Motion

DZD 811

“I need to go somewhere; I need to feel small.” Three weeks after that call, I was following Greg on his dream to drive the northernmost road in America straight through the heart of Alaska: the Dalton Highway.Anticipating 23 hours of daylight would mean 23 hours of warmth, the trip began with the harsh realization that we were about to gain a new understanding of what it meant to be cold. That spring in the Arctic was a season not to be compared with what we experience in the lower 48. To be clear, most of the things we thought we knew about this place were shattered with each passing mile. Even the fact that this section of the map is somehow American was only identifiable by NFL bumper stickers and the great diners; the rest was like an island of its own. Carcasses the size of a school bus, a perimeter of mountains guarding the horizon, and a population tough enough to spend a quarter of the year in uninterrupted night. I could go on and on. While making these photographs, I wasn’t sure what I would do with them or how they could possibly connect to anything I had made in the past, but like the road does best, it provided an alternative. On the last leg of the trip, we took a pit stop. Inside of a shop dressed in moose skulls and rusted truck rims, I stumbled upon an empty photo album. An Alaskan license plate cut into thirds, encapsulating 98 4x6 slots. Carrying its old name—DZD 811—I can’t help but imagine this piece of metal flying up and down the same harlines of loose gravel and cracked asphalt we did. Now, it sits on a bookshelf in Brooklyn, holding fragments of life much like its last one. Incorporating a mix of 120, 35mm, a few digital photographs and a selection of drawings I made every night before trying to sleep.