Route 66: from chicago to los angeles, 2006

In 2006, my partner Jay Adler, a writer and English professor, and I flew one way from Los Angeles to Chicago where we rented a car and drove the entire distance of Route 66. I shot this project with a 4x5 pinhole camera and Polaroid 55 film (which has a negative and a positive and is now extinct.) Neither the journey nor the photographic process was easy. Though GPS was available at the time, we did not have it, so we had to rely on books to help us find a road that doesn’t exist any longer. Each day equated to 10 hours of driving while looking for the perfect shot in each state. When shooting with a pinhole camera, you cannot see what you are composing, so each shot always took a few attempts. After taking a shot, I peeled the two parts of the film apart. One part was a wet print, another was a wet negative. I would carefully place the wet print somewhere safely to dry and the negatives were put in a tuperware container filled with water. At the end of the day, after checking in to a hotel, I spent several hours “washing and fixing” all the shots, followed by hanging them up to dry on a clothesline in our bathroom. The next morning, the negatives were dry. This project took 11 days over a 12-day period. We took one-day of rest toward the end of the trip from exhaustion. Each of the states along Route 66 are pictured here.

This project was published in an eight-page spread in what would be the last issue of a wonderful magazine that highlighted documentary photography, Double Take, Fall/Winter 2007.

Here is Jay's lead to the article:

By A. Jay Adler:

Route 66 begins in the imagination. That there is a better place. That it lies in the westward distance. That every rock and tree round every road that bends delivers an undiscovered world. That lives, drawn to where the sun sets on what those who live them never before have seen, can begin again. That the road is the way.

Pictured Below: Chicago, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Texas, New Mexico, Albuqueque, Arizona, Arizona, California