Every day with me is literally another yesterday for it is exactly the same.
 — Alexander Pope, 18 March 1708

Years before we met, I first came to know Susan Lipper's trip in the ever-increasing mileage of The Strand's bookshelves. I could rely on their limitless stock to peruse this book and slowly, repeatedly study it. Every time I returned they would still have yet another copy. In my mind It is there in perpetuity, stable, insistent, beckoning. I picked up my own copy, and over the years myriad others to forward to friends. I've encountered this book in Tokyo at first run bookshops and second hand bookshops including Genkido. An artist told me he bought one in Izu last month at the Photo Museum. I've seen it in London, Frankfurt, even once in Shanghai; it gets around.

Sandwiched between Walker Evans' "American Photographs" and Michael Lesy's "Wisconsin Death Trip", 1973, with "Guide" to the side, The Strand's serendipitous curation revealed connections through proximity. I could piece her dialogue with: Walker Evans' distance; her New Humanism to New Topographics; her inclusion, expectation, interactive theatricality with vernacular "history" films like Gone with the Wind or Psycho ; her recognition of the shape of things to come with Paul Strand's mantle of modernism; a digestion and a test of Tod Papageorge's core curriculum…

Ongoing years of epic travel, the grand tour, the road-trip, the exploration, the journey, the expectations, the photobook, the documentary, the journal, the film, set your camera and make a plan. Return! Revise! Read! Revisit! Remove! Participate!

trip is slow. trip is deliberate. trip is home. trip is evidence. trip is our influences and inner dialogues. trip is our yesterday which is our future. I tote tomes because TV doesn't interest me much. I cannot read on a plane, but do so on buses and trains. Stories merge with views and views with images. I read the pictures we bump into in our heads. I learn to see differently. The beauty of a recurring trip is that pressure to arrive is lessened, and interaction is obligatory, deliberate. These photographs are not instant reactions of a single trip visually described in speed and detachment. The anecdotes are informative but not crucial, perhaps interchangeable or imaginary. Results accumulate. Each shot's impact is more akin to the accurate and quiet clap of a rifle, than a explosive grenade. The bullet is lodged irretrievably. It remains. It reminds. Repeated visits, destinations, contemplations, visual trans-location, the images add up, but the book's sequence makes the story into a guided whole.

Growing up along the Mississippi River, trip is familiar. Returning and staying in motels, revisiting sites of local wonder, reveling in exquisite solitude, protected by the distance of time, I observe in spite of development that nothing has fundamentally changed. The new becomes old and cracked; disrepair is rampant. Progress pends. Details emerge. Commemoration boards overlap as parallel stories impose or mesh. I connect and configure to suit my purposes, my humor, my anger, my anxiety of influence, my disappointments, my embarrassments, my past, my pride, my ideas, observations, and my triumphs. Her images are specific, yet interchangeable not unlike our own trips. Scenes are not set behind glass, and the artist is not a mechanical eye floating detached, but fully interactive, just as we set our bags down to stand decidedly to one side as directed by the photographer or wait for these people to pass. The location is decidedly American, but the pleasure of these photographs is that the scenes are translatable in any country. They share our human reality and the malleability of human gesture.

The images are subtle. Details and overlooked scenes take on new urgency or relevance, only to dissolve while another work compels us another day. trip is warm and felt, lived in, a connection to the landscape, not a clinical or detached survey. It is there, but here as well. It is involvement between worlds, real and internal. It is her poetic experience given for us also to experience and notice how we share many of the same complex thoughts and conflicting feelings seen less with a critical, but literary eye.

In our externally subjective home, trip is our return.