Sara Macel’s new book of photography takes its name from an ancient Irish blessing, to follow her father’s path across a long career and a nation of highways.
“It’s about never quite knowing what my dad did for a living – I knew he sold telephone poles, traveling to all these cities, but that’s it,” she says. “So the question is: Who is this man when he’s away from home, when he’s not being my dad?”
For 40 years her father, Dennis Macel, drove a series of company cars, including Oldsmobiles, Fords and Cadillacs, for a total of between seven and eight million miles. He sold 36,000 telephone poles every year, each one made of Southern Yellow Pine, each one 40 feet tall, and each one priced most recently at $550. His career total added up to 1.5 million sold.
And he spent 4,244 days, or 11.62 years, away from home.
To document all that, Sara, a graduate of NYU and the School of Visual Arts, retraced her father’s steps with him, then struck out on her own. She spent about two years on the project.
The images she captured are color-drenched, extremely well-composed and evocatively nostalgic.
“They’re about a period in our country that’s in its own twilight – a traveling salesman today is not what it was in my parents’ lifetime,” she says. “But it’s also about a daughter looking at her father’s life and connecting with him.”
She takes her cues from other photographers working in the “on the road” genre, including Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Justine Kurland and Alec Soth. Soth suggested to her that a book is like a pop song – that it needs a hook. And so her father became the narrative thread in this, her first tome.
“I’m throwing my hat in ring and combining a family element,” she says. “It’s a project that feels a little more personal.”
Indeed. When her father came up to Brooklyn for the book’s launch, he read the afterword that his daughter had written. “There were tears,” she says. “He said: I feel like I’ve learned more about it in the past ten minutes than the entire past two years.”
One can’t help but wish that the wind will always be at the backs of them both.
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