A Close-Up View of American Life on the Road

Around a decade ago, the photographer Phil Jung had just shot what would become the first image in his series, Windscreen. Pointing his camera through the windshield of an old American car in Cape Cod, Jung captured a strange scene: a bottle of aspirin and a toothbrush laid out on the dashboard. “I got interested in the story behind it,” Jung says.

Windscreen, which he’s worked on more or less continuously since then, distills American life down to the pieces of it we leave behind in our cars. “The car represents the American ideal—exploration, class mobility,” Jung says.