INTERSTATES

© William Hohe - Mockup of INTERSTATES photobook cover, featuring "Tear in Gallup," a portrait of Charlotte at a street corner in New Mexico. © William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project © William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project View all images ↓
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  • Dates
    2024 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Topics Awards, Documentary, Editorial, Fashion, Fine Art, Photobooks, Portrait, Social Issues, Street Photography, Travel

INTERSTATES is a performative photo archive tracing 5,137 miles of America’s mythic Route 66. Through persona, drag, and documentary, it unearths identity, memory, and illusion along the fractured corpse of the American highway.

INTERSTATES is a performative, collaborative photobook that interrogates the myth and memory of the American highway, Route 66—once heralded as a symbol of national unity and freedom, now fragmented into nostalgia, contradiction, and decay.

Over the course of 5,137.9 miles and 14 states, co-authors William Hohe and Charlotte Watson journeyed from Chicago to Santa Monica and back, capturing both iconic and forgotten roadside America. But INTERSTATES is not a travelogue. It is an archive of contradictions—a visual meditation on American identity through the lens of performance, persona, and photographic play. With each stop, the line between documentation and invention is deliberately blurred. Drag, costume, and performance are wielded as tools of both critique and celebration, transforming rest stops into stages and diners into dreamscapes.

The project draws from traditions of road photography—echoing Robert Frank’s The Americans and Martin Parr’s glossy banalities—while pushing the genre into something more theatrical, hybrid, and self-aware. Inspired by thinkers like Peter Hamilton and Alec Soth, INTERSTATES asks: When the American road is rebuilt, rerouted, and resurrected, what remains of its spirit? What ghosts linger in its asphalt?

Charlotte and William, alternating roles as subject and author, embody regional archetypes: a Waffle House server in Kansas, a mirage-like silver alien in Arizona, a motel bride in Las Vegas, a rust-belt gymnast in Illinois. Through drag and roleplay, they don personas that echo both contemporary queerness and historic Americana, examining the pageantry of patriotism and the spectacle of identity. These images—by turns tender, absurd, and surreal—probe the sincerity and failure of the “American dream.”

The book’s form mirrors its themes: layered, nonlinear, and filled with visual and narrative double exposures. Found object sculptures interrupt photographic spreads. Regional shifts usher in tonal ruptures—from melancholy motel vacancy to neon-lit euphoria. The editorial tone shifts between poetic, diaristic, and ethnographic. Just as Route 66 is no longer a continuous road, INTERSTATES refuses to present America as cohesive or whole.

This work arrives at a moment of national instability—amid elections, environmental collapse, and cultural division. It embraces fragmentation as a mode of seeing. It questions the neat boundaries of states, genders, and truths. It mourns the lost optimism of westward expansion while clinging to moments of roadside tenderness and shared absurdity.

Rather than resolve, INTERSTATES revels in the in-between. It is both personal and political, archival and mythic, critical and romantic. At its core, the book poses one question: What do we carry forward—and what do we leave behind?

© William Hohe - Mockup of INTERSTATES photobook cover, featuring "Tear in Gallup," a portrait of Charlotte at a street corner in New Mexico.
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Mockup of INTERSTATES photobook cover, featuring "Tear in Gallup," a portrait of Charlotte at a street corner in New Mexico.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
i

“Highway Deprived” (Page 12): Portrait of “Raw Self” getting ready in a parked car during a roadside stop. With limited access to bathrooms or prep space, daily routines were improvised in transit. Each day demanded quick decisions and constant adaptation as new characters emerged.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Arch Lady” (Pages 28–31): Charlotte poses beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO. Shot during the afternoon, the image balances the feeling of a local and a traveler set against the monument’s iconic steel curve.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Surveillance” (Page 30): Surveillance camera mounted near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO. The presence of security infrastructure contrasts with the monument’s symbolic openness and national significance.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Gymnast” (Pages 52–53): Charlotte performing gymnastic stretches beside a rusted baseball fence in rural Kansas. A tattered American flag is caught in the fencing near a Catholic school athletic field.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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"Bonnie & Clyde" (Pages 60–65): Bonnie & Clyde, an alter ego of sorts for us as artists, became an act we stepped into — a performance. This iconic gangster duo felt like the perfect tribute to the region where most of their crimes took place. We stopped in the wild fields outside Oklahoma City, where the only company was the beating sun and the silent expanse of wind-swept wheat.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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"Lone Star" (Pages 76–82): Pictured at the iconic Big Texan Ranch in Amarillo, this series imagines Charlotte as a long-term resident — someone deeply rooted in the dusty charm of the Texas panhandle. Shot the morning after our stay, we explored the persona of a watchful neighbor, catching Charlotte mid-glance through a nearby window.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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"State of Enchantment" (Pages 94–97): Set against the nostalgic backdrop of El Rancho — a legendary Western filming location now dotted with vintage James Dean posters — Charlotte takes center stage in the motel’s parking lot. While waiting for a Trump brigade to clear the frame, we captured a cinematic moment filled with quiet tension.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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"What Could Have Been" (Pages 90–91): A fleeting glimpse of the Harris Walz sign, blurred and obscured — a visual echo of missed moments and untold stories. This image captures the uncertainty and nostalgia of possibilities that slipped just out of reach.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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"30 Seconds Past Williams" (Page 107): In our small trailer in Williams, AZ, we smoked and unwound beside a self-made fire under the vast night sky. An empty, abandoned car stood silently nearby as millions of stars stretched overhead. On the sixth day, we yawned our way to bed, wrapped in the quiet stillness of the desert night.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Foreign Body” (Page 113): In the Arizona desert, without running water or electricity, Charlotte became a mirage—painted in silver, glinting beneath the sun. Channeling Botticelli through heat haze and dust, this scene crystallized the journey’s surrealism: a living illusion born from pavement shimmer and distilled defiance.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Elvis Wedding” (Page 123): In the parking lot of the World’s Largest Souvenir Store, we staged a mock Elvis wedding—complete with red lipstick kisses and thrifted glam. A playful nod to commitment and camp, it stood in for the lavender marriage we joked we couldn’t quite justify.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Genesee Girl” (Pages 136–137): At the corner of Genesee Street, Charlotte channels Chappell Roan—thumb out, curls wild, poised like a runaway on the edge of a dream. In homage to the “Pink Pony Club” singer, this imagined hitchhiker blurs small-town longing with pop spectacle, echoing Roan’s rise through glitter and grit.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Fake Name Friend” (Pages 128–129): On a fog-drenched pier in Santa Monica, light rain blurs the neon of the amusement park behind Charlotte. The camera lens, misted with moisture, softens the spectacle into haze. Grainy and cinematic, these images mark our arrival to Los Angeles—less triumphant than dreamlike.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Zion Horse” (Pages 138–139): A lone horse stands tethered near a trailhead in Zion, Utah—silent, still, and half-lit by canyon sun. Its presence felt biblical, spectral. After weeks of chaos and noise, this quiet witness in the desert marked a rare moment of pause, reverence, and strange peace.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Junktown” (Pages 152–155): In a flower field outside Grand Junction, Colorado, Charlotte poses at sunrise, draped in an Oscar de la Renta shawl. Half-asleep and half-performance, she yawns between frames. Here, personas softened—folding into the landscape as the distance between character and self began to dissolve.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Omen” (Page 165): At a Quality Inn in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Charlotte prepares in Look #2 as police approach. Outside, a McDonald’s sign looms—its golden arches casting a surreal glow through the motel door. The scene teeters between safety and dread, fast food and foreboding—an emblematic omen in America’s heartland.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Sin Brought Death” (Pages 174-175): A roadside sign looms along a Nebraska highway, blending Christian evangelism with construction zone warnings. Its stark message—painted in red across plywood—confronts travelers mid-transit. Morality, mortality, and the Midwest collide in a single, jarring phrase.

© William Hohe - Image from the INTERSTATES photography project
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“Down in the Drain” (Pages 180–181): Charlotte showers in a roadside hotel room in Iowa after discovering her dog, Frank, had fleas. Meant to be a 30-minute stop, the moment unraveled into a quiet ritual—hair clinging to bathtub walls, steam thick with exhaustion. With her raw self exposed, the journey reached its final crescendo before the return to Illinois.