Taken on the Road: American Mile Markers

How wide is America? The way engineer and amateur photographer Matt Frondorf measures, the answer is 3,304 photos—one 35 mm shot for every mile. Featured on Kodak.com, American Mile Markers offers an interactive version of Frondorf’s unusual photographic tour of the U.S. He spent six days driving across the country with a camera hooked to his car’s odometer, automatically snapping a picture from the passenger side every mile along the way. Whatever occurred along that stretch of road—thunderstorms over cornfields, used car lots, herds of Herefords—was captured exactly as the camera saw them. American Mile Markers puts audiences in the driver’s seat on this journey with an interactive map and picture viewer for exploring Frondorf’s unique take on the road trip. Frondorf’s approach to taking pictures, which he calls “statistical photography”—a technique that envisions pictures as a collection, where the individual photograph loses much of its meaning when taken out of context—is ideally showcased in this site. To create an interactive, panoramic experience, the site uses an interactive “picture viewer” to let visitors cross the U.S mile by mile—or every 150 or 600 miles—by way of a photo strip, as they track their location with a zoomable map. They can also click on any picture to view a larger version and send a picture postcard. QuickTime movies offer a cruise control rendition of the trip, yet still allow visitors to stop or revisit any point of interest.