Mark Blondin

WRITER · PHOTOGRAPHER

Vila do Conde, PORTUGAL

"The official account is the first thing I stop believing."

In 1996 my family spent nine months crossing the country in a motorhome, and every few days I hunted down a phone line and filed the trip to a website we built as we went. That site is still live, unedited, at blondins.com. Thirty years later the job hasn't changed: filing from wherever I am, with no institution deciding what fits.

The essays take on how American systems actually run once you stop taking the official account on faith: health care that profits from managing illness rather than ending it, a safety net Congress last adjusted when gas was a dollar a gallon, diversity programs that added a face or two to the boardroom while the rent soared. I check the numbers, and I say where they came from.

The travel writing comes out of seven years without a fixed address across three continents, and now the coast of Portugal, north of Porto. A country reads differently from outside it. So does a news cycle.

I'm writing a book about the American medical-industrial complex and a memoir about leaving. Both of them start in the same motorhome.

"Still On Its Way to Cleveland," which Betsy and I wrote for Longreads, is the first published piece of that memoir.

THREE BODIES OF WORK

PHOTOGRAPHY

Three continents. One camera. The world as it looked.

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