Keeping Sane on the Road with Art
It’s 4:52 PM, and I’m in New York, buying toothpaste at a Bodega. No, it’s 12:01 PM and I’m in London and I’m packing books for our next pop-up event. Maybe it’s Amsterdam because I definitely heard a foreign language. They’re Polish. I’m in Greenpoint. I have a pound, a five euro note, and a twenty dollar bill in my pocket. Which do I need? I give the one pound note to a busking member of a mariachi band on the New York subway (let him figure it out). Or is it the tube? All I know is I’m not home in San Francisco, though I keep getting emails from there: Where is that blog post? Where are the books for Sydney? When are you coming home?
I come back to my hotel. Which hotel room? Is it 510? 205? 315? 305? I’ve stayed in all of them. I have keycards to prove it. I drop my bag down and kick off my shoes. On the headboard is a line of instant photos: Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, a sign in Greenpoint advising against the posting of bills, some Williamsburg graffiti, the New York skyline. OK, I know where I am.
I travel for work. Recently, as part of Blurb’s Roadshow I found myself, over three weeks, in three cities, three countries, four hotels, three currencies, three time zones, all while helping Blurb to plan an event on another continent entirely. It’s thrilling work. But it’s easy to lose track of where I am and what I’ve done. I experience extreme dislocation. Jet lag doesn’t help (I’m writing this at 6:00 AM, unable to sleep). That’s where the photos come in. I always travel with at least one instant camera, a Polaroid or Instax (this time both). I take photos — mostly abstracts or pop-inspired compositions. When I come back to my temporary home I find a suitable picture rail — a ledge where I can lean them up. This is my record, my personal gallery, my touch of humanity. I take down photos I don’t find satisfying. I reorder them by time, theme, aesthetics.
This goes back to 2013. I traveled for Blurb for the first time. I was in frigid Chicago and I’d been out shooting with my colleague, Dan Milnor. I had a 35mm camera and a Polaroid. Later in the evening, I was hanging out with some art students. The bar had closed so we were having a nightcap in my room. We talked Polaroids. They leaned mine up against the window sill and juried them. We had a laugh. I learned students can be critical. When they left, I left the Polaroids there on the sill. My travel tradition was born. I do other things to keep me sane too. I keep a journal for writing. I keep a notebook with collages, art from failed Polaroids, photobooth photos. I make self portraits on hotel keycards. But the picture rail is my favorite. Art is what keeps me sane on the road. These days, modern hotels eschew artwork on the walls. I Instagram too, but it’s not the same — my photos there disappear when the phone goes in my pocket. My picture rail* gives me continuity, a physical thread that winds from San Francisco to Schiphol to Heathrow to John F Kennedy. The photos come home with me too. Because I work for a company that lets people make books with their photography, I often make books with them. Ultimately they end up in a box or a binder. I go through them every once in a while. But I know that soon it’s going to be time to pack up the Polaroid again, get on a plane, and wonder just where in the hell I am. Thank god for those little plastic pictures.
*I rate hotels by them. The Ace has the longest, it’s a metal rail on the wall. The Wythe’s is wide and above the bed, with the best lighting. The Pulitzer, in Paris, has a bed with a wide headboard, but — warning — photos can slip down behind them. Best Westerns sometimes have dressers. The Citizen M made me improvise by wedging them in the bevel of the flat screen TV.
