@drivenbyboredom

In 2013 I had this idea to do a road trip across Route 66 so I launched a Kickstarter to do a small zine to help pay for the trip. The Kickstarter did better than expected and then I sold the trip as a web series (which is now thankfully gone from the internet) and using that money I was able to fly (or bus) a bunch of nude models to me for different parts of the trip. I then sold a bunch of those photos to Hustler Magazine so the girls got paid as well (originally most of them just did it for a free road trip). I ended up expanding the trip to 31 days and while I was on the trip I picked up a job shooting a music festival in Chicago two days before I was supposed to fly home out of Detroit. I had to cut a couple days off the trip and absolutely book it from SF to Chicago (I got pulled over five time, but only two tickets), but I ended up making so much money off the trip that I turned all the photos into my first book, Get Your Kicks. I shot 67 rolls of film on the trip, but as fate would have it, I lost one of them along the way, so I ended up developing 66 rolls from Route 66 (and Detroit, Vegas and SF). Route 66 goes from Chicago to LA but I flew in and out of Detroit because renting a car there was much, much cheaper and it's a short drive to Chicago. I have a few friends in Detroit and one of them I photographed in the famous abandoned Packard plant. From there I drove to Chicago to start the trip, but while I was there I photographed a model that was a friend of a friend at Navy Pier which is sort of the unofficial start of Route 66. That night I crashed at my friend Joe Swanberg's place (IYKYK) and then picked up a friend of mine and drove her to St. Louis. In St. Louis I took her to the bus station and then another friend of mine showed me her city and we had a blast and took a bunch of fun photos along the way. We actually got kicked out of the City Museum for shooting nudes - actually we didn't even get kicked out, they just told us to stop but we felt super awkward and left. The next day I flew in Charlotte StokeIy who was an American Apparel model/ porn star and an absolute muse of mine and I drove her to Oklahoma City and flew her back out from there. At this point I didn't really have anyone to photograph for a while but I did have a good friend who lived there so I went to hang out with her. She had just broken up with someone and just decided to take a couple days off of work and come adventure with me for a few days. The funny thing is she was my closest friend when the trip started and we got along the least. I did get a few photos of her I loved though that are in the book. She also got me out of one of those five speeding tickets. I dropped her off in Amarillo, which is home to one of Route 66s most iconic attractions, the Cadillac Ranch. I didn't have anyone to photograph there so I went on this old site where you could find models called Model Mayhem and there were only two girls in all of Amarillo who shot nudes. I contacted them both and it just happened that one of them not only was available to shoot, but was a fan of my work already. I think she was the only person I paid in actual cash at the time (everyone got paid when I sold the work later) and she did it for $50 so that worked out really well. From there I was alone until I got to Albuquerque. I was so lucky that my friend Ash was able to meet me there. I was calling everyone I could think of because I didn't have a single model between Amarillo and LA and I didn't really know what to do. Ash was like "I would do it but I'm in Vegas." I ended up buying her a last minute flight from LAS to ABQ and then drove her back to Vegas since it was just a short detour off the "Mother Road". We also took a detour to go to the Grand Canyon which was amazing. It started raining so hard and we thought it would be ruined but we got about 20 minutes of sun and it was so, so worth it. I can't imagine most people spend less than 30 minutes at the Grand Canyon, but I will never forget that shit. The Vegas detour worked out really well. It was offseason in Vegas and I got a really nice hotel room for a couple of days for really cheap. I had been staying at the worst motels you could imagine along the trip so that was pretty nice, plus an old booty call of mine lives there so I got to hang out with her. The first night I was there she brought over two pon star friends of hers to use my hotel's pool and it turns out one of them I knew and she just happened to be flying to LA in a couple of days so I convinced her to cancel her flight and I would drive her to LA and we could shoot along the way. It worked out so perfectly and I was able to find a model for some really iconic Route 66 spots. When I got to LA I did a few other shoots and partied there for a week. My brother lives there so I just crashed on his couch. I did do one more Route 66 specific shoot on the ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier which is the unofficial ending of Route 66. After my week in LA I drove up to SF because at that point I had never been and stayed with a girl I used to hang out with in LA who had moved up there. I got a fucking crazy story about her from that trip, but that's not for public consumption. Feel free to ask me about it if we ever meet IRL. I did three more photo shoots while I was in SF and I was planning on heading up to Portland and Seattle after that, but I booked that gig in Chicago and just sprinted across the country. I did pick up a hitchhiker at one point but other than that it was just me and the road. In Chicago I shot this festival and amazingly had a free place to stay because a fan of mine was out of town and just let me stay at his apartment. Absolutely wild, but he got a thanks in my book and I am sure I sent him a print or something to thank him. I ended up driving back to Detroit a day early because I backed into a sign advertising geodes at the famous Rainbow Rock Shop in Holbrook, AZ and apparently my car insurance only was good for 30 days and my trip was 31. I had to return the car before they closed the day before my flight. It's a short drive to Detroit but there were two huge crashes less than a mile apart and traffic just completely stopped for hours. I got to the rental car place minutes before they closed and made it before my insurance ran out. (After all that, they never even noticed the cracked taillight). This was a time before Uber and I took a rental car shuttle to the airport and then took a hotel shuttle from there to my hotel and the next day I went home. Everyone who backed my Kickstarter ended up getting a book instead of the little black and white photocopied zine they were expecting and all the extra copies I made sold out almost instantly. Looking back on it, I would have done a lot of things differently (as far as what I photographed and what went in the book) but I am still very proud of the book and it is almost impossible to find and when it comes up quickly sells for many times what it sold for originally. One day I would love to do a larger road trip book with a lot of this stuff in it, but for now the only way to see most of it is by tracking down the book. The end.

3 replies

1 recast

13 reactions