Portraits of 101 travellers stopped along Trans Canada Highway 1 in Golden, British Columbia.
Artist Statement
Inside each zippy car, lumbering transport truck, and vintage motorhome along this busy highway, there is a story (or several). We fly along on these roads that bend through the landscape like rivers teeming with life, fully absorbed in our own stories, disconnected from all the others racing past, and yet connected in that we’re sharing this experience of travelling this section of highway in this moment, together.
When I am in places of heavy intersection, where many lives cross paths, like airports and subway stations, like crosswalks in bustling cities and busy rest stops along the Trans Canada, I find myself looking into the faces around me and imagining all the struggles and unnamed joys that each has experienced. I am struck by the significance/insignificance of all these storylines running parallel in this moment, criss-crossing in some cases, altering one another perhaps. I wonder what each passing person loves more than anything, what they despise, what they would change. I feel the potency of hope, of disappointments, of fatigue and boredom, of anticipation and excitement.
This curiosity led me to ask a few strangers if I could photograph them, if I could get the littlest glimpse into their personal story. And then I asked a few more. And then I had 101 portraits of travellers, the images you see here. This project has been an exercise in noticing, taking note of the ways we are similar and the things that make us unique. It has also been a test of my theory that everyone, all people (and many dogs) are interesting to photograph.
The portraits in this series were shot during the summers of 2015 and 2016. The prints were shown as a pop-up exhibit in the outward-facing windows of Tim Hortons at the north end of the parking lot where most of these interactions took place. Funded in part by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.