1) We start with someone we know and find interesting on the East Coast – preferably in NY, where we live.
2) We interview that person in their home about their relationship to where they live, how they got to where they are (etc.) and take many pictures of them in and around the home.
3) We finish the interview by getting our subject to identify someone he or she knows who:
a) Lives to the west
b) Lives within a day’s comfortable drive away
c) Can be contacted and who would be willing to meet us and go through this
same process the next day.
4) Once we have determined who the next person will be, we leave and head to our next location where we repeat steps 2-4.
What if we get stuck and we can’t find a person living to the west within
a day’s drive to go to next?
1) Occasionally, if need be, we can eliminate the day’s drive west rule so that a subject can simply send us to someone else in the same town. Ideally, after repeating step 2 we will be able to contact someone who fits the criteria outlined in Step 3 and we will be on our way westward once again.
2) Our other option if someone is not able to identify the next person, is to ask a previous person in the network (starting from the last person we met, and working our way back) if they know anyone they could send us to west of where we are.
Why?:
The idea for this project evolved initially from a fascination with the idea of uncovering a thread of people connected one by one, but spread out across a vast distance, similar the Small World Experiment, done at Columbia University, which used the internet to study degrees of separation between people, and their connections across the world.
But as we began discussing how to use photography and audio recording to actually execute a project along these lines, the somewhat “concept-y” nature of the initial idea quickly morphed into something much deeper and richer.
Inevitably, we turned to questions of how personal connections are affected by the nomadic nature of modern life, how people end up where they are, and what makes a home a home. We have both always been interested in ideas about how a person’s physical space and location affects well-being and sense of self, and these are the ideas which became a natural underpinning for the project.
The heart of the project is in the counterpoint between the abstract structure
of the journey (and the rules we have given ourselves so that we can get from
point A to point B), and the concrete act of doing it – the delicate reliance
on people we don’t know to let us in to their homes, the gaining of trust,
the asking of personal questions, and the collaboration required between us
and the people we meet to propel the project westward.