The work is exploratory, with its guiding aspect, or “binding theme,” being the Pan-American Highway, a network of roads that reaches some 19,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina.

“The project isn’t necessarily intended to be just about feeling out of place,” Klimenko says. “I want to focus on the idea of connection. It’s as much [about looking for] the things that encompass all of us. What is America? What does it mean to me and to other people?” The project, which will eventually include the Highway’s North American expanses, searches for consistencies and universalities, exploring unifying aspects of Americanness as a way of understanding what makes one feel foreign. 

Klimenko’s search for these human consistencies, unsurprisingly, led to him eschewing the exoticized aspects of travel attractive to many photographers. “Go anywhere in the world and you’ll see tourists photographing a lot of the same things over and over again, coming back with a set of images that are probably similar to what you’d find on a Google image search, and that’s totally fine, I don’t want to shit on other peoples’ prerogatives or work…there are so many differences that should be celebrated, but I think what I’m really trying to focus on are some of the things that are overlooked because they aren’t different.”