Road Life Galleries with Photographer Gunner Hughes
Generally speaking, one should not recommend leaning out of the window of van, or careening over your shoulder while on a motorcycle. That’s just generally speaking. Now include trying to get the right angle with camera in hand to both of those unadvisable scenarios and you get a somehow-unscathed photo of roadside Americana from photographer Gunner Hughes. The Anywhere But Here series follows the exhaust fumes of Gunner through adventure and misadventure across the country. Usually finding the backwater towns, roadside religions, old-salt locals, cash-only dive bars, and much more character than you might see off the main highway.
Regardless of where one might fall on the spectrum of “Florida is a swampy dock fire” to “Florida is a continental tropical paradise” few could argue that it isn’t at the very least a colorful tropical dock fire—with orange stands and vasectomy billboards as far as the eye can see. First installment: a deet-worthy ride through the sunshine state.
A certain Floridian world champion surfer and I used to joke on our trips together that “the road is home.” Though the more I said it, the more it became true. In the last 12 years since I graduated high school, I haven’t lived on or in the same house, apartment, room, car, van, floor, couch, etc for more than a year consecutively. I haven’t lived in the same town or city for more than a year and a half without a hiatus elsewhere either. When I get homesick, it’s because I’ve sat still for too long. It’s an addiction, it’s adventure, it’s avoidance, it’s an exit plan, and it’s the cliche unknown around every intentional wrong turn that keeps me running. It’s no destination, in particular, no end goal, it’s just the only place I constantly want to be, anywhere but here.
