Milestones… everyone has them in their lives. Landmarks that shape them forever, and change the way they perceive the future. For Ray and me, this was one of them.
We were comrades, we were friends, we were lovers, we were brothers and sisters, and we were fortunate to live in the time that we lived. There was a war, there were protests, there was a music festival on a farm in upstate New York, and there was, “something happening here.”
I had managed to stay out of the draft, had just come back from Woodstock, and had found what I would do for the rest of my life: Photography.
It was then that Ray and I would start to talk about it. By the winter of 1969 we knew what we were going to do come the following summer. It would change our lives, and we knew it before we left. It’s one of the reasons why we did it. It was part of the journey our generation took, to find a different direction to navigate through the world we had inherited from our parents.
So in the summer of 1970, Ray and I went on an adventure across the country. To put it simply, we were on a quest to find belief, belonging, and meaning … more than what was being promoted by the consumer and pop culture. We didn’t have an inkling of the places it would take us, and that was part of what made it so exhilarating.
Everyone has a story. Everyone has a tale or two they want to tell.
We were a community of youth. It was a real time, with real people, in real places, that lasted for a while, and is gone forever, but its spirit lives on.
“There was no where to go but everywhere” Jack Kerouac
The photographs here are no longer things. For me they are experiences….they represent a part of moments captured … reminders and memories of a journey.
All of the photographs are produced with an inkjet printer using modern pigment based inks and archival paper to ensure longevity. The original photographs were scanned from 35mm negatives and developed in Adobe Lightroom 5, using Blurb.com to publish the book.
