Coast to Coast [antikvár]

COAST TO COAST Thanks to the good, old Jaguar XJ which was about to leave me in the lurch several times but it never did. My friend and I had been planning the trip following Kerouac's footsteps for years but it was not actually the reason why we set off. Simply and bluntly, we wanted to see America. In the beginning I wanted to shoot some photos on Route 66 but soon I had to realize that I was too much influenced by the legends around it. So I decided to forget Kerouac and what I had read and heard about the topic. I wanted to see America with my own eyes. Soon after setting off from Chicago along Route 66,1 had to realize that my initial plans were crumbling to dust with each mile, so my first plan elaborated for Route 66 had turned into a Coast to Coast plan: 66 pictures from the Atlantic Ocean (Coney Island) to the Pacific Ocean (Santa Monica Pier). The pictures are not organized into a geographically accurate order. Only the first and the last pictures have a well-defined position in the series. The main ordering criterion for the rest of photos is the atmosphere of the journey. And the feeling of intensity. For example, in Europe nobody asks you 'heading east or west?' People are much more interested in a city or a country. This is something I understood during the journey. Most of the pictures were taken from my car. I did not want to create a series on sociocultural phenomena; the only thing I wanted to capture was the joy of travel. And sometimes maybe, the feeling of solitude. With a hindsight, if I had been faithful to my initial idea to "follow Kerouac's footsteps" the whole journey would have been a failure, Because what he writes about is already not there. And this is normal. Time never stops, even if we are sometimes gripped by nostalgia. The circle has closed. (B. R.)