How to Win Friends & Influence People

“After graduating from college, he started selling correspondence courses to the ranchers among the sand hills of western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. In spite of all his boundless energy and enthusiasm, he couldn't make the grade. He became so discouraged that he went to his hotel room in Alliance, Nebraska, in the middle of the day, threw himself across the bed, and wept in despair. He longed to go back to college, he longed to retreat from the harsh battle of life; but he couldn't. So he resolved to go to Omaha and get another job.”

-Lowell Thomas, “A Shortcut to Distinction [a short biography of Dale Carnegie],” found in How To Win Friends and Influence People

Same as it ever was: Photographs from the Midwest

As I was driving west on I-80, I realized that I had taken this road before. This was the same route I traveled with my father as a young boy, accompanying him on his travels as a pharmaceutical rep. We would drive from Omaha to Aurora stopping at doctor’s offices, gas stations and grocery stores. We continually passed through small town after small town, Atlantic to Sioux City; we would meet doctors and nurses who briefly praised my father’s character. Their admiration for him was something that I hadn’t always received outside of these short trips. These times when I accompanied my father into the doctor’s offices were short learning experiences about the perception of one’s character and how one chooses to live their life.
I am now taking the same journey that I had when I was a young boy, ending up in an infinite number of locations, trying to define a place. These photographs are an examination of, an attempt to define Contemporary Midwestern culture. As I began to make photographs similar to my father’s method of navigating through his work, I realized that there were three important themes. These themes are related to my way of making photographs, but are also essential to defining the Midwestern culture. The fundamental themes are isolation, transportation, and the manufactured landscape.
I see isolation as a part of the Midwestern lifestyle. The Midwest was at one time mostly made up of farmland. The distance between neighbors was vast. One might only see a neighbor once a week or passing in a vehicle. The need for transportation and the isolated mentality of the Midwest is entangled and visually present within the manufactured landscape. The land is controlled, reconstructed and manipulated often subtly and most always drastically. The land is altered for self-preservation, but most often for vain ideals. This mentality has carried into the growing Midwestern cities and for the meantime, will likely remain until people are forced into a more community-based lifestyle, such as in larger, more densely populated cities.
The automobile is essential to my method of making photographs from the Midwest. It allows me to navigate throughout the many roads, highways and interstates that connect the small towns to the big cities. It was important to my father in his work and it’s definitely part of the Midwestern culture. Isolated landscapes necessitate motorized forms of personal transportation. Traveling alone in my vehicle, driving by flat fields of tilled dirt. I would pass large terraces sliced through the land. Driving on bare highways, passing few cars. I arrived in cities of the Midwest, hoping to understand my place.