24.3 MPG
–
24.3 Miles Per Gallon documents a three-month drive across the United States through a camera mounted in the rear window of my car. Programmed to photograph automatically once every minute, the camera produced a serial archive of the country glimpsed in reverse. Indifferent to my embodied experience of driving, this mechanical rhythm transformed the road trip into a durational performance shared between body, vehicle, and the camera’s machine vision. The car became an instrument of seeing, while the camera created an accumulated index of omission, mapping the landscape’s gaps and distortions. The resulting photographs form an afterimage of America as land and infrastructure recede.
Presented alongside fuel consumption statistics meticulously collected from gas station receipts, my vast and variable experience is reduced to the car’s own language of efficiency in the form of a calculable exchange: fuel for motion, attention for distance. Similarly, the act of serialized photography becomes its own mode of data collection. With the book’s elongated format recalling folded road maps, the reader is presented with as many as 6 photographs per spread, blurring landscapes together through aggregation, mirroring my experience of the drive.
–
12” x 5.25”
336 pages
562 photographs
Edition of 20