Baton Rouge songwriter Jodi James is glad to let her partner, country folk singer Clay Parker, do the driving while on tour. From the passenger seat, James can always have her phone ready to snap photos of the landscape.
“I have road rage, too, so [Clay] is the calmer driver—the calmer everything,” she says.
Her new book, Just Another Road, began on Instagram with James’ #justanotherroadpic tag. She snapped photos while they drove through Tennessee, Montana and Idaho and visited places like Garden of the Gods in Colorado or San Cristobal in New Mexico.
Those images are now part of this full-color, 84-page collection captured across two years of touring.
Her most striking shot perhaps is a panoramic view of a mountain valley, with Parker’s sky-blue denim shirt—miniscule in James’ epic frame—nevertheless matching the sky overhead.
Big things are reflected in small things.
Other scenes are more intimate: off-the-cuff studies of color and texture, or poetic moments caught in an instant. One shows a golden retriever leaning his head out a vintage convertible, looking back at the trail behind him. William Eggleston would have made the same photo.
“I didn’t want it to be place-specific because these places are everywhere and anywhere,” James says. “There’s beauty in common things.”
Her collection is vacant of any hints of a musician’s life, or any dates or even the general locations of where the photographs were taken. It is nearly wordless, allowing each image to anonymously evoke a spirit of adventure, and that soul-searching quest for answers that usually accompanies travel—a long look down a lost highway, a glance up the wobbling path of a sun-kissed crag, the drive-by blur through a thicket of brush to a dark desolate building.
But the book isn’t completely wordless. Parker offers a foreword to the photography: a lyrical, breathless ramble capturing a zeal for fleeting moments. It’s all about cherishing the small while bowing to the vast.
Just another road, indeed.
But much like the spirited and bittersweet melodies they evoke together on stage and in recordings, James’ imagery and Parker’s introduction meditate in unison on holding fast and letting go in equal measure.
“I cannot know what I’ve known,” Parker writes. “The mountain is mine, but I cannot see the face of God.”
For James, picture-making is both a return to her teens, when she’d chase the setting sun down River Road with her film camera, and a new creative exploration that will lead to more photo projects and could even impact her songwriting somewhere further on up the road.
“I always want to challenge myself creatively, and one art form doesn’t have to relate to the other,” she says. “For Clay and I, our motto is to say yes.”
This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of 225 Magazine.
