In Passing: Roadside Memorials Of The American West
Roadside memorials appear suddenly along highways and desert roads. A cross at the edge of the gravel. A cluster of flowers tied to a signpost. Sometimes a photograph, sometimes a small object left behind.
They interrupt the landscape quietly. You can drive past them without noticing. But once you begin to see them, they become impossible to ignore.
I started photographing these memorials while travelling across the American West. They would appear in places that otherwise felt empty or vast, along long stretches of road where nothing seemed to mark the landscape. The memorials changed that. They turned ordinary pieces of roadside into places that held memory.
Most are simple. A wooden cross. Plastic flowers faded by the sun. Occasionally something more personal, a toy, a photograph, a handwritten message. Each one suggests a story, but the story itself remains mostly unseen.
In Passing is not about the accidents that happened there. It is about what remains afterward.
These memorials are acts of quiet devotion, built by people who want a life to be remembered in the place where it ended. They exist in public view yet feel deeply private. Drivers pass them every day, often without knowing who they commemorate.
Photographing them became a way of noticing those moments where grief briefly surfaces in the landscape. Small markers that hold memory in places the world otherwise moves through quickly.
They are reminders that even the most ordinary stretches of road can hold a story.
Locations photographed:
Roadside memorials photographed across California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.