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

David Michael Kennedy is a 60-year-old art photographer from New Mexico who took an extraordinary cross-country journey to rediscover what he thought was a lost America. He shares his photos here, and responds to a few questions.

Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy

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 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.

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Hide caption "Driving through nowhere, Wyoming, we came upon the town of Emblem with a population of 10. It seemed like an inspired idea to do a portrait of an entire town. ... We made little fliers and she put them in all the P.O. boxes. We set up a barbecue at the community center. There are more than 10 people in the picture; they cheated. People came in from outlying areas because they all wanted to be in the photograph." Previous Next

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Hide caption "One of the more abstract places we went was Salton Sea, Calif. It was supposed to be a planned community but there was some kind of snafu and the entire development died. ... When you go there today, it's this huge grid of homes that have been totally abandoned. You can see how nature is taking back the land." Previous Next

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Hide caption Longhorn Head, Liberty, Texas Previous Next

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Hide caption "Bob Sundown is an ex-Marine. In summers he lived in Montana and taught survival training. In winter he traveled in that trailer pulled by burros down to southern New Mexico. For years, I'd see Bob parked on Highway 14 at the corner of my road. I was always in too big a hurry. Six months into the trip we came through Deming, N.M., and there he was. We pulled up next to him and spent the night there and I finally got to make the picture." Previous Next

Hide caption Santa Rita Chapel, Rio Arriba County, N.M. Previous Next

Hide caption Heather, Malachite Beach, Texas Previous Next 1 of 12 i View slideshow

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.

Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy

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.

Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy

There were people who didn't need to text, there were people who didn't need iPods, there were people who actually had coffee pots you could take apart and fix when they broke. We met one old man and his wife; 50 years ago he made an electric tractor that was still running, and he heated his entire house with solar panels that he'd made from beer cans, which he'd drunk.

Did you know where you wanted to go when you set out, or was the trip completely unscripted?

We had no plan for this trip. Every morning when we woke up I'd look up at the sky and think, "Heading north today." The trip began to get scripted by the people we met.

Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy

"Sister Reiddie was a Pentecostal minister who was just amazing. When I photographed her, she couldn't decide whether she should be holding a Bible or a shotgun."

V.R. Hylton was a minister we met in Texas; we stayed with him for over a week and ended up going to his church and fishing in his lake and photographing his longhorns. V.R. told us about some old cowboy crop-dusters over in Louisiana. When we left V.R., we headed over to Louisiana to try to find the crop-dusters. Of course we made a wrong turn ... the trip was really about wrong turns.

We passed a roadside fruit stand and spent a week with the people who ran the fruit stand. They introduced us to crawfishermen and we had huge crawfish feasts. Then they introduced us to Sister Reiddie.

Tell me about the Airstream trailer.

We traveled for two years living in that vintage Airstream. It still has a 1959 lifetime warranty stuck to the closet door. We did a little modification to it so I could process film at night. Heather made blackout curtains, or we'd just park in dark places and I processed and printed in the trailer.

Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy Courtesy of David Michael Kennedy

And I think the Airstream kind of helped. A big blue Dodge pickup with an Indian motorcycle in back, pulling this huge silver reflective trailer down the road. It definitely drew people to us. It made people interested in what we were doing.

What was it about these moments that made you go and get your camera?

They're just things that touched me. There are moments that grab me and make me say "yes." This feels right and natural and good, and I make a picture.