Thirty years ago this June, I opened my first film lab. The industry was already changing — digital was coming, and most people in photography could feel it. I stayed anyway. I kept shooting. I kept the chemicals mixed and the enlargers running.
In the years since, I worked for Kodak, watched labs close one by one, and quietly started collecting the camera equipment everyone else was getting rid of. Not as a hobby. Not as nostalgia. Because someone should.
I now have more than 600 of them — from a WWI soldier’s pocket camera to the Nikon F5 that bridged film and digital — each one cataloged, studied, and understood. The full arc of a medium’s life, from the first folding bellows to the last professional film body Nikon ever made.
This June, I’m loading three of them into a truck and driving west.
THE PROJECT
Middle Ground is a 15-day, 4,000+-mile photographic road trip through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri — four states I’ve never been to — departing on June 18, 2026.
The route follows the parallel journeys of Todd Webb and Robert Frank, who traveled separately across America in 1955 and 1956 and made photographs that still define how we see mid-century life in this country. Seventy years later, I’m retracing a path through the same interior, stopping at the same kinds of places — diners, main streets, empty highways — with some of the same cameras.
I own an estate print of one of Webb’s most recognized photographs — the highway sign in Kinsley, Kansas, equidistant between San Francisco and New York. Print six of ten, from the Todd Webb Archive. I own a Rolleiflex 3.5F Planar: the same model he carried. I don’t know whether the original sign location still exists. I’m going to find out.
Along the way, I’ll seek out the photographers, shop owners, darkroom technicians, and film devotees who are keeping analog alive alongside the digital world that surrounds it — people who speak the same language I do, in places I’ve never been. I’ll stop at surviving film labs, connect with communities I’ve never seen, and document the American interior through a purely photographic lens.
There is a resurgence happening right now — people discovering film for the first time, learning what it feels like to slow down and commit to a frame. I’m not part of that rediscovery. I never left. What I can offer is thirty years of knowing what this medium is, where it came from, and what it costs to keep it alive.
THE CAMERAS
Primary: Nikon Zf paired with a 1968 Pentax Super-Takumar 50mm f/1.4 from the collection — a retro-modern professional body shooting glass that predates it by decades. A deliberate bridge between eras.
Supporting: Leica IIIf with Canon 50mm f/1.4 LTM, a lens Frank’s contemporaries called the Japanese Summilux. Rolleiflex 3.5F Planar, Webb’s camera. Widelux F7 for the wide American landscape. DJI Mavic Pro for aerial perspective.
Film is purchased along the route. Mid-trip processing handled by Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas — one of the last full-service mail-order film labs in the country, which has developed film for me in the past.
DETAILS
Three histories travel with me: Webb and Frank’s, the medium’s, and my own. This is not a rediscovery. It is a continuation.
Dates: June 18 – July 3, 2026
Route: Massachusetts → Illinois → Iowa → Nebraska → Kansas → Oklahoma → Missouri → New York → Massachusetts
Link to Working Map: RoadtrippersMap
Join the conversation on Facebook, in the Middle Ground Facebook Group
ASK: Are there any family friends or people I should connect with along the route? I am looking for photographers, families, places to stay, yards to tent in, and suggestions. Contact me here or tim@timricephoto.com
I was featured on a photographer’s podcast, The Photowalk, an awesome weekly conversation about photography and life hosted by Neale James. We spent a good part of our talk discussing my trip; you can check it out here.
