On the Road

ON THE ROAD WITH DAVID MICHAEL KENNEDY 

“Anybody can make Paris holy, but I can make Topeka holy."  -- Jack Kerouac

In 2004 photographer David Michael Kennedy sold his house and studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico and hit the road for a trip of indefinite length and flexible itinerary. His home for the next two years would be a vintage 1960 Airstream Travel Trailer.  Besides cameras and darkroom equipment, Kennedy brought along fellow artist and girlfriend, Heather Howard, and his dog, Henry Crow Dog.  His aim was to photograph what is left of an America that exists quietly outside the frantic Zeitgeist of this era, where people haven't entirely forgotten that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.

Mostly Kennedy and Howard kept to the back roads, following old two-lane black tops in search of unspoiled landscapes, and people who had fled from or been bypassed by the tentacles of interstates and shopping malls.  Tucked away in small towns, truck stops, tourist traps, and trailer parks they found something definitive about America contained in the lives of moms and pops, iconoclasts and eccentrics, rabble rousers and nomads,  gallery owners and artists, farmers and mechanics, evangelicals and hell-raisers, the places they call home, and the spaces in-between.

In his comprehensive, constantly updated web site, www.davidmichaelkennedy.com, snapshots and diary entries documented their journey, inviting viewers to come along for the ride as they stitched their way back and forth across the United States.