I’ve spent years traveling the world with a camera in hand. Photography has taken me to remote landscapes, silent streets, busy cities, and forgotten corners of the present. But no matter how far I’ve gone, there’s always been one place I could never reach: the past.
Newton Motel: Halfway to Somewhere
This project was born from that impossibility. With the help of generative AI, I’ve set out to create something I thought I’d never be able to: a photo reportage in 1958. Not a reconstruction, not a pastiche, but a sincere attempt to explore a moment in time that I could never have witnessed, through the lens of who I am today.
Set in a fictional roadside motel in the American Southwest, The Newton Motel, this series captures quiet portraits and atmospheric fragments of lives in transit. People who pass through. Who stay for a night, maybe two. Who leave a mark without meaning to.
The Newton Motel welcomes strangers from all walks of life; each carrying their own past, secrets, and dreams. Meet the faces behind the doors. Some are running away, others are chasing something. All of them caught in a moment that won’t last.
This isn’t a documentary. It’s fiction, yes, but built with the same attention, patience, and respect that I would bring to a real reportage. Because even if the past is unreachable, its stories still deserve to be told.
Behind every room number, a story.
A veteran searching for peace. A teacher with doubts. A runaway. A mother-to-be. Each carrying a story, each leaving something behind. Meet the travelers who stopped at the Newton Motel.
Mae Newton
Owner of the Newton Motel
Walter Newton
Mae’s husband
Lily Williams
A young woman on the run
Ernie Delgado
The Motel’s cook
Sam Miller
The Motel’s Mechanic
Maria Ramirez
Heading to California
Harold Okoye
visiting an old friend
June Newton
The Newton’s Daughter
The Newton Motel
The Newton Motel isn’t just a setting. It’s the heart of this story. A quiet outpost in the Arizona desert, it holds the silence, the dust, and the echoes of every life that’s passed through. Step inside, and stay a while.
