“As a child, Macel had a limited understanding of what her father did after he drove off and traveled far away to work,” writes Marvin Heiferman in the introduction to Sara Macel’s May the road rise to meet you. The book reveals the mystery by retracing the miles traveled all those years by father, Dennis, a telephone pole salesman. “After forty-four years on the road, Dennis Macel estimates he’s been away from home more than 4,000 days, traveled close to 8 million miles, and sold 36,000 telephone poles a year. The challenge for his daughter was to figure out – in retrospect and through roughly forty images – how to respond to and represent all of that and then even more.”
Sara Macel does so by collecting the recurring details from the trips by her father’s side: phone calls in the car, studying the map on the side of the road, anonymous motels, the airplane, the car, the generic ketchup in diners, the airport hotels with their identical rooms, the TV at the foot of the bed, the microwave, the minibar and warm colors. A few pages from the notepads of Marriotts and other hotels appear covered in Dennis’s notes. He makes to-do lists: meet a customer, review an invoice, even “Flying home!” one Friday, underlined twice on a Hilton post-it. Macel has turned their years on the road into a travelogue of one long journey, one devoid of adventures, which began in 1981 behind the wheel of a scarlet car. She takes us across the whole country almost, from New York to Texas, but it might as well all be in the same place. The landscape is hardly ever seen, except for once, in a photograph that seems to be more a portrait of a telephone pole than a study of the vast Texas plains.
“In a mix of images that circle around and stretch notions of what documentary is or can mean – some shots are straight as can be, others recreate or reenact – Macel developed an elliptical and remarkably effective storytelling framework,” writes Heiferman. We find this narrative diversity in the texts, which are personal, critical, poetic and even technical. At the end of the portfolio is a remarkable data sheet kept by her father where he lists such things as the number of states visited in the last month, the annual distance traveled by airplane and automobile, the price of a telephone pole—$550 for a 40-foot southern yellow pine—and, finally, the “Time Spent Away From Home in Career: 4244 Days, or 11.62 years.” This number, recorded underneath how long he has been married, 35 years, calls to mind Arthur Miller’sDeath of a Salesman, and Linda Loman’s pathetic observation: “He drives seven hundred miles, and when he gets there no one knows him any more, no one welcomes him. And what goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why shouldn’t he talk to himself? Why?”
Macel deconstructs this sad myth of the salesman in American popular culture and tenderly puts it back together, with a toast to her father in the title of the book, which is dedicated to him: “May the road rise to meet you.” On the final page, the rest of this traditional Irish blessing is given, concluding with the words, “May God hold you in the palm of his hand.”
EXHIBITION
February 8 – March 30, 2014
The Center for Photography at Woodstock
59 Tinker Street
Woodstock, New York 12498
USA
BOOK
May the road rise to meet you
Daylight Books
92 pages / 50 photographs
$44.95
http://www.cpw.org/upcoming/pr-sara-macel
http://daylightbooks.org/store/sara-macel-may-road-rise-meet-you
