Motel Art
For many years I've been photographing the wall art on display in motels I stay at. I travel quite a bit. These days my trips are often domestic road trips in my own car, or from flights, picking up a rented car, driving from motel to motel, night after night. If I need a room for a night I'll try to book a day or so in advance through Hotwire or a comparable app.
I pay attention to what's behind the counter as I check in at a motel. This is often what forms the guest's first impression and would seem important, at least to me. Sometimes a chain will hire a local artist or photographer to provide art for the motel, more usually it's handled by a company that does that on a "more for less" basis, art in quantity, with reproduced prints and framed posters in lower-end places, whereas at higher end hotels the quality is better, often showing original or commissioned art.
Different scenarios are that I am just booking into a motel for a night on a close-to-home two day shoot, or far away and on the road heading towards my destination, or booked in for several days up to a week or more in one place. More recently I am using Airbnb, etc. more for stays in one place for a long weekend or a week or so. I can't help but notice what is hanging in my room, along the hallways in motels and in public spaces. Usually at the end of the day I am just too beat to pay much attention to what's on the walls but will wake up early, head on down to the breakfast area and find myself checking out what they did art-wise. Sometimes it is just too good, or too bad, to ignore.
Motels and subsequently motel art, are, for me, an almost necessary evil. Convenient, plentiful, affordable they provide a place to lay my weary head after a long day of driving, shooting, driving, shooting for hours on end. They also can be simply awful; unsanitary, poorly maintained, devoid of aesthetic and poorly run. I search for affordable three star motels, but have been dealt some really poor hands over the years. This picture below came from a hotel in Virginnia on my way to North Carolina to teach at Penland one spring in my bathroom after I'd taken a shower.
Motel Art: I wonder if you do this too, photograph where you stay on a photo road trip?
Related series
Spruce Pine, NC 2013
The Spruce Pine, North Carolina pictures come from when I was teaching at Penland School of Crafts in April, 2013. Most mornings I would head out early to town, a few miles away, before class to first have a coffee then walk the town.
This is the same town I made a group of pictures in last year called Penland, North Carolina 2012:
http://nealrantoul.com/projects/penland-north-carolina-2012
Penland, North Carolina 2012
These photographs were made in late June and early July 2012 on a trip from Boston, where I live, to teach at Penland School of Crafts near Spruce Pine in North Carolina. I drove down there and back, photographing some along the way, but mostly photographed in the small town of Spruce Pine and near to Penland. Each morning at 6:30, often with two or three students along, we would spend a couple of hours photographing in Spruce Pine. The idea of coming back to someplace to photograph, to study it and one’s results from the previous day seemed to resonate with the students and it certainly did for me. Spruce Pine is small, bifurcated into older and newer parts and reflects present day US economics and hard times. It has a railroad that goes right through it, sits in a valley alongside a river and is lush in late June with dark green foliage.
Working this way in North Carolina brought me back to days in my deeper past. There were many road trips spent photographing, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, sometimes with students, pulling over in some little town, walking and shooting what I saw and what seemed worth trying to make into a picture.
Of note here to other photographers is that this is the first group of pictures I have made with a new camera, a Nikon D800E. This is always a love/hate relationship for me, getting used to how a new camera works, how it sees and imposes itself on what I want it to do. No one wants to be stumbling with buttons and controls while taking pictures and, as cameras are now very complex, it takes me a while to feel comfortable with its newness and being unfamiliar.
