The House of Rhys

A boy in a Midwestern American town stops mid-sidewalk for a 1980s Porsche 911 idling at a stoplight. He does not move until it does. He is roughly five years old. This is the first entry in a notebook that, much later, becomes this site.

A summer in Budapest with a Hungarian grandfather who knows the name and model of every car on the boulevard — Trabants, Skodas, Wartburgs, the occasional Mercedes — and pronounces a small editorial on each in turn. The boy learns that taking a machine seriously is its own form of affection.

A first camera. A first essay, written privately, on a 1968 BMW 2002 a neighbour declined to sell him. The essay does not change the neighbour's mind. It does change the writer.

Four years of writing about cars on the side of other work. Notebooks accumulate. A folder of unsent letters to chassis owners accumulates. The conviction that someone ought to be making this kind of record, in earnest, accumulates fastest.

Road Rhys is founded — a one-person studio, the House newly built, the ledger newly begun. Ledger № 0001 is shot in October. The first Folio is filed in November.

The site opens to the public. Six entries in the Archive. Three in the Folio. The work continues at its own pace — which is unhurried, and on purpose.