A Handmade Camera And A Vintage Trailer: On The Road To A Lost America

In the '70s and '80s, David Michael Kennedy lived in New York City, shooting portraits of music icons like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Muddy Waters for magazine and album covers. He moved to New Mexico in 1986, where he focused on Native American culture. Today he lives in a 200-year-old adobe house in the tiny agricultural village of El Rito in northern New Mexico.

But for two years beginning in 2004, Kennedy wandered back roads photographing preachers, crawfishermen, RV-ers, buffaloes, longhorns, cowboys and mystics.

He and his then girlfriend, Heather Howard, and a res dog named Henry Crow Dog packed up in a 1959 Airstream trailer outfitted with a wet darkroom. He took all his photographs with a handmade 4x5 camera using Polaroid positive/negative film, which he developed in the trailer then made contact prints using the archaic platinum palladium process prized by collectors and museums.

John Burnett: Why did you take this trip across the country?

David Michael Kennedy: I got divorced, my house burned down and I didn't know what to do. It was March 2004 and I was confused about where America was going. I was watching the news and it didn't make sense. It seemed to me America was broken and the people were a mess. I decided to go out and rediscover America and myself.

What did the people you photographed teach you?

At the end of the trip, most of what I felt is there was still a spirit within the people. Once I got out there, I found people who were reinventing their lives, who were not going to strip malls, who were not feeding that consumer monster. The deeper we penetrated into the back roads of America — what I think of as the real America — the less I found of that.

"We camped in Ochlockonee River State Park in Florida and every day I'd walk by this tent and there was a Madonna, an old car and nobody around. It fascinated me. After a couple of days, Randy crawled out of the tent. He was on a pilgrimage to a statue that was bleeding in Mississippi. He ran out of money waiting for his miracle. I gave him $20 for gas and he went down the road to see the statue."

"We camped in Ochlockonee River State Park in Florida and every day I'd walk by this tent and there was a Madonna, an old car and nobody around. It fascinated me. After a couple of days, Randy crawled out of the tent. He was on a pilgrimage to a statue that was bleeding in Mississippi. He ran out of money waiting for his miracle. I gave him $20 for gas and he went down the road to see the statue.

photo-eye | BLOG: A Closer Look -- Burke + Norfolk

Loosely rephotographic in nature, this book is Simon Norfolk’s revisitation of the work of little known 19th century Irish photographer John Burke. Burke was the first photographer to make images in Afghanistan while accompanying British forces during the years of 1878-1880. The result of Burke’s travels produced several photographic albums the photographer sold following the British invasion. Carrying a large wooden view camera and using a wet-collodion process, the shear task Burke undertook in the conflict-ridden country is worthy of great intrigue. But process aside, Burke’s stunning photographs are richly printed and the details from his large negatives are exquisite. Paired alongside Burke’s photographs, Norfolk’s images are equally brilliant. Taken with a 4x5 view-camera, many of the photographs were shot at night or dusk, giving an ambiance that transcends traditional documentary photography. And while the photographic atmosphere is unique to conflict photography, Norfolk’s approach to retracing Burke’s steps grabbed my attention. Using history books, maps and the ‘terrain tilt’ feature in Google Earth, Norfolk loosely gauged where Burke’s camera must have been. In many ways these stylistic approaches created a book that is wrapped very much in the history of the photographic medium – climbing to high vantage points in order for the viewer to understand the full topography of a region. Containing three distinct sections, the city, portraits and military the book gives a well-rounded view of both the changes Afghanistan has endured, as well as the changes that have not occurred. The reality that there has been, as Norfolk refers to it, four Anglo-Afghan Wars, is a sobering actuality. And as Norfolk states, many of the British fighters currently involved in the Afghan conflict know little of their country's deeply rooted history in the region. In a time when many in this country are questioning the relevance of a continued war in Afghanistan, this book sheds a small light on both countries’ violent history and current state of existence. -- Antone Dolezal photo-eye Blog is here to inform our audience of all things photo-eye, including new photography books, notifications of events, exhibits, and latest photo-eye related news.

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