A Decade on the Road

Written by Jon Beck | Photography by Jon Beck & Jason Lee

I’m walking around New Jersey, having just concluded several days of filming on a motorcycle. Exploring these old neighborhoods on foot makes a person want to skate. Infrastructure built upon the forgotten remnants of itself creates an accidental canvas of creative possibilities. Hiding in plain sight, a broken section of retaining wall points the way over a grassy bank to a misshapen sidewalk slope just beyond. In many ways, a skater’s eye is trained to see beauty and utility in the abandoned and the broken.

Jason Lee is a legendary skateboarder who has translated this aesthetic into a series of photo essays spanning over 10 years. With an arsenal of older cameras, Jason has been steadily building a library of black-and-white slides, color films and Polaroids that are a record of what would otherwise be forgotten America. Sharing a passion for film photography, Jason and I have traveled through portions of the U.S. and Mexico over the years, cameras in tow. On a recent road trip from California to Texas, we revisited some locations from early trips a decade ago. Visible changes over the 10-year span were striking in some cases, and barely perceptible in others. 

Having a tangible, analogue record of everyday people, locations and events creates a more honest historical archive. Where monuments, natural wonders and featured destinations perhaps represent the lion’s share of usual road-trip documentation, the vast majority of what exists on most any journey lies in the supposedly mundane. Life’s narrative is composed mostly of gaps … and written in silence.