A reframing of America’s pandemic
Photos for ‘Drivebys’ by Brian Bowen Smith show the quarantine from a truck window.
Brian Bowen Smith knew what the cover of his book would be the moment he shot the photo.
“He’s a famous cowboy [in Colorado] and he’s got a big ranch there. We called him up and … we came on by and there he was,” Bowen Smith told The Times in a phone interview about his book in progress, “Drivebys.” “I got in the car and he just started running, and I look over. And he’s just sitting there and he looks at me, he takes off his hat and goes, ‘Yeehaw!’”
It’s the most dramatic shot in a series that Smith, an L.A.-based photographer, took on a meandering road trip through pandemic stricken America, armed only with a Leica, an Instagram account, a 1958 Ford F100 pickup and a single aesthetic constraint: Every picture had to be taken through his truck window. With the help of a Kickstarter campaign, Bowen Smith plans to compile them into a book, “Drivebys,” and perhaps a documentary.
It feels like the perfect approach (and Bowen Smith isn’t even the only one taking it). We’re all supposed to be staying in our homes and vehicles and keeping a car’slength distance from others. Bowen Smith saw it as a unique project, a way to do something safely productive — and a handy excuse to leave his house.
The idea to capture a country in varying states of isolation through a socially distanced frame was inspired by a shoot Bowen Smith did with a family friend, Téa Romano.
“She’s really beautiful and interesting,” said Bowen
Smith, who photographed Romano in her driveway. “I need[ed] to start my Ford anyway,” so he took a shot from inside. “After we did the first one I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually really cool. I gotta do more of these.’ That’s what became the series.”
Bowen Smith’s initial plans were modest — a drive to New York and back, no longer than two weeks. Six weeks and 11,000 miles later, he has photographed more than 120 people.
If the project hearkens back to the writers and photographers of the Works Progress Administration, documenting an earlier American crisis of mass unemployment, the Great Depression, it’s not for Bowen Smith to make those connections explicit. “I kind of wanted to just go by the seat of my pants,” he said, “see what happens and then put it in a book and let it come together and people can form their own opinions. So I didn’t really have an agenda.”
Nor did he have much of an itinerary — just a vague idea that he’d be shooting friends and others he connected with via social media along the way. Bowen Smith hopped into “Pearl,” as he calls his shiny, white, antique Ford, on May 2, just after his 51st birthday. He returned home June 12. He let friends and followers across the country — celebrities and colorful civilians alike — dictate his travels.
Bowen Smith used a Leica M 10 Monochrom, a compact black-and-white camera that was both practical and “very film-like,” he said, “which I really love about all the images. It kind of made them feel like you don’t know if it was 1960 or 2020.”
Bowen Smith found his path to photography in a different way than most — as a model. Herb Ritts helped with that.
“He shot me for a Gap campaign actually,” Bowen Smith said. “And then we became friends. I really was interested in photography, and he convinced me to kind of dig more into it.” Only now, he added, “after 30 years of doing it, I can finally say that, yes, now I am a photographer.”
Proceeds from the book will go to Feeding America, a charity to which Bowen Smith has a personal connection. Growing up in New York, he relied on the program’s school lunches. “Sometimes without them,” he said, “I didn’t eat.”