After 20 years of working as a small-group tour guide, I have driven a LOT of vans. When I started out in the industry, I used to name them - common names like Bessy or Max or once, because I found the line “this is the worst trip, I’ve ever been on” hilarious, The Sloop John B. After my 10th or 11th van, the novelty wore off and now I know that I probably won’t have a particular vehicle for more than a couple of trips in a row so it seems like a silly idea. When I was conceiving this particular project though, I was buying a van for the long haul and it was going to need a good name. I started to think about things that inspired me and my journey.

I would definitely say my two biggest inspirations for the journey I’m on came from books I read for the first time many years ago and have read many times since. In Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon traces his cross-country journey through small-town America along the rural roads that in his time were blue on the map. His is definitely an internal journey as well as a physical one. From the time I read this book for the first time in college until I set out on my own adventure, it has held up well as an iconic vanlife adventure. The name of Least Heat-Moon’s van was Ghost Dancing, and I’ve always loved that he chose something meaningful to him and didn’t stop at a simple one syllable name you’d call a cow. In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck also takes to the highway in search of a personal understanding of America in his time. He takes his dog Charley along for the ride. While Steinbeck lives in a truck camper instead of a van, his journey and how he writes about it have also been hugely inspirational to me. Steinbeck calls his camper Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse and I always appreciated that he also thought longer and harder than most about a name for his vehicle.

As a photographer, I have always admired the tremendous work of Edward Curtis. We’ve probably all, at some point, seen his sepia-toned images of Native Americans in books or on postcards. I didn’t have a full understanding of how much of his life he dedicated to photographing Native American people and documenting their lives and traditions until I read Timothy Egan’s brilliant 2011 biography Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Curtis’ life was fascinating, and the reason his photographs are so beautiful is because he spent time with the Native American tribes that he visited - real time, not just a few minutes or hours. He gained their trust and that makes a big difference in photography. The native people who were often unfamiliar with photography at that time and amazed at what Curtis produced, called him, quite appropriately, “Shadow Catcher”. I’ve since spent long hours in the rare books room at the Library of Congress carefully studying his 20 volume collection The North American Indian of which only 222 complete sets were produced. His images are incredible and to see them up-close and full-sized allows you to really look at the detail of both the subjects and the photographs. Since each set was hand-assembled, each image you touch was also handled by Curtis himself. It’s a collection like none other.

While I could never hope to produce anything as magnificent as Curtis, I still find inspiration in his work that I’ve found in very few photographers in the world. So in tribute to Curtis as a photographer, traveler and anthropologist but also with a nod to both Least Heat-Moon’s Ghost Dancing and Steinbeck’s Rocinante, I settled on the name Shadow Catcher for my van. It’s an epic name for an epic journey and I hope you’ll come along with both of us as we hit the old blue highways and head off towards the sunset.