Photographer Pietro Lazzaris shares the story behind his intimate new series, which captures a close-knit community that has become an American archetype
While listening to trucker and folk musician ‘Long Haul Paul’ (Marhoefer) wax rhapsodically about his days and nights on his Over the Road podcast a few years back, photographer Pietro Lazzaris first felt the call of the wild. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2024 during a trip to Texas that he put pedal to the metal and embarked on Trucking – Today’s America as Seen From the Cab, an intimate series chronicling this quintessentially American brotherhood.
Gaining entrance into a world so far removed from his own was no easy task; Lazzaris undertook research, sent emails, and explained himself but was largely met by a wall of silence. Undeterred, he kept on trucking until he struck gold: the annual Tom ‘Uncle Bear’ Safford, Sr Memorial Truck Show held in Norwich, held in a tiny town in upstate New York during September 2024. Lazzaris sent the organiser a long email and finally received a response: “Cool, see you there.” Unwittingly mistaking casual dismissal for an open invitation, he showed up, much to the organiser’s surprise. “He didn’t really trust me, I later found out,” he says.
Determined to make a connection, Lazzaris approached some 90 truckers over the course of three days, hoping to get into a truck – but it was simply a case of mutual culture shock. “No one understood who I was or why I was there – like, who’s this young Italian dude with a real English accent? The whole story wasn’t that convincing to them,” he says. At the end of the third day, Lazzaris was out of luck and asked one of the truckers named Stray Cat for a ride out of town. “By the time we got to Syracuse, we had become friends in an hour,” he says.
For Stray Cat, trucking was a family business; his father and grandfather were truckers, and he began his apprenticeship at age 14. By 18, Stray Cat was on his own. “He’s now 45 and just wakes up every morning and starts driving. He doesn’t have a house. That’s his house,” Lazzaris says. “I stayed with him for a week. We kept spinning around: down to Pennsylvania, then to West Virginia, back to Massachusetts, and then New York again. By the end of the week, he had told this story to the other truckers at the fair, and they started me calling back.”
A trucker named Lil Al invited him to Washington State and accompanied him on a cross-country haul from Oregon to Boston that October. Once welcomed into the fold, Lazzaris came to understand that the job required a certain character and discipline to survive the dog-eat-dog nature of American capitalism. “There’s almost this romantic idea of pushing it to the limits. It’s long days and when you are done, you’re not at home,” he says. “They’re lone wolves: self-reliant, independent, and all of that, but at the same time, they are the biggest chatters. If you find a way to connect, they start talking and keep on talking forever because of loneliness. Deep down, most are really sweet people.”
Lazzaris rode through America during election season, barreling down the highways in an 18-wheeler; his patience and strength softly wore down the hardened mistrust of his compatriots. “It’s a really tiny, close community and it’s not receiving information from anywhere else,” he says.
Within that space, American masculinity is coded as rugged individualism that belies a more complex spectrum of gender and sexuality. While riding with Stray Cat in September, the trucker casually mentioned his partner’s pronoun: he. “I caught that and repeated it just to make sure because the truck had various signs of a straight man, like pictures of sexy women,” Lazzaris says. “We ended up ignoring the fact that, after two days together, he just opened up and revealed he is gay. The few that know accept him for who he is.”
Lazzaris would later learn that his arrival was the hot gossip of the Norwich truck show. “There was a rumour circulating within the truckers while I was walking around the fair and asking to be picked up, that there was this weird Italian camp guy, so they sent Stray Cat out as a tester,” says Lazzaris, who ultimately passed with flying colours. His photographs speak to a community that has become an American archetype, in no small part because it is largely impenetrable to outsiders.
“Most of the people that do it, do it for love more than for need but perhaps it’s a bit of a mix of both,” he says. “It’s a community that is also disappearing. I haven’t had the luck to experience it as they describe it but couldn’t show me. It was bittersweet to experience the last drops of it.”
