Across America from the Air: Following the Bull Run from Los Angeles to Miami

David Corfield reflects on one of his more ambitious assignments – crossing America in pursuit of some of the world’s finest supercars.

There are journeys you remember because of the places you visited, and others that become almost impossible to separate from the sensations surrounding them: the people, the noise, the smells, the light and the extraordinary circumstances in which you experienced them. My journey across America, from Los Angeles to Miami, was one of the latter.

I was not crossing the United States in a conventional way. There was no Greyhound bus, no rented Cadillac and no succession of anonymous interstate exits. Instead, I was travelling as a photojournalist aboard a Hughes 500C helicopter, following the flamboyant travelling spectacle known as the Bull Run.

It was an extraordinary assignment. I was working for three very different publications – the Mail on Sunday, FHM and Octane – each with its own audience and editorial expectations. I needed cars, personalities, atmosphere and a broader sense of the event. Yet the helicopter transformed the job into something much bigger. What began as an assignment about exotic machinery became a journey through America itself.

From Los Angeles we headed east, crossing remarkable landscapes before eventually arriving in Miami. From the air, the United States became a changing cinematic panorama. Urban sprawl gave way to desert, rock formations, mountains and immense empty spaces. Arizona opened beneath us in shades of ochre, red and gold. In places the landscape seemed untouched by civilisation; elsewhere roads, railways and towns appeared as fine lines across an enormous canvas.

The Hughes 500C was not a luxurious way to travel. It was compact, noisy, purposeful and very obviously a working machine. Sitting inside it with cameras and equipment was nothing like sitting in the back of an airliner. There was no sense of being insulated from the environment. The noise was constant, the vibration travelled through the airframe and into your body, and the smell of aviation fuel became part of the experience.

For a photographer, however, it offered something remarkable. With no side door between me and the landscape, there was nothing but air, altitude and a camera separating me from America below.

Arriving in Los Angeles

Before the helicopter even lifted off, there was another first for me: Los Angeles.

Like so many people of my generation, I felt as though I already knew the city. My idea of it had been constructed from films, television, photographs, magazines and music videos: Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard, palm trees, sports cars and movie stars. The reality was simultaneously familiar and completely alien.

Walking along Sunset Boulevard produced the strange sensation of recognising somewhere I had never visited. The name was already part of my cultural vocabulary: not simply a road, but an idea absorbed through popular culture. Suddenly it was real, complete with traffic, shopfronts, signs and ordinary people going about their lives.

The Viper Room had the same effect. I knew it from photographs, stories and the news reports surrounding the death of River Phoenix. Standing outside it, the boundary between popular culture and physical reality seemed briefly to disappear. That became one of the recurring pleasures of the trip: encountering places I had previously known only through images.

The Mondrian hotel left another strong impression, particularly its rooftop bar. Looking across the skyline, I began to understand the scale of Los Angeles. It was not one concentrated city but a patchwork of roads, buildings and lights stretching towards the hills and beyond. Sitting above it all, drink in hand, I sensed this journey would be unlike anything I had done before.

Around us, anticipation for the Bull Run was building. A Porsche was being covered in event stickers on the street, an Aston Martin was having its carburettors tuned in a basement, and remarkable cars seemed to appear by the hour. It was a rolling collection of some of the most desirable machinery imaginable.

The people were equally interesting. There were celebrities, wealthy enthusiasts, larger-than-life personalities and serious car lovers who had the means to indulge their passion. For a photographer, it was a gift. There were stories everywhere.

The Bull Run

The Bull Run was unlike a conventional motor race. There was no circuit, no predictable sequence of cars passing the same corner and no fixed viewpoint from which to work. It was a travelling spectacle in which the cars, their occupants, the cities, hotels, roads and unexpected encounters all became part of the story. Its unpredictability was central to its appeal.

My job was to document it while keeping pace. I had always loved cars, so photographing exotic machinery in extraordinary surroundings felt ideal. A Porsche outside a Los Angeles hotel had one kind of drama; an Aston Martin beneath palm trees another. But a Lamborghini crossing the Arizona desert became something else entirely. The farther we travelled, the more surreal the combinations became.

The Hughes 500C became my mobile photographic platform, although working from it was more difficult than it sounds. There was vibration, wind, movement and constantly changing angles. You could not simply frame an image and wait for the decisive moment because both you and your subject were moving. You had to anticipate, work instinctively and accept that some pictures would disappear before you could make them.

That was part of the excitement. The helicopter forced me to look differently and to make decisions quickly. Instead of controlling the environment, as you might in a studio, I was responding to a landscape, aircraft and convoy that refused to stay still.

America from the Air

There is something profoundly humbling about looking down at America from a helicopter. On the ground we understand a country through practical geography: roads, towns, destinations, miles and driving times. From the air, many of those distinctions disappear and the landscape becomes immense.

A road can run towards the horizon for what seems an impossible distance before dissolving into heat haze. A town that might take half an hour to cross becomes a small cluster of buildings surrounded by open land. A mountain range that seemed distant from the ground can suddenly dominate the horizon, revealing ridges, valleys and shadows invisible from below.

What struck me most was how quickly everything could change. America was not one landscape but thousands stitched together across an enormous continent. Los Angeles was dense, sprawling and intensely urban. Then, almost without warning, came the desert. The colours changed, the vegetation changed, the geology changed and with them the quality of the light. Even the atmosphere seemed different.

From the helicopter I watched the country continually transform beneath us. There were vast areas where it was difficult to imagine anybody living at all, followed suddenly by a road, a gas station, a settlement or a handful of buildings: small signs that people had established themselves within this extraordinary wilderness.

For someone who had spent much of his working life looking through a camera, it could be overwhelming. There were simply too many pictures. Everywhere I looked was another composition, pattern or collision of light and landscape demanding attention. Photography often requires the discipline to isolate a subject from visual noise. Here the challenge was almost the reverse: deciding which part of this abundance deserved the frame.

Sedona and the Arizona Desert

Sedona was one of the places that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Seen from the air, its red-rock formations possessed a scale and intensity that photographs struggle to convey. Towers and escarpments rose from the desert as if deliberately sculpted rather than slowly shaped over unimaginable periods of time.

The colours were remarkable. Reds, ochres, oranges and deep browns shifted as the sun moved across the rock, illuminating one face while throwing another into shadow. Yet what fascinated me most was not simply the formations themselves but their relationship with the landscape around them. That is one of the great attractions of aerial photography: it changes your understanding of a place.

From the ground, a mountain is principally something that rises in front of you. From the air, you see its actual form and the way it occupies the landscape. You see valleys carved around it, roads and rivers responding to its contours and settlements developing according to the geography. Features that appear disconnected at ground level suddenly belong to the same visual story.

At times Sedona looked almost unreal, closer to a film set than a natural landscape. There were moments when I simply stared instead of photographing. Even after a lifetime making pictures, a place can overwhelm the instinct to record it. You arrive with the camera ready, only to discover that sometimes the most appropriate response is simply to look.

Meteor Crater had a different effect. Somewhere in the immense openness of the Arizona desert lay this extraordinary wound in the Earth, roughly a mile across and hundreds of feet deep, created by a meteorite impact around 50,000 years ago.

From the air, the crater became a complete geological form. Its immense circular shape sat within an otherwise uninterrupted desert, looking sudden and violent rather than gradually evolved. Flying over it, I found it impossible not to think about the event that had created it: a piece of rock arriving from space with enough energy to excavate a vast cavity and leave a mark still unmistakably visible tens of thousands of years later.

The contrast was extraordinary – geological violence on an unimaginable scale, followed by millennia of silence. And there I was, hovering above it in a small helicopter with a camera in my hands. I took the photograph, but what has stayed with me much longer is the feeling of being there. Meteor Crater made the planet itself feel very old, and our own presence on it remarkably brief.

People, Cars and the Travelling Circus

For all the landscapes we crossed, the Bull Run was ultimately about people. The cars provided the visual hook, but the personalities gave the event its character. Helena Christensen was among the instantly recognisable faces, along with J.K., Richard Rawlings and a constantly changing collection of personalities from entertainment, television, motorsport and popular culture.

Meeting people in this environment was different from encountering them at a conventional celebrity event. There was no red carpet and little separation between celebrity and participant. Everyone was there because they loved cars, enjoyed the adventure and wanted to be part of the spectacle. That informality made people more interesting to photograph: talking, laughing, comparing cars, partying, then climbing back into their machines the next day.

The cars themselves could have filled an entire assignment. Aston Martins, Porsches, Ferraris and other exotic machinery were everywhere, but what made them especially compelling was the context. A beautiful Ferrari in a studio is an exercise in control: lighting, reflections and background can all be carefully managed. Put the same car on an American highway, surrounded by desert, mountains and enormous skies, and it becomes part of a much larger story.

That was what I wanted. I did not simply want pictures of cars; I wanted pictures of cars in America. The roads seemed wider, the skies bigger and the distances longer than I was used to in Europe. Looking down at a line of exotic cars moving through the desert, the scene felt cinematic. The tension between sophisticated machinery and ancient landscape was irresistible.

By night, the character of the Bull Run changed again. The days belonged to roads, helicopters and landscapes; the nights belonged to cities, hotels, bars and the people who had spent the day driving across the country. One moment I could be looking down at geological formations millions of years old, and a few hours later I would be surrounded by supercars, music and people who appeared to have stepped out of a fashion magazine.

This was where the needs of the different publications overlapped. One required cars and details, another glamour and personalities, while the newspaper needed the broader human story. As a photojournalist I could move between those worlds and recognise that the subject might change by the minute. Sometimes it was a Ferrari; sometimes the person beside it; occasionally simply the aftermath of the night before.

The Rhythm of the Journey

After a while, the trip developed its own rhythm: travel, helicopter, cars, photography, hotel, food, nightlife, sleep, then start again. Yet it never became repetitive because the country kept reinventing itself around us. The landscape changed, the architecture changed, the road changed and even the character of the light seemed to shift as the miles accumulated.

For a photographer, it was intoxicating. I have always believed that photography is partly about learning to see. You do not necessarily need a spectacular subject; you need the ability to recognise when something is visually interesting and understand why it might make a compelling image. Crossing America from a helicopter sharpened that instinct. I was constantly scanning for shapes, patterns, colours, contrasts and relationships that might disappear seconds later.

It also reinforced how closely America is tied to movement. From above, roads, cities and isolated communities revealed a country built around distance and mobility. The Bull Run amplified that relationship: cars moved from city to city, people from hotel to hotel and our helicopter above them, while the landscape beneath seemed almost purpose-built for the road trip.

That presented another challenge: I was never simply making pictures for myself. Each publication had a different audience. The enthusiast wanted the cars and details; the newspaper reader needed the story; the lifestyle audience wanted glamour, personality and atmosphere. The real task was to create images that went beyond the obvious. Anyone can photograph a Ferrari. The challenge is to make a photograph that says something about the Ferrari, the place and the moment in which you found it.

The same applied to people and landscapes. A celebrity portrait is more interesting when the person looks unguarded rather than staged. A famous landscape becomes more successful when it communicates some of the scale or emotion you felt in front of it. I wanted the photographs to be more than records; I wanted them to suggest what it had felt like to be there.

The Work Behind the Glamour

Travel assignments can sound impossibly glamorous in retrospect, and there was certainly glamour on the Bull Run: Ferraris, Aston Martins, celebrities, rooftop bars, remarkable hotels, Los Angeles, Sedona, desert landscapes and a helicopter. But there was also hard work.

The days were long, the equipment heavy and the pressure constant. Photographing from a moving aircraft brought its own uncertainty, while working for several publications meant returning with enough variety to satisfy very different editorial needs. Exhaustion does not disappear simply because the landscape is spectacular. Photography often looks glamorous from the outside; from the inside it is frequently about continuing to work while everybody else is having fun. I would not have swapped it for anything.

Miami and What Remains

Eventually the journey brought us to Miami. After the West and the desert, southern Florida felt almost like another planet. The red rocks and immense dry spaces had gone, replaced by humidity, water, colour, palm trees, architecture and a very different kind of energy. Los Angeles had been the beginning of the adventure; Miami felt like the conclusion of one world and the arrival in another.

Looking back, I find it difficult to separate the journey into individual photographs. There are the pictures I made, but also those I remember without a camera: the Mondrian rooftop, Sunset Boulevard, the sound and vibration of the Hughes 500C, Sedona's red rocks and Meteor Crater below us. I remember the cars, parties, conversations and constant movement, but most of all the sensation of being somewhere extraordinary.

Memory has a habit of editing reality. It removes some of the exhaustion and keeps the excitement; it softens the logistical difficulties and preserves the sunsets. Perhaps that is no bad thing, because what remains is usually what mattered.

The Bull Run brought together almost everything I loved about photography: travel, cars, people, landscape, unpredictability and storytelling. It also reminded me of one of photography's great privileges. A camera gives you a reason to go places, to look more carefully and to meet people you might otherwise never encounter. Occasionally, if you are fortunate, it even puts you in a Hughes 500C crossing America.

Most people experience a road trip through a windscreen. I experienced this one from above. Instead of seeing America as a sequence of destinations, I watched it unfold as one enormous connected landscape. Cities gave way to deserts, glamour to silence, modern machinery to geological time, yet everything was linked by movement.

Photography has also given me a memory bank. Every photograph is a doorway. Look at an image years later and you can suddenly recall the temperature, the smell, the sound, the conversation taking place beside you and, most importantly, the feeling you had when the shutter was released.

Every assignment has a final photograph, even if you do not recognise it as such at the time. Eventually the cameras are packed away, the helicopter lands, the cars disappear, the hotel room is emptied and the journey becomes memory. Some journeys, however, refuse to become ordinary memories.

For me, the Bull Run is one of those journeys. It took me from Los Angeles to Miami, but the mileage tells only part of the story. The real journey was from the familiar to the unfamiliar: from the mythology of Los Angeles to the Arizona desert; from nightlife and celebrity culture to landscapes shaped over geological time; from Ferrari, Porsche and Aston Martin to the immense natural forms of Sedona and Meteor Crater.

From the air, America was vast, beautiful, chaotic, glamorous and sometimes overwhelming. Following a convoy of extraordinary cars across a continent, I realised the journey was never simply about reaching the next destination. It was about everything between them: people, machines, cities, deserts, long days, changing light and the privilege of seeing a country at a scale few people experience.

It was about movement and freedom, but ultimately it was about the journey itself. For a photographer, there could hardly have been a better one to photograph.

Words and pictures © David Corfield