Highway Oasis

‘Highway Oasis’ began as an act of recovery. After a decade of commercial photography, Maxwell Tomlinson drove over three thousand miles across Japan, sleeping in the car parks of roadside service stations — the Michi no Eki — with no fixed route and no guidebook. The resulting photographs are a deliberate turn away from the postcard Japan: instead of temples and landscapes, here are weed-strewn car parks, quiet petrol forecourts, roadside curiosities at dusk. What Tomlinson found in these in-between spaces was something harder to name — humour, strangeness, a kind of stillness that the more celebrated destinations couldn’t offer. The title comes from a service station visited during the trip, but over the course of the journey it became something larger: a way of moving through the world, finding contentment in solitude and in the act of looking. A book about photography as much as it is a book of photographs.