Highway 61

7 days on the road from Davenport, IA, to New Orleans, LA

A couple of options here:
1) you can go straight to the photographs or
2) read a little bit about them first (below).

**Note: The photo gallery contains 139 images, all of which are 'straight out of the camera' with no corrections. Photographers generally don't put their work out there like this, raw and untouched, but personally I've always found it interesting to see how someone works. You'll see some dust spots and color and contrast that needs correcting, perhaps. Just wanted you to know. I'll be preparing a polished set of images with text accompaniment for possible publication.**

Highway 61

First of all, why Highway 61? When you tell someone you're going on vacation they immediately ask where you're going. Imagine telling them you're about to drive down Highway 61 for 7 days from Davenport to New Orleans. It's not exactly what they expect, not exactly what they're prepared for, not usually what they'd choose for themselves. For a moment they might have dreamt of an island, a cruise, at least an ocean...and now the buzz has been killed. There are no travel brochures touting a week-long road trip down Highway 61.

"Highway 61 follows the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Minnesota", I'd explain. "It's the 'blues highway'. New Orleans gave birth to jazz which migrated north through the Mississippi Delta where blues was born . By the time this music reached further north, in Memphis, it became soul and rock 'n' roll. Highway 61 is musically very significant. There's also the Vicksburg Civil War Battlefield in Mississippi and Hannibal, MO, where Mark Twain wrote his famous stories about the Mississippi River."

"Oh, that's nice. I'm going to Italy in the fall," they'd respond. And so it goes.

While my story about music and the Mississippi was sincere it wasn't the complete story. It had been a couple years since I'd taken any measurable time off from the studio. So it was time to take a vacation, to get away, to find something out about America, myself, why I take photographs, what I'm looking for and, most importantly, to record the places and things that are evolving and in some cases, sadly disappearing from the American landscape. In my relatively short lifetime I've seen televisions go from black and white with rabbit ears and no remote control to room-filling HDTV behemoths with surround sound and hundreds of channels for the choosing. The family farm has waned, email has replaced written letters and cell phone towers dot the landscape. Small stores and restaurants are being replaced by chains and big boxes. All of these things happen outside our periphery, usually, then years pass and at some point we look around and say, "hey, do you remember when...?".

So was this trip about nostalgia? Sure, it was. It was also about the present. Headlines proclaim an economic boom in America that isn't apparent in my close circle. Is there a boom 'out there' somewhere? Highway 61, by my definition, is 'out there'. I was curious to see what I might see.

There's a lot to take in in just 7 days heading south from Davenport, Iowa, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and not much time. I'd be taking the trip with my friend Greg in his family's Chevy mini-van (a stylin' ride). There aren't many people who would be willing (much less excited) to take on a trip like this. As an engineer in big industry who has worked way too many hours as of late, Greg was ready to get away from all responsibility and his family thankfully obliged.

So, did I find what I was looking for? In a word: yes. Despite the statements above about what I hoped to accomplish, my most sincere desire was to keep an open mind, to stave off big expectations and resist big plans and presumptions about what I might find. In the instances where I had presumptions they were most often proven wrong.

Hmmm, you know what? Maybe that's what I was really hoping for all along...to be proven wrong about my own presumptions. Before this trip I feared my mind (and world) was shrinking. That's what happens when people profess to know the answers to questions they've stopped asking. Seven days and a thousand-plus miles along the Mississippi River later, I feel like my eyes have opened to the world once again and, in return, the world has opened up to me.

Hey, let's get to the photos...

Thanks for your patronage,

Jim Talkington