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Editor’s note: Our series “My Atlanta” turns the spotlight on photographers, using their images and supporting text to illustrate how living in Atlanta has inspired their careers and lives. Today, we feature the work of Beth Lilly.
Beth Lilly moved to Snellville from Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1975 and ran away from home that summer, taking only her Kodak Duaflex. She was found and returned but made some great images. She earned a bachelor’s degree in film production from the University of Georgia and an MFA in photography from Georgia State University. Her work resides in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, MOCA GA and the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Her critically acclaimed performance/interactive project “The Oracle @ WiFi” was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2012.
Lilly is represented in Atlanta by Spalding Nix Fine Art, where the work shown here (and more) will be featured in the main gallery January 20-March 10 2023″
When I think of the highlights of my life, one experience stays at the top of that list. I was working for Turner Broadcasting at the time and I volunteered to drive in the presidential motorcade for President Bill Clinton’s visit to Hank Aaron’s birthday bash.
Sure, it was great meeting the President, but it was the moment when I was following the Secret Service, barreling down the Downtown Connector at 90 miles an hour when my mind screamed, “I can’t believe I’m doing this!”
So it should not be surprising that I have several projects shot entirely on the interstate. And most of them while I am driving. Before you have a heart attack, let me explain. My camera, with a motor drive, is mounted on a tripod. As I pass another car, I press the release on the remote cord. Far less dangerous then fumbling with a cell phone. I’m not composing an image; rather I search later among thousands of images for the ones that reveal something compelling about the subjects’ inner lives.
The photographs presented here were shot on metro Atlanta interstates and are selected from my project, The Seventh Bardo. Bardo is a Tibetan term, meaning ‘the space between’; usually the space between death and rebirth. I find driving on the interstate to be a kind of bardo. It’s an opportunity to unplug for some much-needed introspection. The landscapes are inspired by this idea that the interstate is a unique place suspended in time and space, between leaving and arriving.
We live in a time when we have never prized individuality so highly and yet we have never been so lonely. Cars travel the interstate side by side, just feet apart, yet the passengers experience complete isolation. These portraits record their moments lost in thought or the brief moment of connection when they curiously look back at me.
Most of my photography, installation and video projects speculate on the nature of existence, often incorporating random chance in my process. My work is in the permanent collections of New Mexico Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Zuckerman Museum and MOCA GA. Except for a short stint in Athens, I’ve lived in Atlanta since 1975. I’m represented in Atlanta by Spalding Nix Fine Art. These six images (and more) will be featured at Spalding Nix early next year.
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Whenever I need to tell someone where I live in Atlanta, I say, “imagine the city of Atlanta as a clock with I-285 as the circle. Clarkston is at three o’clock, just outside the Perimeter.” Love it or hate it, we define ourselves in relation to this boundary. It’s one of the few cities I know where social assumptions are made about you based on whether you live OTP or ITP.
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As I’ve tried to make peace with Atlanta, a city I loathed as a teenager and now adore, I’ve embraced the bizarre role the interstate has in its DNA. Many cities have a beloved river that runs through it; Paris has its Seine, London the Thames. We have the 75-85 Downtown Connector, a raging river that never ceases; loud and dangerous, you can only cross at the bridges that periodically connect east and west.
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Maybe it’s because I arrived in Atlanta in my formative years that it felt like a brand new city — all skyscrapers and interstates. It was in the ’70s, a decade of explosive growth for the city. I’m definitely not proud about it but I admit I came from a white-flight family that transferred from Charlotte, down I-85, to the Atlanta suburbs. The interstate was my escape from a place I didn’t fit in, my way into culture and life in all its amazing variations. I knew that one day, after I graduated high school, it would be my way into adulthood.
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I frequently tell the story of how I would become overwrought as a suburban teenager, angry and rebellious. I wanted to run away but I was smart enough to know how that would turn out for a teenage girl. So instead, late at night, I’d drive to 285 and circle the city, imagining that I was leaving all of my troubles, escaping to the open road to find freedom and adventure, until I had calmed down or ran low on gas.
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If you look at an interstate map of Atlanta, it looks like a stick figure; 285 is its big round body, 75 and 85 come in at the top as upraised arms. They join to form the trunk at the bottom of the circle and split off to form the legs. Highway 400 comes in as the neck and I-20 is the belt across its tummy. You can literally see the strata of economic status in the interstate — the rich folks outside the city zoom past commuters, high above them on the flyovers; a real-life Metropolis, the 1920s silent film by Fritz Lang.
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I found my people in Athens and I never intended to come back to Atlanta, but life intervened and I’ve concluded that it was just meant to be. I put down roots and embraced its idiosyncrasies. Now, when I’m navigating the city and I get those spectacular views of the skyline and the monstrous interstate structures, I marvel at its sheer size, complexity and energy. Driving is right up there on my list of favorite things to do and this city was made for me. It’s no surprise they filmed Baby Driver here. I find an odd sense of pride living here — if you can drive in Atlanta without disaster, no other American city can possibly intimidate you.
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