Landscape Car Project

Our last project in our Contemporary Landscape class was completely open, so we could choose whatever we wanted to do. After spending so much time in the car during our road trip to California, and all of the traveling I do to and from school and home or driving around in general, I decided that I wanted to shoot the landscape from inside my car. People spend so much time traveling in cars and it’s through the windows of a car that we see a lot of the landscape. There is always that separation between you and the rest of the world, and I wanted to use that as a way to frame my project. I discovered that Lee Friedlander did a project like this called America By Car, and I used his project to help inspire me. I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to shoot exactly, so to give myself some guidelines I chose to shoot all of the weird stuff I could find along the road on Highway 50 between Warrensburg and Lee’s Summit. I drive this road all the time, and I never really noticed these things until I was looking for them. I hoped to create a sense of nostalgia by photographing the remnants of an older time that may have been forgotten but still remain in the landscape.