and thrill (suddenly seeing a strange—or beautiful—or disturbing sight or vision along the road, stopping the car, getting out the cameras!)_ I keep running out of black and white film. Had to renew it in Dallas—and again in Phoenix. Lucky there are still a few places stocking Tri-X!

More from the West Coast……

April 2012: Two weeks in Mount Athos, photographing the Greek Orthodox Easter ceremonies. This was my fourth time in Mt. Athos. All went fine until I had to leave. The weather had been iffy. And when that happens, the boats stop their crossings. I had a flight out on a Thursday and so needed to leave Wednesday if I was to make it. But no boats Monday. None Tuesday. And Wednesday morning I woke up to dark skies and knew the boats would still be docked. A Dutch fellow had told me he'd arranged with a truck to go the "overland" route that morning. I hadn't even known there was one (a well-kept secret by the monks!), and I asked the driver if I could pay to go with them. There were already four passengers however. I said I could sit in the back of the truck, and the driver agreed. Unfortunately for me, it was pouring down rain the entire trip. Fortunately, I had a good raincoat, but despite that I was frozen and soaked the whole three hours of the journey. Worse than that was the state of the road--really just a mud track--and while the driver was good at maneuvering his vehicle, I was thrown back and forth and shaken up to such an extent that at one point, about to be sick, I had to ask the driver to stop for a few minutes. We made it though and I got my bus back to Thessalonica, another three hour trip. I was pretty glad to have a hot shower that night. The next day I flew back to Paris. Now I've got a big sack of undeveloped black and white film which will have to wait until August to be developed--for I'm off for a two and a half month long trip to the United States in just a week, where I'll rent a car in Boston and cross the country East to West.