Wind-swept hair, the vast open road, infinite possibility. It sounds great — but is that the great American road trip all it’s cracked up to be?
“The photographer speaks from recent experience. About two years ago, he and his wife Tracey Mancenido, also a photographer, decided to drop their lives, attend truck school, invest in trucking billing software, and hit the road. Tribble, the son of a driver, wanted to grasp more about the elusive culture that moves America — and figured the sole thanks to knowing it was to measure it.
“These guys and girls,” he explained, “they’re just like the backbone of our economy.” to it, his wife added, “What we wanted to try to… was step off from the stereotypes of truck driving. We all have an inspiration of what a truck driver’s like when we’re a child — but we do not really know much about them.”
To get a stronger picture, pardon the pun, Tribble and Mancenido spent a year and later on the road producing Hurry Up & Wait, a series now on display at the big apple City’s Sasha Wolf Gallery.
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“Everyone has this concept of an enormous, overweight, burly man who’s really rough and raw and possibly uneducated,” Mancenido explained. “There wouldn’t be a stereotype if they didn’t exist, but there have been also many extremely educated — college-educated — people, who wanted to be truck drivers. They wanted liberty. Or who lost their jobs and didn’t know what else to try and do.”
Hurry Up & Wait maybe a pretty benevolent portrait of the trucker culture. Just like the ways during which they were received as a multiethnic couple. Or the items they heard on the CB radio. But that, they reiterated, misses the purpose.
Hurry Up & Wait also paints a reasonably lonely picture of trucker culture. What do they are doing for entertainment — for hours on end of driving toward nothing within the middle of nowhere? in step with Tribble, they listened to plenty of NPR.