Adirondack Motels
The Adirondack mountains of upstate New York were always a haven for me as a child. Heading north each summer was a time honored way to escape mundane life and explore the great outdoors with good friends and family. I remember eagerly awaiting the first whiff of fragrant white pine and the glimpse of tall mountains on the horizon, as we drove up to stay in a rustic, overgrown motel, a place that felt like it belonged to another time.
These old Adirondack motels captured the spirit of that adventure, with their offbeat handcrafted signage promoting gateways to a wild and exotic land. I watched as these unique signs gradually began to disappear, sometimes updated to generic commercial versions, or in other cases abandoned and nearly erased altogether. So I set off to photograph every one that I could, as well as tracking down old postcards of the sites to see how they evolved over time.
These signs are markers of a time when travel felt more personal and the landscape wasn’t yet overtaken by the uniformity of the modern world. I’m interested in how the places that shaped us continue to live within us, and what it means to savor a fading past even as the world moves on. Perhaps we can rediscover what we’ve left behind in our pursuit of the new, and how it may serve us both in the present and into the future.