The appeal of the road trip, or the long through-hike, or the pilgrimage, is that the ‘‘point’’ is so deliberately minimal — to arrive at, you know, the end — and the decisions involved so banal (stop for gas now, or in a bit?) that the distinction between signal and noise is blurred. The point of a photograph of a trail, or some billboard half-seen out the window of a bus, is that it could easily be exchanged for the image taken immediately before or immediately afterward. The random sample communicates in one unpremeditated frame all the significance that particular person’s drive down that particular road could possibly contain. This is the aspiration common to road-trip literature and road-trip photography: The moment at the gas station is held, insistently, to express as much about the total experience as the shot of the Eiffel Tower.

But there remains, at least for me, a tension between the stories we tell about the road and the photographs we take along the way. When I’ve returned to things I’ve written about extended overland travel — whether a book, or travel articles, or just emails to friends — I feel settled, almost subdued, by my own accounts. Though in each case I tried to capture the miscellaneous experience of that particular interlude, the mood of each has inevitably been coerced into coherence. Yes, I think, this is how it happened, and this is what it meant, and what it will now continue to mean in retrospective perpetuity. These texts, over time, overwrote the memories from which they were drawn.

Revisiting my photographs from those same trips is dislocating in a different way. Always I find my photographs replete with remainders, pedestrian details that contradict and undermine the equally pedestrian account I committed to words. The colors are different. Drops of scarlet blood on a hard tarmac black as obsidian. An overturned brass samovar in a dingy brown train compartment. A bright alarum of pink cherry blossoms against a glass-flat cobalt sea. There is something about those moments, fugitively apprehended as they might have been, that seem to me now odd and decisive. They don’t at all seem like random samples of the ongoing. I never think, What was so special about this? I think instead, Yes, I remember now exactly what was so special about this. They mutely twitch with escaped significance. When we see what we saw, we are reminded of what was apprehended — and let go.

—GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS, from the introduction to The Voyages Issue