In 1999, Corinne Day was paid to do a road trip in Texas. She spent most of her budget on a car, the rest on our flights, and four of us all piled into this car and just drove from Houston down to Austin. We followed the Llano river, stayed in a hotel that Bonnie and Clyde once stayed in, and ended up in a dodgy, dusty little town just inside the Mexican border.
Corinne’s friend Susie Babchick is from Texas, and she helped arrange it all. Rosemary Ferguson was the model, chosen because she was just really relaxed and laid back. And Corinne asked me to come along and help out. My role was very vague. I wasn’t there to model, or be a photographic assistant as such, but I was going to be in the pictures, and help out. They wanted me to drive, and thought I’d be good if the car broke down.
Corinne did her own pictures, with her own view of the trip. But my book is about women together, having an adventure. We had no phones with us, we just felt very free, and untraceable. No one knew where we were. It’s about four women, on a road trip, doing fairly dangerous things at times, but mainly just mucking about. No one fell out, no one got hurt, there was no disaster, and they don’t die at the end like Thelma and Louise. They just have a really great time!
Of course, it was also looking at Texas: the gun culture, and the cars. We ended up at this place where was an Art Car parade, and I got in the back of a car with these Chicanos called Los Magnificos. It could have been risky, I suppose, but they were fine with me, and so proud of their car!
Mainly, I was just interested in recording what was happening, and how we felt. As women, the other three are very relaxed in my gaze. There’s one picture in particular where two of them are lying on the beach and they’re nude, but there’s no sense of them being nude in the traditional male gaze, sexual kind of way – there’s no awkwardness at all.
