The Distance Between

One past June, I spent five days riding my bike 500 miles from Kansas City to Chicago. Every two hours I would stop to rest and take a few minutes to photograph what I saw.

The further I rode, the less self-conscious my picture making became. Snapping the shutter on my camera felt like drinking water or breathing. Once I was back on my bike and riding, my thoughts were consumed by the rhythm of my pedals moving me through the hot, flat, windblown landscape. I thought very little about making pictures. Thousands of unmade photographs rolled by like cracks in the pavement and pebbles in the dirt.

Over five days, my photography transformed into an involuntary physical reflex. I learned to trust this intuition the way I learned long ago to trust that a bicycle will remain upright as long as it’s moving.