Divided #14 – Day 97
Chicago was the first big city on our route since San Francisco. Big cities are milestones in our project and mostly mark the completion of a stage for us. But they are also more difficult logistically and we are under more pressure to come up with good portraits. It doesn’t matter if we shoot a portrait in any given town on our route, but we know if we stop in New Orleans, LA or Chicago, we can’t leave without having completed at least one good shoot/interview.
Chicago is not only the hometown of Obama but also home to one of the biggest Mexican communities in the US. So we went to Pilsen, the Mexican barrio of Chicago, and soon enough we found Santiago “El Mariachi”, a Mexican who plays on Pilsen’s main street to make a couple of Dollars and still doesn’t speak English after living for 30 years in the US.
Chicago was also one of the very few places on our trip where we spent more than 2 nights in the same place. On all our journey we only did it 5 times. So not having to pack in the morning and sleeping twice in the same bed felt like a little vacation. When we left Windy City we knew we had started the last chapter of our American tour. It was bitter sweet. We are quite tired by now, but it is such an incredible adventure, that it will be a sad moment when we arrive in NYC and it is over.
What followed next was our “Uniform Week”. Americans love uniforms and therefore we have to show this in our work. On Monday we shot firemen in Michigan City. Of course it’s not a uniform they wear, but their apparel is so iconic, unique and pretty much the same all over the US, that it looks like one. It was one of these shoots that we knew we would do from Day 1 on. Finally it took us 90 days before we finally knocked on the doors of a fire station. As so often in this work, we were really lucky. The commander was excited to have his fire station featured and by sheer coincidence we had just picked their firetruck cleaning day. But we also encountered firemen who were very open and didn’t shy away to talk about the psychological impact that their work could have on them.
Our next uniforms were worn by two corrections officers of the Jackson Correctional Facility in Michigan. Prison Guards in more colloquial terms. Here again we encountered a man and a woman who didn’t only make good portraits but who also talked in a very reflected way about their job.
The third uniform that week was worn by Lt. Col. Olivia Elliott, a fighter jet pilot of the US Air Force. Fighter jet pilots normally fly one type of plane. Hers was the A-10, nicknamed the “Warthog”, a devastating war machine equipped with one of the most powerful aircraft canons ever built. There was something vexing about meeting this slender mother of three, who could have been any suburban mom, but whose job was to fly this deadly aircraft.
From Wright Paterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, we continued our journey towards the East Coast, which came closer by the day. Pennsylvania we crossed from West to East along its Northern edge on Highway 6. But on our first day in PA, we had to hold true to a promise we had made to Elias. If there is water in the US, there are boats. Motorboats, Yachts, Jetskis, Canoes, Kayaks, you name it. There must be millions of vessels on all kind of bodies of water in the US. And Elias was absolutely fascinated by it! There wouldn’t a day go by without him asking Mathias if he rather would buy a motor boat back home or learn how to fly (that one started with the smoke jumpers…). So after staving him off for 3 months we finally rented a canoe on the Allegheny river in Western Pennsylvania and paddled for 3 hours down river with our courageous captain.
And then on Sunday came a truly American experience. To our own surprise Pennsylvania, or let’s say the part we were crossing, was not quite as liberal as we had expected. Quite the contrary. It seemed to be deeply conservative. A fact that was emphasized by the many pick up trucks and gun shops we saw on our way. When we found a gun shop that was even open on Sunday we stopped to have a closer look at it. Pam, the owner, a stanch conservative and NRA member, agreed right away to be photographed and interviewed. We stayed all afternoon, to get a better glimpse at America’s gun culture and when we were invited to shoot ourselves at her gun range at the end of the day we didn’t decline. Even Elias was taught how to shoot with a mini rifle by one of their instructors and while it was rather premature for him to shoot for the first time, we didn’t wanted to deny him the experience after travelling for nearly a hundred days in a country in which gun culture is so deeply embedded.
Only a few more days on the road, but enough time to make a short detour to New England before finally returning to NYC!
