SHOTGUN

(book release anticipated for 2026)

"Riding shotgun", that’s what they call it here. It's got the air of a romanticized interpretation of the "wild west" days of stagecoaches, bandits and adventure, doesn't it?

However, I was actually in the front seat, beside the driver, when this story began about a decade ago. It’s where I watched this strange and awe-inspiring land open up in front of me, camera in hand. In photography, taking a "shotgun" approach means: taking scores of photographs in rapid succession, quickly, intuitively, sometimes blindly. I'm trusting that, among the many frames of each burst, one will hold the truth I was looking for, or the tale I didn’t know needed to be told. I've been in that seat, watching the (contemporary) American West as countless days, countless miles washed by.

My photographs are not about destinations, but about in-between spaces, about the long hours when the mind drifts and the eyes glaze over; when I start to see without so much as looking. My weary mind morphs the side of a chromed tanker truck into a distorted landscape. Through reflections and refractions, strangers by the wayside meld and swirl into their surrounding landscapes as if by Van Gogh's design.

Then, over time, something curious and unforeseen happened: the images began to speak to one another. What began as a loose record of movement increasingly became a set of visual conversations. In this book, many of the pages combine photographs taken in vastly different places, sometimes years apart, that strangely share a rhythm, theme, narrative, or form. To me, these pairings are recognitions of the way ancient patterns and archetypes tend to surface across time and space. Sometimes they do so in ways that make me laugh, and sometimes the associated feeling is more profound. These photographs are of the road. I am merely a conduit, the one who pressed the shutter at a place and time halfway between reality and hallucination.

Buckle up and enjoy the ride.

- M