Two artist’s intent: joel beaman, david miller

Deep inside a dark, quiet basement coffee shop in a southern university town in the low nineties, two photographers quietly hash out the beginnings of an impossibly crazy scheme combining the simplest of light principals, the camera obscura (or ‘pinhole camera’), with a step-van. With just enough photographic knowledge and a whole lot of ambitious energy to make us a danger to ourselves we craft a plan that will drain our minds, bodies and wallets in the construction of a fantastical camera that we can drive, sleep in, and or course—take pictures with.

Now almost ten years later, the project is seeing the light of day—with the help of some very generous foundations, the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation, the Alfred P. Weisman Memorial Scholarship Fund, and Columbia College Chicago’s Graduate Opportunity Award.

Driving us is a love for photography and a conviction that inventing new ways to record images, combined with that strange fascination of ‘The Road’ are vital avenues that need to be explored—not only for ourselves, but also to cultivate the crucial functions that art is responsible for (the farming of supposedly useless stuff).

The images we wish to record are fleeting at best; ephemeral evidence of the loneliness of traveling, and of the traveler. The special in the mundane— the not-quite classical forms of banality, twisted into the frayed ropes of incongruous meaning— they connect humans to their landscapes, and repay richly the observer who lingers to look.