On the Road by Jack Kerouac
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across America. The novel, published in 1957, is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations of the 1950s, with many key figures in the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee) and Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise. The film was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Walter Salles, in 2012. It focuses more on the emotional relationships and love trianbgles than the book, with a much more sympathetic and rounded treatment of the women for a modern audience. But other characters on the road who are quite detailed in the book have been omitted. Jazz plays a less obvious and vibrant role in the film than in the book where it is a real source of energy and exploration.
The road is the central connecting element – a search for some meaning between episodes of drug abuse, sad relationships and meaningless sexual encounters. It is travelled in a variety of ways: on foot, hitchhiking, by bus and by car – often driven at breakneck speed under the influence of drugs, with sex in the front or back seats. On the one hand it is a symbol of freedom – speed, wide open spaces, long roads to distant mountains and dramatic lighting of dawn and sunset, and white driving snow. For Sal it is a search for his voice as a writer.
“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
“because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars…”
But ultimately it is shown as meaningless – an attempt to run away from life, to avoid commitment and complexity, a road to suicide, to find something that does not exist.
“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll
The break point is where Dean abandons Sal in Mexico when he is very ill. Then the successful writer Sal turns away from Dean when he is obviously messed up – but a rather ambivalent ending – does anything have any meaning if not the road?
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
Kerouac died, at the age of 47, was determined to be due to an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking, along with complications from an untreated hernia and a bar fight he had been involved in several weeks prior to his death.
Part 2 Landscape as a Journey examines photography as a tool for research – enabling engagement with a place and a means of exploration – and the relationship between landscape practice and cartography. (Alexander 2013 pp 52-53)
Surveys
Alongside pictorial landscape photography during the later part of the 19th Century ‘topographic’ or ‘proto-documentary’ approaches arose making use of the ability of the camera to record external phenomena. This coincided with a rapid rise in industry, imperialism and means of communication, notably the print media and telegraphy. The photographic process was believed to eliminate any subjectivity on the part of the photographer. Photographs provided a means to communicate, with unparalleled realism, the far-flung corners of the country and the world.
2.1 : ‘Territorial Photography’
The Road
The road has featured prominently in art and literature as a means to get characters from one place to another, and as a stage for narratives to be played out.
Typologies and new topographies
The most significant influence on contemporary landscape practice was the exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House, Rochester, USA in 1975, curated by William Jenkins.
See New Topographics
New Topographics Exhibition 1975
The typological approach remains a popular mode of photographic exploration. Power and control are recurring themes within topological practice. The process of photographing and collecting can also, in itself, be seen as a symbolic act of possession and control. See Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin, pp.12–16
See for example the work of Donovan Wylie
Mapping and other technologies
A ‘map’ isn’t necessarily something used to navigate through unfamiliar territory; it’s also a visual ordering of features and information…a means of making sense of our physical surroundings in new ways. Alexander 2013 p67
Mapping and Other Technologies
Project 2.4: Is appropriation appropriate?
Land Art
Earth and land art use film and photography to document outcomes and incorporates aspects of performance art and sculpture.
Psychogeography and ‘edgelands’
Psychogeography is essentially the broad terrain where geography – in terms of the design and layout of a place – influences the experience, i.e. the psyche and behaviour, of the user. It has walking as a central component (Alexander 2013 p74)
2.6 Psychogeography and Edgelands
Assignment 2 : A Journey
Beyond ‘Safari’ – approaches to photographing Journeys
The word ‘safari’ means journey in Swahili from the Arabic root ‘safar’ travel. It was used by colonial powers in Africa to refer to game hunts. This meaning is now being changed by African governments and tour companies to refer more to eco-travel to photograph national parks, and also to African tourism more generally. This shift does not however remove either political concerns, or the colonial overtones. There are intensely conflicting interests between large private companies and/or governments and local people about the use of national parks as a generation of revenue. Although some national parks are managed in the interests of local people as well as animals, farmers living in or on the boundaries of the parks often have their livelihoods and crops decimated by incursions of animals – particularly where the areas are not large enough for the animal populations and/or where poaching and illegal logging and other types of exploitation by large vested interests are also involved. Moreover the tourists are generally from rich nations eager to find a ‘lost wilderness’ where animals are free in a way that would not be permitted at home as for example in opposition to reintroduction of wolves and bears in Western Europe. For these tourists the people are often secondary. Aiming to ‘shoot’ photos (Sontag) and capture as many memories of the exotic as possible to take home. Leading to ossification of ‘quaint’ cultural traditions. eg pygmies etc. The focus is on difference rather than human similarities. It is also far from clear that the foreign appreciation of ‘wilderness’ corresponds to local perceptions of ‘beautiful landscape’ or indeed the types of landscapes encouraged by global commodity companies or development agencies where the focus is more on efficient and in some cases sustainable agricultural practices. This review is an attempt to work through implications for my own work. I travel a lot for work, but unlike professional photographers I am employed to do a job training people in local communities in participatory methodologies. As such I do have privileged access to the views and issues facing local people and people in the organisations working with them. But, like a tourist, I have fleeting opportunities to do more contextual landscape or environmental work. The questions that really interest me in order to make the best of the opportunities I have is:- what can one learn from this type of ‘safari’ – are there things that one can do with the idea of journey in terms of understanding and contextualising images that cannot be done through staying and studying one place (as for example in ‘space to place’ and ‘transitions’).
- what can these fleeting impressions on the move show? are the issues of photographing journeys in Africa necessarily different from in UK? is one necessarily any more an ‘outsider’ – in UK I am often travelling through new or forgotten places. In Africa there is always the driver to consult and I often travel with NGO staff some of whom are local, and also talk to the people I am training. Bearing in mind much of the colonial conditioning we all have.
- what are the implications for different approaches and different techniques? what does this mean for planning my trip?
- Who created, owns, uses and changes this landscape? How do these people relate to each other?
- How is this ‘landscape’ distinguished from other similar places (who decides what is and what is not similar? by what criteria? why are those criteria important?)?
- How do (different) users and inhabitants of a place feel towards (different aspects of) the landscape (pride, indifference, disrespect, fear of loss)?
- What attitudes do (which) outsiders have towards it?
- How are these feelings, identities and relationships manipulated, why and by whom? (See Part 3 landscape as political text)
- Self-awareness on the part of the photographer of their own identity/ies and assumptions and power/desire (or lack of it) to manipulate and change things.
- ‘Free safari’: Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda – taken before Assignment 2 and the closest to common understandings of ‘safari’ though taken as we travelled along the main road rather than paying to go through the national park itself.
- ‘Urban voyeur safari’ taken from the car as I returned from rural areas back to the capital city through peri-urban areas in Kenya and Ivory Coast. Looking at how far this type of photography can say something about African urban life – compared to eg Paul Seawright’s Invisible Cities.
- ‘Objective Safari’: Journey through Sumatra in Indonesia where I alternated my approach between ‘subjective’ framing and automatic ‘objective’ clicking the shutter at intervals of 3 seconds as I moved through urban areas to see the different effects this gave.
- Documentary safari: Journeys to communities in Rwanda and Tanzania (3-5 series) I was with both local NGO staff and/or local drivers and had more opportunity to stop, get out and consider ‘shots’ and also to travel off the normal tourist routes and see things more from the local perspective. Including one journey with local people to select what they considered the best photo spot for a picture for a calendar they had asked me to produce. And one journey where I focused on the contrast between my transport and they way local people travelled. One other journey for Gesture and Meaning Assignment 1 I used manual focus to speed up the camera reaction time.
‘Free safari’: Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda
– taken before Assignment 2 and the closest to common understandings of ‘safari’ though taken as we travelled along the main road rather than paying to go through the national park itself.‘Urban voyeur safari’: peri-urban areas in Kenya and Ivory Coast.
taken from the car as I returned from rural areas back to the capital city through Looking at how far this type of photography can say something about African urban life – compared to eg Paul Seawright’s Invisible Cities.‘Objective Safari’: Sumatra in Indonesia
See: http://www.zemniimages.com/Photography/Documentary/Indonesia where I alternated my approach between ‘subjective’ framing and automatic ‘objective’ clicking the shutter at intervals of 3 seconds as I moved through urban areas to see the different effects this gave. Semendo to Bataraja: Series 1 Semendo to Baturaja: Series 4 Semendo to Baturaja selected images from random series Semendo to Baturaja considered imagesDocumentary safari: Rwanda, Tanzania and Kyrgyzstan
Journeys to communities in Rwanda and Tanzania (3-5 series) I was with both local NGO staff and/or local drivers and had more opportunity to stop, get out and consider ‘shots’ and also to travel off the normal tourist routes and see things more from the local perspective. Including one journey with local people to select what they considered the best photo spot for a picture for a calendar they had asked me to produce. And one journey where I focused on the contrast between my transport and they way local people travelled. One other journey for Gesture and Meaning Assignment 1 I used manual focus to speed up the camera reaction time. TASK Write a project proposal for the self-directed project that you’ll submit as Assignment Five. Don’t write more than 500 words. The purpose of this document is to formulate and communicate your ideas to your tutor, for them to approve and provide comments, suggestions and any other feedback. The project proposal is not a binding contract. It is quite acceptable for it to evolve and perhaps shift direction; this is part of the creative process. However, you may find it helpful to think of the document as a real-life professional application for funding, or for permission to photograph at a restricted location. See Designing a project brief for guidelines The project brief: What, where, how and why am I photographing this subject? My main aim is to look at different ways of selecting and editing the same sets of images for different purposes: eg documentary, expressive and tourist and how different impressions can be given through different design of books and on-line slideshows. I will explore the use of black and white and what effects this has on interpretation of the images. I am proposing to use images from my forthcoming 3 week work trip to Ethiopia (November) to take further issues in documentary travel photography raised in Assignment 4. My work is to look at the horticulture value chain, and how the incomes of women in particular can be increased. My work involves training farmers and union/cooperative members and I will be staying most of the time in one community (but I do not yet know what accommodation will be like). As part of this I should be able to negotiate some time specifically for photography to support my work. Influences and research I will research further on African photographers (including Michael Tsegaye and make enquiries from colleagues about other Ethiopian photographers). I will also research different Black and White styles eg some photobooks I have from Lithuania and Marcus Bleasdale. Likely treatment: How will you photograph this subject? What special techniques or equipment will you use? Do you need any further training? Do you need or have you got a ‘plan B’ in case something doesn’t work? The treatment will depend very much on what I manage to do – I will have to be flexible. But my ideas will develop and evolve as part of my professional work. I do not currently have a visual idea of the context, and there is no means of getting this in advance. But I see it as including photographs of:- rural and peri-urban landscapes and related environmental issues
- documentary portraits of farmers, union/cooperative leaders and NGO staff and maybe traders
- a visual and/or verbal analysis of the power relations that bind them.