Experiments in Exodus

In 2012, I sold my tiny reliable Mazda and, ignoring my father’s advice, bought a massive lemon of a truck named Bess to live out of during my first trip into The American West. I was heading into my final year of undergrad and was in search of a topic for my thesis work. I had no idea what I was looking for but I knew I’d find it on the road. I had never been on a road trip and I had barely ever been camping so, as I’ve now learned to expect, everything that could’ve gone wrong, did.

I broke my camera. I broke my truck. I broke myself in more ways than I’d like to admit.

I met strangers. I met mountains. I met a version of myself that I knew I needed to be.

It was as beautiful as it was miserable and, in the midst of it, I became the first iteration of the man that I am today.

A week in, I dropped and broke my digital camera in Chicago, leaving me with only an old 35mm that I used “for fun” and an untested medium format camera that I had just picked up a month prior. These are some of the images from that summer in 2012, where everything went wrong but felt so goddamn right.