London based photographer Lucie Rox hit the road for her latest project, There is no one on the Streets, driving across America with her friend, and author of the zine’s intro text, Fanny Cardin.

Having flown out to the US to visit a friend and travel the country Rox took her camera – it’s second nature – without the aim of turning the trip into a project. Setting off from New York the pair hit Baltimore, Dallas, Austin, Memphis, Nashville, Chicago and Detroit, travelling via buses throughout.

Due to the organic way in which the zine formed, the series sets aside potentially limiting themes and instead takes us on a personal journey between two friends. But looking back on the series Rox saw that a theme had naturally formed, a sense of “emptiness and loneliness” glues the images together. And it is for this reason the title, There is no one on the streets – a line taken from Cardin’s intro – struck a chord with the photographer.

Alex James Taylor: Tell us about how the idea first came together…
Lucie Rox: The idea of doing a zine actually came last. I went to America to visit my friend Fanny and travel with her, and it seemed quite obvious that I had to take a camera with me. I had never done this sort of project before as I mainly shoot fashion and really didn’t even see it as a full project at the time, I left with a new film camera that I had never used before and would have been quite happy if I came back with a few shots that I liked. Turned out I was constantly stopping to take pictures while we were walking around the cities and that when I got the pictures back from the lab in London there were more than only a couple of shots I wanted to use – and that it was probably the images I was the most happy with ever. I started editing them and putting them together and it felt like a sort of story emerged from the whole. That’s really when the idea of making a zine came.

AJT: What/who were you attempting to capture?
LR: As I said, I didn’t really plan anything before I left. I didn’t go thinking ‘I’m gonna do a book about this or that’ so I wasn’t really looking for anything specific during the process of shooting the zine. I guess it was all very organic and spontaneous, I started to ask people who interested me for any reason if I could take pictures of them, and stopped overtime my eyes caught light, colours or shapes to take a picture. Taking pictures was more a for me to try to grasp something from this strange and fascinating place and try and understand it somehow. I’m still taken aback by America as whole, I find it so strange and familiar at the same time, shooting a lot there was maybe just a way for me of coping with its paradoxes ?

AJT: How did you plan your route?
LR: We literally just sat down and looked at a map and pointed at all the places we wanted to go and then cut it down to what was doable as neither of us were driving and we had to take buses everywhere so journey were a bit longer!

AJT: Did you come across any complications?
LR: As she mention in the text she wrote for the zine, we got mugged on the last day of the trip and Fanny ended up with a broken nose so you can probably call that quite a compilation. Everyone was fine at the end and we didn’t let it damage our memories of the whole trip but could definitely have found a best way of ending it!

AJT: What is it about America that appeals so much to you and makes it so photogenic?
LR: I mean the light and all the colours there are just insane. You feel like you walk in a William Eggleston book all the time, I really understood why there was so many great street photographers over there. The urban landscape in itself is really graphic and appealing and again, I’ve never seen such a light before. But more than that, it’s just such a strange country to me, a lot of it feels completely alien and I haven’t quite grasp what it is yet. I guess it is that lack of full understanding that makes me so attracted to it again. There’s part of it that I love, but at the same time I really hate. For example, you can just feel just how segregated by just walking for an hour and that really shocked me over there.

AJT: Where were your favourite places?
LR: I’d say Baltimore and Chicago. Detroit too, I’d really like to go back.

AJT: And where did the title originate from?
LR: The title is an extract from Fanny’s introduction text which I felt illustrated well the sort of emptiness and loneliness you can feel in most of the book’s pictures. Also relates to the fact that we didn’t have a car and were walking everywhere in all of those towns, and all the streets were pretty empty are at least there were no other pedestrians than us as everyone drives for everything in America!

Lucie Rox will be showing her new zine at the Hard Lines exhibition at Doomed Gallery on February 18th