Over a two-week span in August 2023, photographer Barry Phipps produced twenty-six photographs over eight states with an 8x10 film view camera. His intent was to present every image he photographed in book form, shown in the exact sequence of creation. West by Northwest shows in concise economy an improvisation with a landscape defined by layers of cultural accumulations commingling in the present tense.
Introduction from book:
West by Northwest
September 2023 • Iowa City, IA
In June, my mother-in-law passed away. Ann had been fighting Parkinson’s for several decades. She lived far longer than anyone anticipated, so her passing was both sad and a celebration of Ann’s victory. A memorial service was planned for August halfway across the country in Tacoma, Washington. My wife Giselle suggested we drive. She wanted some time to reflect and to place a buffer between home and the service. Plus, post-pandemic, she just wanted to get out there again.
I had mixed feelings about driving across the country from our Iowa home. Giselle and I loved road trips when we were younger, and had a particular fondness for driving west, but since our last trip in 2007, so much has changed. Our previous trips were taken in a spirit of love and fascination for the United States; a love that I wasn’t sure I still had. America feels like a strange place. Yet when I set down my phone to take a break from the news cycle, with my eyes focused on my immediate landscape, nothing looks much different.
I was asked to put together a slideshow of photos for the memorial service. I had only known Ann for the last three plus decades, during which I had taken many photos of her myself. The first one that popped into my head was an image of Ann with advanced Parkinson’s hiking with us in the Cascades. At the moment of exposure, Ann was crossing over a stream via a fallen tree log in defiance of her physical decline. I was most struck by seeing images of Ann from her youth living on the east coast. Her father was a chemist and president of the Adirondack hiking club, so she spent her summers hiking and canoeing in the mountains. These old photos also captured fragments of the American landscape (geological and cultural) over the last eight decades.
I had a few weeks to think about this trip out west and to plot a general course. Giselle and I always centered our road trips around the act of photography, keeping it light and breezy with handheld 35 millimeter film cameras. Since we weren’t flying, I became excited about bringing my big and cumbersome 8x10 view camera, which I started using only recently. The trip to Tacoma can be made in three long days, but I suggested we double the amount of time so we could just get lost in the landscape and avoid too much planning.
August is my least favorite month, both to exist and to photograph. It’s hot. The light is only inspiring early or late in the day. To avoid the heat we decided on the northernmost route across the country, US Highway 2. Also known as the Hi-Line, this beautiful remote two-lane skirts just below the Canadian border. To work around the light, I decided to commit to photographing one image at the end of each day, working with whatever landscape presented itself. When shooting with an 8x10 view camera, there is a built-in editing process in play, mostly related to cost. Color film and processing is forty dollars per shot, so I only shoot if I am absolutely compelled to do so. The idea of photographing whatever subject matter I have available during pleasant light was a novel concept for me. The other factor at play is that the camera is unwieldy and heavy; I would need to commit to only photograph from a vantage point within close proximity to the car. Despite these obstacles, it’s a wonderful and sometimes spiritual experience to photograph with this camera.
Between the pandemic and a decision to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Iowa, I devoted the last few years to making work from home, and have mostly been concerned with lines of inquiry toward personal discovery over public discourse. With this work I was about to make, I felt compelled to make something specifically to share with others. The resolution from photographing to a gigantic negative allows me to share something very close to what I observed.
This is my fourth photo book. The first one, Between Gravity and What Cheer: Iowa Photographs, was an exhaustive four–year project photographing every county in my home state. The book was inspired in part by Robert Frank’s The Americans, and was a tightly edited presentation from thousands of photographs. It’s a route that many photographers take, yet I have thought a lot about this approach, and have slowly taken steps in opposition to arrive at work made in a short selected parcel of time. My second book was drawn from two thousand photographs, but all were made within a two-week period (Driving a Table Down). I photographed my third book over a month, but I made only a handful of images, and almost all were shown (The Exuberance Phase: Selected 8x10 Works).
My intention with this project was to make it with a book in mind. I chose to photograph every image as a landscape (geological and cultural), and only shoot in a horizontal format. I would include every photo I took, so I had to edit as I photographed. I would present the photographs in the exact sequence they were created. Although the concept of one photo at the end of the day quickly fell apart, I still only photographed what I wanted to include in the book, and the number of images was determined by the amount of film I brought on the trip.
I’ve learned from my previous projects that a photo I take is always influenced by the photos taken before it. This all happens on an intuitive or subconscious level which, in the moment, simply feels right. It’s not until the book is sequenced that I start to discover why I made one image after the other. I’ve chosen to present one image per spread to show these relationships through the continual reveal of the page turn. The sequence of this book has a beginning, a middle, and an end, which implies a visual narrative. My hope is that this narrative remains subjective through the viewpoint of the individual reader.
Through the making of my photo books, I’ve come to a specific definition of landscape. Making photos in the real world, I see the landscape not as a place, but as time. In places like my former home of Chicago, the value of real estate is so high that old humble things of little financial value don’t survive. When I relocated to Iowa and began traveling to the countless small towns in my newly adopted home, I found that old things remain, and that they are in interplay with all the new things that have cropped up around it. I came to see the landscape defined through layers of cultural accumulations commingling in the present tense. The American landscape has been mostly altered over the last two hundred years, yet these layers are built upon lands inhabited for the last twenty thousand (and new studies suggest much longer). All of this is built on top of geology shaped over the last few billion years. Seeing the landscape through this lens compels my decisions to commit to the images in this book.
Another motivation for making this, beyond the desire to share with others, relates to memory. My wife and I are both in our mid-fifties, and have noticed a decline in both short and long-term memory. This trip was enjoyable but also intense. So much happened, and much of it will be forgotten. Part of this trip was taken on roads traveled previously. I discovered that the only things I remembered when revisiting were the things I previously photographed.
I had a strong desire to write down everything I remember about this trip before I forgot, making a posthumous road diary, yet the experience of photographing with the 8x10 creates stronger memories to the time and place of exposure. The act, or performance, is more intentional than shooting with a handheld. Perhaps it’s the physicality of the camera, anchoring a heavy tripod to the earth to hold the steel camera. Taking the time to compose with the added movements and adjustments, and the pre-flight checklist to avoid the many points of potential failure. As such, I have vivid memories of making every photo I’ve taken with this camera. In the service of memory, I took a phone photo of every shot in this series to use the data to remember the precise coordinates of the vantage point. I’ve mapped this project in Google Earth Pro, and created additional compositions of these locations in topographical map form. Using the GPS data and timestamp, I was able to recall the weather data present at the moment of exposure to aid in remembering the moment.
Regarding my apprehension of traveling through America, it pleasantly surprised me to find that people, at least on the surface, are still kind. Traveling at the peak of summer, everyone was glad to be out and about, experiencing the iconography of the American landscape. I feel inspired to make a few more books in this way, heading through the country in opposite directions and seasons.