Wednesday, August, 19: Artist Talk
I’ll be giving a talk on the exhibition currently up at Franklin Foto gallery. I’ll be discussing the philosophical and technical aspects of the work and possibly be leading the group in song!
7 p.m
Franklin Foto Community Darkroom and Gallery
8953 N. Lombard St. PDX
2026, 232 pages
Hardbound
“Exhibition Edition” of 12
SOLD OUT
Softcover edition
$60
Road Songs is a collection of images taken over the course of a lifetime of road trips, filtered through the music that shaped those experiences. The book is punctuated by short reflections on songs key to road trips and their larger meaning: the longing for a disappearing America and a changing landscape, what it is to be a woman traveling in the world, finding the spiritual in the journey and the people you encounter, confronting death and politics, joy, age, how Bob Dylan might be the best test of a relationship, and whether The Beatles or Bob Marley are more important to world peace.
Need more? I got all wordy on The Blog.
Selected excerpts:
The genesis for this book was the idea that for me, there is always that one song that augments and defines a journey, a marker of a place at a particular time. In 1986, Europe was awash with the new British Invasion; And yet, it was the Beatles who followed me around on my first trip to Europe… It is the sound of being 16, in love with the color and noise of the world that I was just beginning to see, freedom, and being happily lost in a strange place.
There was that night. I was 22, sitting in a bar in Shanghai, trying to order a White Russian from a hotel bartender who spoke no English and probably wanted nothing to do with Russians, out of a strange Chinese-Pinyin-English phrase book written by someone who clearly didn’t drink, in a country that really had just started catering to business and tourists. I didn’t even want a White Russian. It was just the simplest thing I could think of. I was failing at being sophisticated or international…
The road trip, and by this, I’m really talking about any journey that takes you down your own unknown, unwalked path, is something of a shallow operation. It doesn’t necessarily ask in-depth questions. It is a fling, not a relationship, with a small piece of the world and the people you meet on that trajectory. With them, there is the food and kids and booze and cigarettes and tall tales and silliness and politics. And there is a shared concern for the world on a very personal level...
Michele Thompson 