If you’re ever broken down on the side of an American highway and a woman with a light meter around her neck stops her car and approaches you, don’t be afraid. She’s not there to rob or hurt you.
It’s just Amy Stein, and all she wants to do is take your picture for her portrait series, Stranded. It might be a little awkward at first, but you’ll quickly see she’s chatty, friendly and not only carries a camera, but also a set of jumper cables, a jack, water and snacks.
For nearly a decade now, Stein has been traversing the country helping and photographing motorists. The project, as interesting as it is just as a concept, is not just about people stuck in shitty situations. Motorists for Stein are a stand-in for something larger.
“To me it’s a metaphor for what’s been happening across the country,” she says.
The project was originally conceived back in 2005 right after Hurricane Katrina hit. At the time Stein was in graduate school and had been told by a professor that she should get down to New Orleans to document the event. But instead of trying to document things like everyone else, she came up with Stranded.
At the time she was working on another project that took her from her home in New York City to Pennsylvania several times a week. With Katrina floating around in her head, she started noticing stranded motorists and quickly made the comparison. Like the residents of New Orleans, these drivers were experiencing hardship and watching as the world zoomed by.
“It became about being left behind,” she says.
Since Katrina, the project for Stein has grown to represent any number of situations facing the country. The recession, for example, with so many people sidetracked or flat-out ruined by job loss and foreclosures.
“I think there is this general post-Katrina malaise that continues to affect the country,” she says.
Back in 2008 she thought the project might have been over with the election of President Obama because he was an enormous morale boost and everyone hoped for a quick economic recovery. When things didn’t turn out quite as expected, the project went on.
For Stein, Stranded also relates to the isolation in people’s private lives. That’s why she carries water and other supplies – she doesn’t want to exacerbate the drivers’ vulnerability by taking their picture and leaving. She wants to help.
Driving for hours along desolate freeways without finding anyone to photograph gives Stein an empathy for her subjects. It can be downright depressing.
“It can become psychologically quite heavy,” she says. “It zens you out in terms or trying to control the project.”
The encounters are always unpredictable. In West Virginia Stein spotted a group of guys in orange climbing over the hill with guns while their friend stayed behind to fix the truck. The man doing the work — Gary — said his friends figured they might as well get some hunting in while they waited. He agreed to have his picture taken, but only if he could have his hunting mask on.
Then there was the time when Stein and her husband, who accompanies her sometimes, came upon on a broken-down work crew of federal inmates. The prison official said he didn’t want to be in the picture, but the inmates agreed to be photographed if they could take their own picture of Stein with their phone cameras in return.
The most productive patch of road, Stein says, has to be the freeway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Packed with motorists, she’s run into a lot of characters. What happens in Vegas seems to come out on the side of the highway when you’re stranded.
Surprisingly, Stein says she’s never felt endangered while shooting. She tries to judge the situation before stopping, but so far has had incredible luck. The biggest danger, she says, is the traffic zooming by. She shoots with a medium-format camera on a tripod so it takes a second to get set up and she’s more exposed than if she were to just pull out a DSLR.
“Nothing has ever happened, and – knock on wood – I hope that nothing ever happens,” she says.
