What If the Journey Was the Point?
"It's about the journey, not the destination."
It's one of those phrases we've all heard before. People say it all the time, but I've been thinking lately about how rarely we actually live that way.
Most of us spend our lives focused on what's next. We work toward the promotion, the graduation, the move, the vacation, or whatever milestone sits just over the horizon. We become so focused on arriving that the time in between starts to feel like something to get through instead of something worth paying attention to.
A few months ago, David and I found ourselves in that exact position.
After years of "talking" about it, we're finally moving from Virginia to Los Angeles. Like anyone making a cross-country move, our first instinct was to figure out the fastest, most efficient way to get there. Pack the truck, map the route, drive across the country, unpack, and start the next chapter of our lives.
The drive itself only takes about four days.
But somewhere in the middle of planning, we found ourselves asking a question we couldn't stop thinking about. What if the move wasn't just how we got to the next thing? What if it became the next thing?
That single question completely changed how we looked at the months ahead. Instead of treating the drive as something standing between us and Los Angeles, we started looking at it as a creative parameter.
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We could spend four days rushing across the country, or we could intentionally slow down and turn those four days into twenty. Not because we wanted a vacation, but because we wondered what might happen if we gave ourselves permission to create, explore, and enjoy instead of simply arrive.
The more we talked about it, the bigger the idea became.
This September, we're building a fully functional photography studio into the bed of our Toyota Tacoma and driving it across the United States. Inside the truck bed, we'll build one handcrafted set and photograph it over and over again as we travel through completely different landscapes all across the United States. The set will never change. The landscape behind it will.
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One of the things I love most about photography is how much an image can change simply by changing your perspective. Normally, if I want a different composition, I move the camera a few feet to the left. Maybe I step back. Maybe I move in closer. Sometimes that's all it takes to create a completely different photograph.
With this project, we won't have that luxury. The camera, the lights, and the set all stay in exactly the same place. If we want to change the composition, we can't move the camera. We have to move the truck.
Become Part of The Journey
This project is bigger than the two of us. It will only exist because people choose to follow it, share it, and support it. If you'd like to become part of the story, here's how you can help.
Support The JourneyI love that constraint because it completely changes how we'll think about making photographs. Every image will be the result of finding the exact place where the landscape lines up with the frame we've built. Instead of searching for the perfect angle with a camera, we'll be searching for it with a truck.
It's going to make us really slow down, become incredibly present, and really push our photography skills...while simultaneously moving across the country with as many belongings we can fit and our dog Joey.
The more I think about it, the more I realize this project isn't really about the truck at all. It's about taking something ordinary, like a roadtrip, a truck, and move and asking "what if...?"
Looking back, that's how almost every meaningful project we've ever created has started. Not with a client or a deadline, but with curiosity. The 100 Set Project started with a simple question about how many sets we could build in one year. Our attic series started because we wondered how far we could push one tiny space. None of those ideas were practical. They were simply interesting enough that we had to find out where they would lead.
This project feels like the biggest version of that idea yet. Instead of treating the move as the thing standing between us and the next chapter of our lives, we're making it the chapter itself.
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By the time we arrive in Los Angeles, we'll hopefully have created a conceptual photography series unlike anything we've made before. We'll also be documenting the entire process for a documentary, a fine art book, and eventually a gallery exhibition. But before any of those things exist, there are twenty days on the road, and I have a feeling those twenty days are going to shape the project just as much as the photographs themselves.
One thing we've learned over the years is that independent art doesn't happen in isolation. Every ambitious project we've created has only been possible because people believed in it enough to follow along, model for us, share it, encourage it, and support it.
The Journey is no different.
Choosing to turn a four-day move into a twenty-day art project means choosing creativity over efficiency. It means investing more time, more resources, and a lot more trust in an idea that, at least on paper, sounds a little ridiculous.
That's where The Journey Journal comes in.
Starting September 1, we'll be sending a daily newsletter from the road for each of the twenty days of the project. We'll share where we are, what we're building, what surprised us, what went wrong, and what it's actually like to create an ambitious independent art project while driving across America.
If this project resonates with you, we'd love for you to be part of it.
Whether you simply follow the journey, share it with someone who might enjoy it, or choose to become a supporter, every bit of encouragement helps make projects like this possible. Your support gives us the freedom to spend less time worrying about how to make an idea work and more time doing what we love most: creating.
Maybe the journey really is the point.
We're excited to find out.
Category: All About The Journey
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