For years, I traveled on road trips throughout America taking photographs. Only recently have I made the connection between my desire for the road and the fact that my father, for the past thirty years, has traveled these same routes as a telephone pole salesman. As my father is reaching the end of his career, the role in society of the traveling salesman is also entering its twilight. Likewise, telephone poles as both components and symbols of communication are also less vital than they once were.
My project, “The Last Salesman”, explores the life of a businessman alone on the road. My goal is to create a visual narrative of my father’s life separate from our family structure over the past 30 years. There is very little photographic evidence of my father’s life at work or on the road. We spend most of our lives working, and yet it rarely gets photographed. This project is my attempt to change that. I am retracing my father’s footsteps, visiting motels, diners, and offices he traveled to years ago in an effort to imagine what my father’s life was like all those years ago away from home. Parallel to this work, I am also documenting my father today and collecting ephemera from the life of “the salesman.”
Elements of fact and fiction play heavily in both the creation of the images I make and the ideas I hope to convey. The scenes of places visited by yesterday’s “salesman” are based on my fantasies of what it would be like to be my father, but at the age I am now. Sometimes these scenes are based on stories he has told me over the years. When possible, I visit actual places he did, but I also seek out real-life places that match the fantasies I had as a child of where my father went on his business trips.
My father is my collaborator in creating this project. As much as he is an active participant, there are areas of his work life that he has not told me or allowed me to photograph. For every room in his memory and private life that he lets me in, there is another I am left to imagine for myself. The blending of fact and fiction speaks to the reality that I can never fully know my father or what it is like to be a man alone on the road. On a larger scale, the project also explores the blurring of the lines between truth and lies that is at the very heart of photography.
These photographs are a projection of what both I and my dad want the visual narrative of his working life to be remembered as, and it is a fable about a father and a daughter memorializing a period in time in our family’s life and in America that is fading away. In “The Last Salesman”, I am rediscovering my father as a man separate from his role in our family, and the alternating sadness and freedom of life alone on the open road.