Will Cook waits for his hours of service to start at a rest area on I-70 west of St. Louis in May of 2022. Cook is also the founder of America Without Drivers. The grassroots organization is focused on the jobs and safety-related issues associated with driverless trucks.Unless otherwise noted, all photos and their captions by James Year
A photo exhibit chronicling working truckers in the face of unprecedented technological change is currently on display at the Newhouse School of Public Communications on the campus of Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.
The exhibit, entitled “Stealing Fire: The Collision of Trucking and Automation,” features the work of photographer James Christopher Year. Year was the 2023 professional recipient of Newhouse's prestigious Alexia Grant, which attracts hundreds of applicants from around the world. The grant, per its website, “exist[s] to help professional and student visual storytellers produce projects that inspire change and foster understanding by addressing significant topics.”
James Year
Stealing Fire itself is a reference to Prometheus, who in Greek mythology was a Titan and self-serving trickster. Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mankind.
Through his work as a photojournalist, James Year hopes to help the public see “trucking as an allegory for the automation of everything,” he said. “Proponents of AI make the argument that there hasn’t been a technological advance in the past 300 years that didn't improve the way we live. I’m not an AI doomsayer, but we’ve never automated human thought before. Nobody knows what outcomes this will create. I’m worried about the social upheaval this will cause in the next 10 to 20 years.”
For the expansive "Stealing Fire" project, he would travel 25,000 miles through 27 states all told, running with owner-operators and drivers of all stripes. He photographed various, often disparate parts of the trucking world.
