Highway 61
Starting the weekend of July 4, 1996, I accompanied a magazine writer on a road trip down U.S. Hwy 61 from St. Paul, MN to New Orleans, LA, a stretch of some 1,200 miles.
My job was to record anything that happened that the other photographer hired to make the same trip two weeks later would not be on hand to witness.
I knew there were better-than-even odds that the magazine, an obscure-but-flush-bundle-of-color sent free to individuals with a demonstrated interest in cigarette smoking, would run none of my pictures, which indeed was the case when the story appeared that October.
Be that as it may, the influential media company was prompt paying expenses and the -- ahem -- fee, and I got to take a bunch of pictures. The follies of the modern NYC magazine business are, mercifully, no longer mine, but I am everlastingly grateful for them nonetheless.
We started in the Minnesota farmlands, midday, July 3.
