Portraits of Route 66

A pick on NOWNESS, a video channel premiering the best in global arts and culture.

One summer day, I skated from Pasadena to Santa Monica on the final 20 miles of Route 66. Along the way, I interviewed different people who use wheels other than cars to find an understanding about how transportation and cars relate to our identity. The film was featured on the agency and media outlet Nowness.

FULL FEATURE ARTICLE ABOUT “PORTRAITS OF ROUTE 66” ON NOWNESS

STATEMENT ON THE FILM:

A lot of what informs people's understandings of their identity comes from their surroundings. As a skateboarder, a lot of the way I relate to my surroundings is through the experiences I have skating around it. My skateboarding expresses itself in a number of ways, but, fundamentally, it can generally be boiled down to two things: skateboarding for pleasure or skateboarding for transportation. Sometimes, it's for both. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York, the way I interacted with my skateboard and the world around me changed drastically. I found that people's relationships to transportation and how they get around helped inform the way they see themselves in the world. Often, people's identities were closely related to how mobile they were in their world, that is: how much freedom they could access. The reliance of car culture in a metropolis like Los Angeles started interacting with the way I saw myself and my freedoms and altering my relationship to the city and world around me. It's this tension between the built world, transportation, and one's sense of self that interested me and inspired me to try and gain a little bit more understanding about it. I wanted to see how traversable the city was from one end to the other on a skateboard and figured that, in the process, I could explore how some other people might navigate this same issue. How is one's identity related to their built environment? What does it say about us as a people? A society? I wanted to know what our physical mark on the world was doing to our identity and psyche. With Los Angeles being the last stop on the world-famous "Main Street of America," or Route 66, the highway's terminal route became the guiding principal for this exploration, both geographically and culturally. The road's legacy is that of an automotive society and, arguably, world, and I wanted to see how that affected the lives of just a few of Los Angeles' citizens in this day and age and what, if anything, that revealed about our relationship to the environment we all share.