Welcome to Part 1 of 4 photo journals from the Mid-West. Some of the photos featured here will be available for purchase soon on the website, once I have published the whole blog series. I will keep you posted!
Last September I flew out from Iceland on a long journey to join my girlfriend who was spending six weeks with her family and friends where she grew up in the Mid-West USA. Of all the incredible areas of the States I wanted one day to visit, the mid-west was not high up on my list. Well, I'll be honest with you. It wasn't even on my list.
That said, one of the things that makes me most passionate as a photographer is documenting life and finding beauty wherever I go. It's easy to get a great shot of a famous mountain or a waterfall, but the reality is the moment is normally shared with hundreds of other people spilling out from tour buses and hire cars, cameras jostling for position. On the other hand, to seek out beauty in the back lanes of the flat-lands of Ohio and Indiana or the cities of Michigan means I start to come into my own, switching on my photographer's sixth sense to find excitement in architecture, cornfields, forgotten alleys, quirky houses, fascinating people.
This blog will be in four parts, and is my photographic perspective of three weeks spent driving around the places outside the tourist guidebooks, but finding much beauty in the process.
This first part of the blog is focussed on Northwest Ohio. Jess grew up in a small, pretty town called Elmore which sits unobtrusively in the midst of endless cornfields. I was kindly hosted by some of her good friends in the nearest large town, Fremont, a twenty minute drive to the south east. Fremont is an unassuming place, home to around 16,000 residents, a similar size to the town I grew up in England. It's main claim to fame is that it was home to a former president of the USA, Rutherford B. Hayes. He was president in the late 1800s, during the time that Queen Victoria was on the throne in Britain. It's other claim to fame is that it is home to the world's biggest ketchup factory (Heinz of course).
The day after I arrived, I found myself with time to kill so I decided to walk around and photograph the town. One of the first things I noticed was that, despite being a Saturday, I seemed to be the only one walking. I found out later that unbeknown to me, my arrival had already been noted by friends of friends, as nobody really walks around Fremont, especially slowly and holding a camera, without arousing curiosity. I arrived very quickly at the small "downtown" area (when you consider that Manhattan also has a "downtown", the word can seemingly be interpreted very widely). I still get fascinated by certain street features that Americans must not think twice about- the proudly flown Stars and Stripes nearly every direction you glance, the traffic lights hanging from wires, the wide streets, the bold announcement of every slightly interesting (and even not very interesting) facts about each city or county. All of these features were there in abundance in Fremont.
The main street (what I would call a "High Street" in England) is Front Street. It's one of those wide main streets lined with red brick buildings and shops which seemed very familiar from so many movies. I later realised that nearly every mid-west town has one, but the novelty hadn't worn off when I took these shots. I was particulary drawn to the the cute little cinema, with the film announcement board making it look positively 1950s, and also a group of men drinking around a picnic table in the middle of the street.
Just round the corner, the even wider State Street forms part of US Route 20, which at 3,365 miles is the longest Road in the USA, reaching from Boston in the east to the Oregon coast in the west. This is a drive I would love to do someday.
Finally I wandered back to my guest room via a few back streets. I noticed a beautiful but very patriotic looking house which typified my view of small town America, saw some churches worthy of an old English city and discovered the "Northcoast Inland Trail", a 270 mile walking and cycling path still being developed which will eventually connect Indiana with Pennsylvania. The Fremont section runs along a disused railway line..
The following day, Jess took me to one of her favourite NW Ohio haunts, Marblehead. Marblehead State Park has to be one of the tiniest state parks anywhere in the States, and sits on a peninsula jutting out into Lake Erie. The Marblehead Lighthouse is the oldest in continuous operation on the American side of Lake Erie and its a pretty and peaceful spot despite the number of tourists gathered at its base. We sat on the rocks for a while water splashed over the rocks beneath our feet, staring out into the misty horizons beyond which laid the vastness of Canada.
We headed back to Jess's home town through the ripe September cornfields that characterise this part of Ohio...every road feels like a scene from any road trip movie you've ever seen..
The following day we set out for a three day road trip to the neighbouring state of Michigan. Please look out for the next blog about Michigan coming in the next few days!