Statement

This travel craze started in May of 2001, when my friend Libba asked me to go to India, with some other friends. There were five of us, gone for three weeks, through five major cities, and it was amazing. 115 degrees, in the back of a four-wheel drive truck, at 80 miles an hour; I was changed forever.

For this Louisiana series, my friend Natalie was a couple hours out of New Orleans in a workshop, so I flew down, rented a car, and when she finished, we hit the road. No plan, just drive. As it turned out, we headed toward New Orleans and followed the Mississippi River bank down one side to New Orleans, kept going south, and then came back up the other river bank. We were gone, maybe a week. This was my first road trip with the newfangled digital camera, and I felt like a traitor for some reason, since Natalie had her super-funky old Super-D 4x5 and Type 55. I was the slut with the modern digital, somehow betraying all the guys who’d come before me.

One thing that always messes with my head is that I’m foremost a commercial photographer, but I have this other bent, too, toward what most people call “personal work”. That’s the work you’d shoot whether you were getting paid or not. But it does a whammy on my head to try to do both things; I do better when I’ve got some clarity of purpose. The rules are so different if you’re a commercial guy versus a fine art gallery guy. With commercial, you’re shooting to a layout, and there’s an art director there, and a client, and a full crew, and a motor home, and you’re shooting somebody else’s vision. Of course, you bring your own vision to the job, but in the end, it’s always collaboration; at best — five cooks in the kitchen — whereas the fine art guys make up their own rules (at least it seems that way). They finance it, they call the shots, they pick the frame, and they suffer the consequences. It’s just a head-warp to get up one morning with one set of rules, and then, the next week, you play by the other set. I’ve yet to pick what I’m really going to do “when I grow up”, even though I’m 46 years old. I like doing both; one scratches the other one’s back.

I do find that these road trips are healthy for the soul. Most of the time, it’s just me — one camera, a rental car with a sunroof, and a wad of cash. It’s all about exploring, and all about opening up your head. The Louisiana series had a slightly dark twist to it; it wasn’t really planned that way, it was just what we found. I remember this one morning — we left early, like 6am, south of New Orleans, and the sky was pitch black from a refinery fire. We pulled into a side street, negotiated our way through the closed roads, and found these mobile homes, nestled up next to the refinery. It was a beautiful scene — surreal — the stench in the air, the dramatic sky, and the run-down mobile home lot. Again, it’s about the discovery, and not knowing what you’re going to encounter around the next bend in the road.

To extend out this discovery model, a big part of the photographic process for me is in the printmaking, and the post-production that I do on the files once I return home. I find that the digital camera is useful, because I can take a quick peek at the files, in the hotel room, each night. But I don’t do anything to them on the road; it just helps to see what I’ve gotten so far, in terms of what works, and what doesn’t. Usually, toward the end of the trip, toward the last day, you’ll feel it winding down, and maybe by that time, I’ll have a general feeling as to how I’ll treat the files, and what the overall look and mood is, of the whole group of images. I always think of them as part of a group; never a single picture — like a kid that shouldn’t be separated from his family. The treatment of the images takes them to a whole next level, and probably puts my thumbprint on them for good. Part of it, for me, is the image content, but another vital part is how they’re messed-with, after the fact. A big part of the work—the texturizing—is done inside of Photoshop, but then, once the prints come out of the printer, they’re also coated with Oleopasto, Wingel, or Ageing Varnish. Somehow, the Epson print just doesn’t seem finished until I’ve coated the print with a palette knife and brush, and touched with my hands. After that’s done, I give them to the framer for traditional framing.

One thing I miss from the wet darkroom is the whole tactile quality of working with the paper, and working with the toners, and having the range of pleasant surprises that could happen. With digital, much of the tactile quality is now gone, and it’s harder for surprises to happen. I print on matte finish fine art paper with the big Epson, just so I have a surface to touch. I couldn’t deal with glossy paper — too commercial, and too slick. No mojo. But, the issue with the matte papers is they really suffer in the blacks; that’s another reason I coat them, so I can watch the blacks deepen down when the Wingel hits the paper. Digital is great in so many areas, but the one area, in my opinion, where it’s still nowhere close, is the printing options. None of the inkjet options begins to hold a candle to a fine fiber print. It’s not even close.

Moving on the Salton Sea images, there was just a point when I was feeling the itch to travel again, and really, I wanted to go to Morocco (and still do), but just couldn’t pull it all together. So I hopped a Southwest flight to Ontario, California, rented a car, and headed toward Palm Springs instead. I’d always heard about this David Lynch-ish place, where the Colorado River had flooded its banks, in 1905, and it formed this body of water called The Salton Sea, in the middle of the desert, southeast of Palm Springs.

On this trip, I was shooting yet another new camera; this time, a medium-format digital camera, and I wanted to hold as much detail as possible — almost the exact opposite of the Louisiana images, where I’d used that tilt lens to throw the focus. This time, I was shooting everything on the tripod, and wanted everything tack-sharp, and I was trying to slow down and work slowly.

When I got home, I began to notice that just the “normal” files did not even begin to describe the feeling of the place, which was very desolate, very hot, very bright, and with an odd, desaturated color palette. I worked the files with the contrast pulled way back, almost to give the feeling of a 1950’s drugstore-processed snapshot, and then desaturated them further, before the texturizing even began. Most everything was shot at f32, and I loved how the look of these images was so different from the prior road trips. My plan with these images is to print them very large, about 44" inches wide, but I’m waiting on a new printer in the fall.

Again, that rub between being a commercial photographer and a fulltime fine art guy begins to come into play. I don’t sell my prints at all right now; maybe that will change one day. So it’s almost silly that I spend so much time and money, making these large prints, and then, in the end, I just give them away to friends. It’s almost like the road trip itself is “the thing”, rather than the photographs that come from it. Sometimes, it’s “the doing” of it that brings the real value.

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Mark Tucker is a Tennessee-based photographer. For more of his work, visit http://www.marktucker.com