interview conducted by former sales intern, Sarah Mason
Edgar I. Ailor III began his photography career on a high school
yearbook staff. With a camera always nearby, he honed his skills through
several decades of practicing otolaryngology. On retirement in March of
2005 he started Ailor Fine Art Photography in Columbia, Missouri, with
Edgar I. Ailor IV.
What
inspired you to consider making Blue Highways Revisited (as opposed to only
sticking with your photography business)?
I
started reading Heat-Moon's Blue Highways on
a cold winter's night in January 1983--I was hooked. The thought of getting in
a van or even a car and traveling the back roads of America for three months
was just so incredible that I decided then that someday I'd make that trip.
In 1983, I was just three-plus years into my otolaryngology practice, and I had a
wife in medical school and two precious children, ages eight and five, so that
thought had to be put on hold for a few decades. I've been an avid photographer
since high school; and in the five years before retiring from medicine, I knew
my second career would be photography. Susie, my wife and most enthusiastic
supporter, encouraged me to retire soon enough to be able to hike up those
mountains and along those streams--before I was too old to do it. So on the last
day of February 2005, after 27 years of practice, I saw my last private
practice patient and started Ailor Fine Art Photography the next day.
Sometime
in that first year, the seed that Heat-Moon's book planted in my cerebrum began
to sprout. (I don’t think it would show up on a CT or MRI scan, but who knows?)
The thought, once again, of traveling the back roads of America was now a
possibility. In the spring of 2006, at Addison's Cafe in downtown Columbia, I
pitched the idea to Heat-Moon about my son (Edgar IV) and I retracing his Blue Highways journey and capturing it photographically.
Several things are most memorable from that conversation. Heat-Moon had
originally planned to photograph the route in 1978, but he said he had trouble
switching back and forth from left brain to write and right brain to
photography. He ended up photographing mainly the characters he interviewed--the wonderful portraitures we see in his book. He also told me that the most
common question from his readers was, "When are you going to take the trip
again to see how things have changed?" So fortunately, he liked the idea.
Years later he would confide in me that he didn't expect anyone, including me
and my son, to retrace the entire 13,889 miles and put it into book form.
To
combine the pure joy of photography with the several decades-old dream of
retracing Blue Highways
seemed to me to be the ultimate. It could only have gotten better if Susie
could have made the entire trip with me. The result of combining the joy of
photography and a dream is Blue Highways
Revisited.
Who are your personal favorite photographers?
My
favorite photographer since childhood has been Ansel Adams who set the gold
standard for American landscape photography. Adams at age 14 took his first
photographs with a Kodak Box Brownie on a family vacation to Yosemite National
Park in 1916. That visit to Yosemite triggered a career of capturing America’s
wilderness that lasted almost six decades. Many of the National Parks and
wilderness areas we enjoy today were preserved because of his and the Sierra
Club’s influence. He introduced America to the vast beauty of our wilderness
areas though his photography and helped convince multiple generations that it
was worth preserving.
A
current photographer, equally talented, is Tim Palmer. He is an outstanding and
prolific wilderness photographer. My favorites of his 20 photography books are Trees and Forests of America, California Wild, and Rivers of America. His most recent book,
just released, Field Guides to California
Rivers, will make it even more difficult to keep driving over every bridge
I cross in California. When you look at Tim’s books, you want to grab your
cameras, pull on your hiking boots, and head for those distant wilderness
trails through mountains and beside streams that only a few individuals will
ever visit.
If you could read a book for the first time
again, which one would it be?
Naturally,
for me, it would be Blue Highways.
Only one other nonfiction book, Undaunted
Courage, captured my imagination like Blue
Highways. Heat-Moon gives such powerful descriptions that you visualize and
often feel the scene--experience the grit--and no one else spins a yarn as
well as he since Mark Twain. That explains why a pair of photographers would
spend years photographing the journey, cafes, and taverns; spend years tracking
down the book characters; and then spend the time to write Revisited some thirty years later.
Do you hope to do another book in the future?
Any themes you’d like to explore?
Yes!
I’ve got lots of ideas. The most exciting and perhaps daunting would be to
photograph Heat-Moon’s water route from New York Harbor to the mouth of the
Columbia River in Astoria, Oregon--River-Horse.
Does anyone have a boat they want to loan me?
