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Sara Macel was recently named one of the Top 50 Photographers in Photolucida’s Critical Mass Award, received the Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, and her first monograph, May the Road Rise to Meet You, has been featured in The New Yorker, Fraction Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, CPW, and Lenscratch.
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Macel grew up with a travelling salesman father peddling telephone poles made out of Southern Yellow Pine. As a child, she always wondered where he went as she watched his car disappear down the driveway, and May The Road Rise To Meet You is the outcome of these early wonderings. Its sixty pages hold both real and fabricated scenes of an imagined career of her father Dennis, and a tender encapsulation of a daughter filling in the blanks of an entire life lived where she could not follow. Going back to both the places in her father’s past, and the places she imagined he could have been, the perspectives blur seamlessly from Macel to Dennis, all locations blend into the same transient milieu, and all sense of time slips away. We’re left with only a sense of a young girl putting herself into her father’s size 11 work boots, and right alongside her, we feel out the open road in its widened soles.
With Macel’s critical eye, attention to light, and included hotel paper scraps from the past, she delivers gut punching visceral sensations. Looking at these photos you can taste that metallic burn in the back of your throat on a 5 am flight; you can feel that half-second blinded by sunlight through a yawning windshield, searching to see if you’re still in the same state as when you fell asleep.
May The Road Rise To Meet You is more than a monograph: through Macel’s lens, the story of her father’s career becomes a universal shared voyage of distance in its many forms. It gives us new perspective about the male vs. female experience on the road, comments on how men are viewed by women, how parents are viewed by their children, and how inevitably, photographs can toy with memory.
Review by Taylor Kigar
Title : “May The Road Rise To Meet You”, 2013
Size : 10 x 9 in
Page Count : 67 Pages
Publisher : Daylight Books
Edition : 1250, Signed