Journey of the Soul | How the Roads Started

The roads started as a way to keep going.

In 2016, along the backroads of Michigan’s Thumb, Sheryl L. Sutter began to photograph — not to build a catalog, not to open a shop. The work was private. Healing asked for somewhere to put the eyes. The barns were already there. The fields were already there. A turn off a familiar highway delivered a grey wall, a red gable, a shack in the trees, and for the length of that stop the rest of the day could wait.

That is how the MI Eye on the Thumb Collection began: one road, then the next, then the habit of returning. Lapeer County first, because it was home. Then Tuscola, Sanilac, Huron — the counties that make the mitten’s Thumb a place with its own weather and its own fence lines. Hegal. Caro. Hunters Creek. Elmwood. Vienna. Peck. Columbiaville. Names that were only pavement until the car slowed and the shutter opened.

A journey of the soul, if the title is going to mean what the work actually was, is not a grand departure. It is the decision to look carefully when looking was the thing that still helped. Attention became a practice. Presence became a route. The same building in March and again in August was not the same photograph, and that was reason enough to go back. Nearly two thousand frames later, the archive is still that practice, grown large enough to carry home as a print, a tile, a book of greys, a book of reds, a book of shacks.

The roads did not start as a map of landmarks. They started as the next quiet mile. A roof appearing where the trees opened. Sometimes a pair. Sometimes a trio. Sometimes one barn in a field wide enough that the structure looked like a period at the end of a long sentence. Fog in November. Gold in October. A clear Tuscola noon. The collection is those miles, kept.

What began as a private act of shifting focus became a public reverence for the rural soul of the Thumb — weathered wood, open ground, backroads that do not announce themselves. The journey is still the same one. Look. Remember. Stay long enough for the light to be honest. The shop, the galleries, the Perspectives pages: they are only the later shape of a morning that started with a road and a reason to stop.