on the road

This was the best summer of my life; I just bought my M6 Leica and went on a 5-week trip across the United States. In Santa Barbara, my friend and I rented a small Toyota Yaris because we didn't have the money for a more expensive car, and we set off to New York. California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania. The best thing about the whole trip was that we didn't have enough money. We avoided national parks with expensive entrances. We slept in a car in parking lots or cheap motels on the outskirts of cities most of the time. On Monday, we knew about a big mac special at McDonald’s: when you order one, you get another one for free.

I photographed the trip, the landscape, the people. Indians in the desert repairing cars, Vietnam veterans, truckers, gas station owners, receptionists — everyone I came across along the way. I watched an American football game at high school in the small town of Ovid on the border of Colorado and Nebraska; beautiful women in Las Vegas; Yom Kippur in New York’s Williamsburg. I like to wrap up stories with love: I met them at Brighton Beach, Coney Island. She was Belarusian, and he was Georgian …