Feeding the need to make a verifying, and terrifying, and healing, connection to the genuine, Rita seeks to reveal the magical and profoundly democratic value of photography.

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Rita thinks road trips can heal the soul. She grew up in the Midwest and left home at 18 in a 1968 Ford Falcon her mother gave her that broke down right before she dropped out of college.

 

After that her various road trips were conducted via a Chevy pickup truck named Tuna that threw a rod in a Nebraska intersection, a Volkswagen hatchback that leaked gas into the engine block so badly it never had a chance to be named, a Volkswagen Bug named Dub with the floor boards rusting out so water splashed up on the front seat passenger, a Honda Civic named Nerd Car that was hit head on by a wrong-way driver on a California freeway in the pouring rain late for class, a Toyota Tercel named Hank that we drove to Niagara Falls and watched fireworks from stuck in a 4th of July traffic jam, a Geo Metro named Speck that was hit by a deer outside Santa Cruz and blew the air bags, and a Ford Windstar van named The Magic Wagon was bought for a song in Storm Lake, Iowa, but the side door falls off if you aren’t careful.