Chris M. Forsyth: The Car That Brought You Here
The Car That Brought You Here is a unique, handmade artist’s book of photographs taken while driving from New York to Montana, and back. While producing another body of work, Montana Road Wreck, I mounted a small camera to the rear window of my car. Taking one photo every 60 seconds, it captured my trip in reverse. Selected from a library of over 14,000 photos, the 26 images presented in this book have been sequenced to recreate the impression of an anonymous journey heading westward. Beginning in the densely forested east, we slowly transition into the expansive plains of the west, interrupted by the occasional stop for gas.
In creating this collection of photographs, I was interested in retracing my travels as a way of reexperiencing the journey. As my eyes were fixed on the road ahead, I only periodically took full note of what was beside and behind my vehicle. Driving for 8-10 hours a day for several weeks, my own memories of the places through which I drove have blurred together – only the occasional stop or landmark stand out to me. It’s these blurred views that I hoped to reexamine. Not the exceptional instances, but the unremarkable ones that make up the bulk of the in-between. In a strange way, while many of these photos help me to recall my experiences, others feel as if I’m reenacting a stranger’s travels.
In designing the book, I wanted to create one seemingly endless stripe of photographs, each continuing where its neighboring image left off. In this way, the layout mimics the road itself as one continuous ribbon. By using an accordion structure, the viewer can flip through the pages sequentially as discrete pairings, or stretch it open to see the whole journey, or a section thereof, in a single glance.
