Last year, photographer Jordan Bower used the ad space on a Toronto train to share his striking documentation of traveling in India. His goal was to encourage public discussion of the way we perceive other cultures, with the hope of overturning stereotypes and encouraging worldly curiosity. Now, using Kickstarter, he’s planning to do the reverse. “Walking to Mexico” is his ambitious plan to trek the 1,800 miles from the Vancouver to the Mexican border, while carefully documenting the people and places he encounters along the way. When he has completed the journey, he’ll display the resulting work in a public space in India, creating an exciting, cross-cultural dialogue of images and words.

We recently caught up with Jordan to ask a few questions about tackling such an unusual project. You can check out his answers below and support his ongoing project here here.

This a complex and time-consuming life/art project to tackle. what seeded the idea and how did it grow?

I’ve been in love with travel since I spent a semester studying in Europe when I was 17. Since then, the story of my travel has been a general dissolution of the barriers that separated me from authentic experiences. By that I mean that I began to feel as if traveling was complicated, even diminished when I viewed the world through an academic, professional, or Lonely Planet-style lens. These barriers encouraged me to idealize the cultures and places I was visiting and to see their existence as somehow separate from my own. I felt an intense desire to experience the world authentically, for all of its good and bad, and that drew me out of tour buses to explore a different style of travel. As I wandered farther afield, and especially as I began walking, I noticed how geographical travel was becoming an expression of the progress I was making on my inner journey. So the two types of travel — the outer and the inner — began to dovetail beautifully, and I have continually sought opportunities to tear down outer and inner barriers to be more and more real in my life. I feel so honored to be able to touch people in this way and I feel a big responsibility to create something that is worthy of their support and love.

What do you hope people will ultimately take from your voyages? Would you want them to follow in your literal foot-steps or are you trying to inspire something more conceptual — a change in perception?

What I’m working on is avoiding idealizing people, places, and relationships. When I look around me, I observe that many other people face a similar challenge: the language of advertising, for example, is all about how our lives and relationships would be much improved if only we purchased a certain product or implemented a specific change. It’s not that these claims are always lies — at times, these changes do bring positive benefits — it’s that the consequences of those choices are often more nuanced then the consumer tends to imagine beforehand. I think that comprehending the existence of nuance is key to taking responsibility, to becoming adult.

Your Kickstarter project specifically focuses on bringing images of American culture to india — what type of reaction are you anticipating? What do you think you will be showing that hasn’t been seen before in terms of Americans/American society?

I’ve found that most Indians I’ve met are eminently curious about foreigners. And the introduction of mass communications over the past decade tends to share ideas about America that are heavily biased. I think that seeing the subtleties and complexities of our society — poverty, interracial relationships, and homosexuality, but also family values, love, and intimacy — will be challenging to many conventionally held ideas. Frankly, I don’t know exactly what reaction to anticipate — that’s why I’m doing this! — but I know India well enough to suspect that it will be fascinating and meaningful.

Another component to this idea is reversing the flow of the conversation. Our language (i.e. First World vs. Third World) and our technological and economic superiority encourages the idea that our culture is better than a place like India. So when we consider some of the troubles in the world — the wars in Asia, the oil spills, the financial crises, climate change, etc. — it seems sensible to believe that the right answers are most likely to come either from us or from researchers working in our style of institutions in other countries. I want to challenge this assumption. My view is that presenting ourselves honestly and vulnerably is a greater step towards integrative peace than approaching people as a researcher, scholar, or aid worker. I hope my photos — and the ways that I share them — will provoke a different type of understanding of our culture and our situation than even we can imagine.

Any interesting experiences/encounters as a result of your Kickstarter project so far? How’s it been going?

It’s really important to me to approach the project in this way, through Kickstarter, to build a team of backers who want to participate in this journey along with me. I love that Kickstarter offers an avenue for right economics: an honest, transparent opportunity to offer value for value trades that aren’t just about money. It’s especially wonderful that Kickstarter provides a platform for me to discuss this idea with many people who I’ve never met before. All the support I’ve received has been tremendously inspiring, but I am particularly touched by the donations from strangers, especially ones in smaller denominations. When you think about it, it’s a big deal to go through the process of registering and putting in your credit card info because you want to send someone $5 or $10 as a way of encouraging them in their quest. I feel so honored [to be able to touch people in this way and I feel a big responsibility to create something that is worthy of their support and love.

Your leave date approaches quickly, how are you feeling?

I’ve tried not to think about it, in a way, even though I have been busy with planning and purchasing supplies. I know already that it will be different than I expect, and that uncertainty is already creating a lot of vulnerability for me. But another great part about Kickstarter is that I’ve made a commitment to 113 backers that I will follow through on this, and that helps me summon the courage to take the first step. I have a nervous excitement that I’m sure will become more pronounced over the next few weeks; I can’t wait to begin.

in sikkim, i met a man who was voting for the opposition party in last summer’s elections.  when i asked him about his views, he pulled a ratty postcard out of his wallet and said “i want my village to be like switzerland!”.  in ahmedabad, i chatted with a man who wondered “are the women that i see in pornography real or computer generated?”  we are well past the time when we can hope to insulate ourselves from pervasive imagery.  but it remains in our power to take the reins of the story and tell it a little bit differently.  this is what i’m working on: i’m calling it an experiment in cross-cultural storytelling.

this past spring, i purchased all of the interior ad space on a streetcar in downtown toronto.  if you’ve taken public transit in your city, you probably know the space that i mean: a series of panels that runs along the inside of the vehicle, just above the windows. my idea was to temporarily transform the space into a gallery-on-rails and see what would happen.  to do so, i shared a series of 34 intimate portraits from india, presented without any type of written description.  would this type of art provoke people out of their daily routines?  would they seek a different kind of connection with their fellow commuters?  would it change the way they viewed india?  you can view the series of photos that i chose here: www.whatdoesitmeantobeahumanbeing.ca

truthfully, most people didn’t look.  they were caught in their own head, or in their blackberries or iphones, and had allowed themselves to tune out of the space around them.  but those who did seemed significantly affected.  over hours of riding the streetcar, i engaged dozens of strangers in provocative conversation about the role of art and advertising in public space, and also about how much there was to love about india.  one girl i met told me that she had been in a really bad headspace, but that seeing the photos “made her day”.  nearly 30,000 commuters were exposed to the photos over the month; i received some significant positive press in the toronto star and on local blog blogTO.

this experiment totally convinced me of the value of this type of inspirational storytelling.

so now i’m on to the next phase in the experiment.  instead of showing photos of india in north america, i am planning to travel to india and show photos of us.  and to shoot those photos, i’m going to walk, as a pilgrim, 1,800 miles down the pacific coast of the u.s.  by slowing myself down to walking pace, i think i’ll be better suited to capture intimate, honest portraits of americans.  with those photos, i’ll return to india and find a public space – maybe a bus, a village square, the delhi metro, or something else i haven’t thought of yet – and hold a public exhibition.  my idea is to present a different version of us from the one typically portrayed in hollywood, bollywood, news, and TV.  maybe i can change some people’s ideas or touch them in a way that provokes greater understanding.  and maybe i can bring photos of the exhibition back here and show people how much it is that we all have in common.

i’m on a quest, as you can see, and in order to succeed, i needed the help of my community.  using a website called kickstarter.com, i reached out to friends, family and strangers with a request to raise 5,000 to fund the cost of my supplies and expenses for my walk.  within 10 days, they had answered; as of today, i’ve raised nearly $6,000 from 100 generous people.  in exchange for those donations, i offered several rewards, including prints of photos that i’ll shoot on the upcoming pilgrimage, as well as the actual prints that i displayed in the streetcar this past may. this is the beginning of my pilgrimage: asking for alms and collecting the companions who will make this journey with me.

i hope you can become one of those companions.  you can find out more about the project (and watch an overview video) here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/904479314/walking-to-mexico-an-experiment-in-cross-cultural

there are other ways i could benefit from your support.  please share the above link through your online social networks like facebook and twitter.  if you have great ideas about other organizations that could benefit from the exposure that i’ll generate, please suggest them to me.  if you have ideas for how and where i can present these photos in india next year, i’d love to hear them.  and if you live somewhere on the west coast and have a bed or couch to spare, i’d love to meet you somewhere along the way.  i think that this is the type of project that can resonate, and the only way that i can make it real is with your help.

i will be blogging along the way at walkingtomexico.com.  i hope that you can follow along.

thank you so much for your time and your support.

derek flack put together a fine recap of the conversation he and i had while riding the streetcar last thursday.  he explores one of the key observations about the installation: no one is looking.  he muses that

Somehow I doubt that this is merely the result of apathy. On the contrary, I’d speculate that this refusal is demonstrative of a disillusionment with the standard fare of images and ads, a prevailing disinterest in the predictable corporate offerings.

many of us are fluent in deconstructing how advertising defines our cultural myths.  sometimes, advertising does it for us: the introduction of heavy handed irony into marketing has allowed us to create the idea of “the system”, an implicitly threatening yet nebulous entity that is eminently powerful but impossible to confront.  the corresponding search for cultural authenticity (i.e. the hipster movement) has stemmed out of the way that we’ve accepted this nihilistic irony.   but having changed the topic with an ironic shrug for so long, corporations no longer have the credibility to say anything to us honestly.  “open happiness”, “joy it forward”, “love what you do”, “i’m lovin’ it”: these ideas can’t fit with how we have come to see big business and how we’ve been taught to view advertising.  we’re left confused, and maybe even a bit hurt by the way we see ourselves reflected through corporate eyes; it is only natural that we turn away.

the key outcome of the 2008 financial crisis and the failure of the copenhagen meetings has been the first genuine exploration of whether a society can be driven by the profit motive alone.  big business, which has spent so much time and money mining the collective unconscious to discover “consumer trends”, can’t find a way to engage itself in the conversation without an existential questioning of its own purposes.   its voice is stuck in a quickly receding past: with nowhere to develop, it is dead, left behind, collectively useless.  a new message must rush into that vacuum that more accurately reflects who we are now.

if we are to discuss the true questions of our culture -  how can we react to our changing influence on the world?  have our choices brought about a better world?  how do we orient ourselves towards one another, especially as viewed through technology?  how do we prepare ourselves for a future of exponential resource degradation? – we must develop a language predicated on principles of sharing, truth, justice, and love.  i don’t know if my installation is the masterpiece of this new message, but i do believe it is a harbinger of changing times.  i think that’s something worth thinking about when riding the streetcar.

i’ve been riding the streetcar nearly every day this week: it’s really something worth seeing.  i really hope you can make it.

Inspired by McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”, I’ve taken the photos off of the gallery walls, exhibiting instead in the interior ad space of TTC Streetcar #4025, which will be operating on normal service for the month of May, rotating daily between the 11 downtown lines.  By doing so, I’m exploring the way that cultural myths and personal identities are continually refined by the many thousand messages city commuters consume daily.

My exhibit was chosen by the Toronto Star as one of 10 exhibits worth viewing in a Contact Preview article (http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/whatson/article/801893–contact-festival-plenty-of-eye-candy-in-the-brothel-without-walls).  I also received an extensive profile on the cover of the Entertainment section of the Sunday Star (http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/806573–brush-with-death-made-jordan-bower-get-serious-about-photos ).