The Travels Part 1
The background to most of the images.....
For reasons best left untold I hastily booked a cheap flight to Las Vegas in the summer of 2005 with free full board accomodation sorted at the other end.
This accomodation arrangement eventually dissolved and disappeared leaving me with a week to fill in Vegas on my own with not much money and no purpose. I'd never been to the States before, and had never really wanted to for that matter.
A couple of weeks before the trip I discovered how cheap it was to book a car. So I booked a car for the week. At least it meant that I didn't have to do the Vegas thing. Not really my cup of tea. I found a map and a guide book of the South West and learnt a bit about the Vegas area and the local terrain. I could see that Monument Valley was only a few hundred miles away... I'd always marvelled at the sight of that place since seeing Claudia Cardinale leave the station on a horse and cart and head off through the valley towards a new life with a new husband at Sweetwater in Leone's epic 'Once upon a time in the West'.
I now had a purpose for the trip... and could connect it with a passion for cinema and film history. I then hit on the idea of taking some camera equipment. I wasn't sure what I was going to shoot; I'd never done landscape stuff before; it never really appealed to me. I'd been more of a documentary photographer of people and events.
I blew the dust off the Mamiya 6 x 7, found a couple of backs, a wide angle lens, a super 8 cine camera, the 16mm bolex, and the Olympus OM2 and a tripod. This took up nearly all of my allocated weight. You only get 25KGs on the summer charter from Manchester to Vegas
I didn't know at the time but weighing suitcases on bathroom scales and shifting things from hold luggage to hand luggage was to become a feature of my travels from then on. I took the minimum in clothes and what I did take were mainly old and threadbare so that I could dump them to gain some extra weight allowance on the return trip.
I picked up a load of film in colour transparency and B&W in a range of speeds, some old 100ft 16mm short ends from the fridge and crammed it all into my hand luggage.
I pleaded with the folks at Manchester Airport to not send my stock through the X-ray. they were having none of it. Everything from 50ASA to 3200 ASA went through. The Americans at the other end weren't so bad... they were still manually examining stock over 800ASA.
When you go to the States you need an address to go to before you get there. So you need to book your first nights accomodation up front. I had no money but a passion for adventure so I typed "worst hotel in Vegas" into Google. Up came the Golden Palm Casino Hotel on West Tropicana which was situated on the lorry park and fast food outlet side of the Freeway... not the posh side. This set the precedent in accomodation from then on.....
This accomodation arrangement eventually dissolved and disappeared leaving me with a week to fill in Vegas on my own with not much money and no purpose. I'd never been to the States before, and had never really wanted to for that matter.
A couple of weeks before the trip I discovered how cheap it was to book a car. So I booked a car for the week. At least it meant that I didn't have to do the Vegas thing. Not really my cup of tea. I found a map and a guide book of the South West and learnt a bit about the Vegas area and the local terrain. I could see that Monument Valley was only a few hundred miles away... I'd always marvelled at the sight of that place since seeing Claudia Cardinale leave the station on a horse and cart and head off through the valley towards a new life with a new husband at Sweetwater in Leone's epic 'Once upon a time in the West'.
I now had a purpose for the trip... and could connect it with a passion for cinema and film history. I then hit on the idea of taking some camera equipment. I wasn't sure what I was going to shoot; I'd never done landscape stuff before; it never really appealed to me. I'd been more of a documentary photographer of people and events.
I blew the dust off the Mamiya 6 x 7, found a couple of backs, a wide angle lens, a super 8 cine camera, the 16mm bolex, and the Olympus OM2 and a tripod. This took up nearly all of my allocated weight. You only get 25KGs on the summer charter from Manchester to Vegas
I didn't know at the time but weighing suitcases on bathroom scales and shifting things from hold luggage to hand luggage was to become a feature of my travels from then on. I took the minimum in clothes and what I did take were mainly old and threadbare so that I could dump them to gain some extra weight allowance on the return trip.
I picked up a load of film in colour transparency and B&W in a range of speeds, some old 100ft 16mm short ends from the fridge and crammed it all into my hand luggage.
I pleaded with the folks at Manchester Airport to not send my stock through the X-ray. they were having none of it. Everything from 50ASA to 3200 ASA went through. The Americans at the other end weren't so bad... they were still manually examining stock over 800ASA.
When you go to the States you need an address to go to before you get there. So you need to book your first nights accomodation up front. I had no money but a passion for adventure so I typed "worst hotel in Vegas" into Google. Up came the Golden Palm Casino Hotel on West Tropicana which was situated on the lorry park and fast food outlet side of the Freeway... not the posh side. This set the precedent in accomodation from then on.....