A few nice Japanese used trucks images I found:
Schism Jim
Image by Gary Bridgman
One of the more notorious of my shot-up roadsign photographic sculptures from my 2004 show at Midtown Artist Market.
Inspired by turbulence within the Episcopal Church. This piece is now showing at a lighting store in Memphis, but the proprietor had to go it back to his office as it was generating complaints. Not sure if they were from people who reckon this is pro-Confederate or anti-Confederate. I kind of hope it’s both.
I did not produce the bumper sticker, though. Found it on eBay in the extreme late 20th Century.
The company that produces these bumper stickers also sells vanity press history books about how slavery wasn’t so terrible and what an evil dictator Abraham Lincoln was. The company views Zip codes as an unwanted federal intrusion and they don’t post it on their Web site. They also questioned that you not write their Zip code on any first-class mail being sent to them because postal regulations state that zip-code lookup (on the part of the USPS) is part of first-class mail service and we shouldn’t have to bother writing it. But when I sent them the check for two bumper stickers (one for me and one for Charles Reagan Wilson’s collection at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture) I looked up their full 9-digit Zip+4 code and wrote it in large numbers. Despite defiling the envelope with the Mark of the Beast, I promptly received the bumper stickers…. can’t remember if they wrote my Zip code on the package or not.
The title is a reference to a—shall we say, unsavory—character in the Georg C. Scott film, Hardcore
The series
The 35mm slides imbedded behind each hole were shot with a Canon AE1, the pellet holes were made with an Ithaca"musket hammer" double-barrel break-action 12Ga
When I was living near Oxford, Mississippi, in 1999, I started making "wall sconces" out of hurt highway signs that the local Mississippi Department of Transportation field station had consigned to its recycle pile.
Some signs that I buy already have bullet holes, but most of these holes have been rendered by my grandfather’s Ithaca 12 ga. shotgun, using .000 buckshot, and occasionally 9mm or .45 rounds depending on what kind of heat my small helpers are packing.
I often cut lines into the sign, connecting the holes. This dates back to my original thought of building a planetarium projector out of shot-up signs and showing new constellations designed by rednecks. The lines make them look like constellation charts.
Once I shoot and cut a sign, I build a low-tech light box on the back of it and mount 35 mm slides (frames removed) on the white plastic surface. Each fragment of film is lined up behind a bullet/pellet hole.
The whole contraption is framed out in scrap lumber or with more of the white Lucite sheets, deep enough to wire it with a couple of compact fluorescent bulbs. i tried rope light and it sucks mostly, not that ropelight’s inventor gives a rat’s ass about this particular application.
The conceptual corner that I had painted myself into at one point was the lack of a photographic technique that matched this setting.
"What’s the point of inventing a new language when you don’t have anything to say?" I questioned myself, you know, rhetorically (does that mean "in the mirror with a two-beer buzz-on")
I wanted to get inside the heads of the sign-shooters, find out what they were trying to prove, and then prove the same thing with a camera. It finally occurred to me that they weren’t saying anything. They just like to blast the shit out of stuff while they’re driving. Wouldn’t you?
So my breaktrough came when a friend showed me the DVD of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 film, Kwaidan. [I know this is beginning to sound like I'm showing out and putting on airs, but it's really pretty common for people in West Tennessee to have DVD players these days.]
One of the characters was a Samurai, practicing the martial art of Yabusame, or mounted archery [search for that tag and you'll see what I mean]. So while I was watching this guy shoot arrows at a square cedar block while riding at a full gallop, I realized that the Southern pastime of shooting road-signs from a moving vehicle is basically the same sport.
While purists from both camps would protest any comparisons, both sports involve steering with your legs, drinking rice-based beverages (saki and Busch Light), careful marksmanship and a lot of ancestor worship.
So now I shoot most of my photographs from the saddle of my Japanese pickup truck, often through the rear and side mirrors.
