Robert Gainor

Panoramas From the Passenger Seat.

I board a bus bound for a distant destination. I am transformed at that time, occupying a place of neither being where I was or where I am going. It's the in-between world that these photographs capture, that fragmented view of the scenery as it passes by. These are the glimpses of place that I inhabit for a brief moment while I am on my way that I can never really belong to as I travel along.

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The first time I bought a phone that came with a panorama function in the camera settings got me thinking, "What if I used it while traveling in a car or bus?" So I started to point it out the window as I was going down the road (I wasn't driving). My early attempts didn't go so well. It wasn't until 2014 when I started to ride a bus on a regular basis between Lompoc and Santa Barbara that I finally got it working. It was interesting to see what the software produced as it tried to make sense of the scene that the camera captured. The images felt strangely familiar to me. It was as if the images were reconstructed from my memories of  the things that I saw out the window as we hurtled down the road. Fractured and imperfect, they were perfect representations of the impressions in my mind.