Dodge City

In a junkyard, somewhere in Ireland, 1993 (or thereabouts). This was one of our 'Yahoo Road' trips.

The initial idea had been to travel up North and look for anything strange or startling to photograph, in particular the thriving Country and Western scene. After some debate it was decided that such a venture would be too much like Troubles-tourism, street-naivety masquerading as journalism. Instead, we opted to just take off on the occasional long weekend, whenever we could find time, driving mainly through the midlands and border counties, stopping whenever we saw something worth photographing (or painting / taking notes on) or just because we felt like it.

Of course, the word Yahoo has a different connotation now. Our modest enterprise had nothing to do with dotcom empires or information highways. We wanted a group-name that would carry some flavour of what we were about on the far less streamlined Irish highways and byways, some small sense of wildness and cutting loose, of backroads adventure. Oddly enough, some lines from the end of John McGahern's novel, The Pornographer, came to mind, where two of the characters are driving somewhere beyond the last page and one of them calls out (to the road itself) ""Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo . . ." I changed yoohoo to yahoo partly as a gesture to our original impetus, a look at the C & W scene in the border counties (yeehaw!). Also partly to our sense of male comaraderie; these trips were about friendship as much as anything.

The Dodge in the photo above is actually a hearse. I shot it from the side but this was the strongest image by far. Taken with my old Nikon F3.