Sara
Macel

2015 Caucus Application Portfolio

For the past forty-four years, my father traveled around America as a telephone pole salesman. "May the Road Rise to Meet You" is a visual narrative of his professional life, recreated as a collaboration between father and daughter in an attempt to understand the life he led separate from our shared family experience and to explore the sadness and the freedom of a life spent alone on the open highway.

Found snapshots hang alongside large format color photographs, and ephemeral material takes the form of notes on hotel stationaryin telling this uniquely American story. The photographs are inextricably linked to the great tradition of American road photography, calling to mind Stephen Shore’s early color work as well as the seminal photographs of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and most recently those of Alec Soth. It is my hope that this contribution to an ongoing visual vernacular presents audiences with a carefully crafted spin on American snapshots, creating a family album filled with the story of a father’s solitary pursuit to provide for his family.

We were traveling north on I-45 through Texas, when I asked my dad what it was like dealing with customers. He told me: “There’s that old saying that you don’t know someone until you walk a few miles in their moccasins.” It was in that spirit that I put myself in my father’s size 10 boots. Sometimes we traveled together, other times I traveled alone retracing his steps. What I found in chasing this enormously elusive male figure is that I can never fully know my father or what it is like to be a man alone on the road.

In the end, this project became less about the American landscape or traveling salesmen and more about distance: the emotional and physical distance between me and my dad, the vast expanses of land he traveled, and the memories of that brief stretch of time when we got to travel together.

More info at: www.saramacel.com