Travel Anonymous
Jeff HutchensI've finally learned to eat alone, without the crutch of reading materials. That's the first sign of excessive solo travel. The second sign is waking up one night with no idea as to where you are. I'm not referring to a substance-induced amnesia, but rather a travel-induced one.
Over the last couple of years I've been on the road between seven and eight months out of the year shooting on assignment for the National Geographic Channels (NGCI). The vast majority of that time has been spent alone shooting in remote locales at odd hours of the night and day--time spent isolated by schedule and subject matter from normal social interaction for weeks on end.
Last January, while shooting landscapes across Australia for five weeks, I ran into the second of the two signs of excessive solo travel. Two a.m. and I woke with no idea as to where I was. The thinness of the blanket, replete with stains and gossamer foam, reminded me instantly that I was not at home. Other than that, I was clueless. Lights out and in a sleep-induced stupor I tore through my bag looking for an itinerary--without luck. Shortly thereafter I realized I could find a phonebook. Broome, Western Australia. Shaking out the sleep, I reconstructed my last few weeks--where I was, why I was there. As I knew I was awake for the rest of the night, I picked up my camera and began to shoot that which was anonymous.
Every new boarding pass has triggered the salivation of friends and coworkers, joking that I was off on another "vacation". And it sounds like it. And to be fair, sometimes, it can feel like it. However, all things are not equal between pleasure and business travel. What the vacationers of the world rarely realize is that anonymity is a curse publicly traded among the business travelers of the world.
The title, Travel Anonymous, applies across a variety of situations. Anonymity is a state in which all solo travelers exist. They are for the duration of their journey, effectively in a vacuum of social accountability. No one really knows where they are; no one really knows what they are doing. The more removed from their customary surroundings the greater the height of that anonymity, both real and perceived. Think of the preponderance of in-room adult movies ordered during ministerial conventions. When there is separation from the familiar, when there is escape from the habitual, rules of social convention are not enforceable with the same efficacy as at home. There can be new identities created, unverifiable through casual conversation. Travel in some senses is a vehicle for fantasy.
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Anonymity is also the state entered when walking across the threshold of a motel room door. Thousands have slept restlessly or soundly, showered hot or showered cold, tuned to channel 1 or channel 7. But none of it has any bearing as the rooms are devoid of the slightest shadow of those occupants. Granted, reminders of previous guests are enough to have housekeepers dismissed, but that said, there is eeriness about a holding cell for the transient, where no indication of previous occupants can be found. At least every prison is supposed to have inmate scrawling. But in the room everything is reset everyday. When you leave no one knows you were there either. It subtly suggests that no one exists outside of today; yesterday and tomorrow are nonexistent.
But hotels and motels are not the only worlds of anonymity. Travel in all its facets is loaded with social isolation. There is as much isolation on an overbooked flight as on a red-eye ghost shuttle. Physical proximity has very little to do with psychological distance. Ultimately it does not matter whether seat 3A is bare or filled, physical surroundings can have no bearing on psychological dissatisfaction.
The anonymity of the travel process encourages dissociation, where the conscious mind drowns under the waves of impersonal stimuli, and the absence of familiar stimuli. With the conscious mind an automaton, conventions change and consequences are temporarily adjusted. This is the state of mind in which I've photographed this body of work. I've consciously chosen to avoid creating images when my mind has been lucid, when I've been unaffected by immigration lines and flight attendant safety demonstrations. But these unaffected times, when the dissociation is absent, are the times when I've traveled with someone known, or to someone known.
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I've found that the most effective way to work within Travel Anonymous is to leave people directly absent but still suggested in the images. At most I've included representations of people, but I've found the work most successful when it focuses around the "resets", the before and after in which details are created and erased to give the alternating impressions of use and virginity.
I wanted to instill all the frames with an overwhelming sense of etherealness. I've tried to remove the sense of reality from the scenes, as much as travelers' anonymity removes them from the real.
I should confess that I'm writing this from hotel room 302 overlooking Johannesburg International Airport; I'll have dinner soon and will read nothing but the menu.
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JEFF HUTCHENS is currently based out of the Washington, D.C. area when not on assignment. He recently left the National Geographic Channels (NGCI) to work on more of his own projects as a freelancer. He will continue to add to Travel Anonymous.
PHOTOS BY JEFF HUTCHENS
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COPYRIGHT 2005 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group