I’m quickly running out of time before the imminent arrival of my second child (due next week) so my series on the road trip in photography is going to be much briefer than I’d originally envisioned.

In this second post I’m going to look at the work of three photographers who have each produced hugely significant photographic documents while using the road trip as a vehicle for exploring American society. The photographers are Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore. In a future post, I’ll turn to the work of some European photographers who have explored their own homelands via road trips. I’m afraid that most of the text that follows has been taken from the publishing blurb. Apologies, but it’s lack of time!

Robert Frank- The Americans

“That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eig ht states in an old used car (on Guggenhiem Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genuis, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.” Jack Kerouac, from his introduction to The Americans

Robert Frank made this seminal body of work after leaving his native Switzerland, heading out on an extended road trip across the United States. First published in 1959, this book, one of the most famous and influential photography books ever published, consists of a series of photographs taken by Frank on a trip through America between 1955 and 1956 – pictures of normal people, everyday scenes, lunch counters, bus depots and cars, and the strangely familiar faces of people we don’t quite know but have seen somewhere. As Kerouac writes in his introduction, Frank’s photographs had “sucked a sad, sweet, poem out of America.” The slightly offset angles and the blurred focus of many of the photographs suggest the nervousness and dislocation of the people they capture. Frank dispels any romantic notions of the lingering pioneer spirit of America by presenting a landscape of people and places absent of hope and promise.

The Americans has just been re-released, published by Steidl, and Joel Sternfeld was on hand at Steidl’s Gottingen press to witness the process along with Robert Frank. On writing of the experience in PLUK magazine (Summer 2008) Sternfeld comments: “When I was first becoming a photographer in the late sixties his book The Americans was already a landmark – that’s much too weak a word but what other term should you use for a body of work that changed the course of the river of photography forever? I would look at it before I went to sleep and in the morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again.”

Sternfeld goes on to write: “He [Frank] has come to Europe to receive a prize in Spain but the real agenda was to see if the Switzerland of his childhood would be the right place for his final days. Surprisingly, it failed in that regard. Robert wanted to go home: to America…..He spoke of his desire to return to America, of what a good country it was that it had given him his chance…..I thought about ‘home’ and its power, and about an idea I have that many of the great practitioners photograph their ‘home’ landscapes. I had excluded Frank from my thesis because America was not his home. But now it was. A phrase ‘I did not choose this place but now I am of it’ came to mind.”

Joel Sternfeld, American Prospects

Since publication of The Americans, many photographers have made personal journeys to take the cultural and political temperature of the United States, but none has done so with more conviction than Joel Sternfeld.

Supported, as Frank had been, by a Guggenheim fellowship, Sternfeld set off cross-country in 1978, driving a camper van. His quest, he says, was that “of someone who grew up with a vision of classical regional America and the order it seemed to contain, to find beauty and harmony in an increasingly uniform, technological and disturbing America.” The photographs that resulted would become his first, now classic book, American Prospects.

American Prospects is an exploration of the landscape as simultaneously idyllic and dystopian, reflecting on the changing states of American society. Over eight years, Sternfeld crossed the American continent in a camper van taking images of what he saw, which included the most familiar and the unexpected. The impact of this body of work continues to resonate through contemporary artistic, filmmaking and photographic practice.

Sternfeld’s angle in his photographs is that of a local. Yet his home appears to have many different facets. On the one hand, there’s the America in which he spent a sheltered youth and whose stories he heard and, on the other hand, there’s the America which he got to know on his trips after 1978: monotonous, overly technological, confusing, bizarre. On his journeys, he lost his faith in an ideal world, but he did not abandon his sense of humor and sarcasm – both are always present in his photographs.

While Sternfeld tends to shoot pictures of common people in common settings, he always manages to uncover extraordinary motifs in those ordinary scenes. His prosaic still lifes capture the irony and strangeness of everyday America in the form of monumental images. A good example is the bizarre shot of the collapsed elephant on a country road in Washington State. Are we witnessing staged reality here? We are not, since nothing is staged in Sternfeld’s shots, nothing manipulated – he just keeps showing up in the right place at the right time.

Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places

“Until I was twenty-three I lived mostly in a few square miles in Manhattan. In 1972 I set out with a friend for Amarillo, Texas. I didn’t drive, so my first view of America was framed by the passenger’s window.” Stephen Shore, 1982

Shore is one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, best known for his photographs of vernacular America taken in the early 1970s two bodies of work entitled American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. These projects paved the way for future photographers of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ such as Martin Parr, Thomas Struth, and Nan Goldin.

On July 3, 1973, Stephen Shore set out on the road again. This road trip marked an important point in his career, as he was coming to the tail end of American Surfaces and embarking on a body of work that is known as Uncommon Places, which was published by Aperture in 1982.

Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore’s images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance.

Quoting Thomas Weski, in Stephen Shore: Photographs, 1973-1993, “Although Shore’s photos also present the status quo in the America of the 1970s, they are not documentary photographs of the type produced for the police, or for architects or archaeologists. Photos of that type are produced according to set rules, so that they can later be evaluated on a scientific basis. Shore uses the stylistic methods of documentary photography, but his images are the results of a subjective vision. He therefore stands in the tradition of the photographers who shaped this apparently objective style of personal photography: Eugene Atget with his photos of Paris at the turn of the century, and Walker Evans with his photos of America at the end of the 1920s. Like those two photographers, Shore also works in series. The individual shots are placed in a sequence, in a visually complex system of references, and the cumulative effect of the photographs allows them to be viewed at several different levels.”

Shore has also just published the aptly named book A Road Trip Journal, which documents a month-long journal he kept in June 1973. In a deadpan, unemotional style, Shore’s journal itemizes where he stayed, what he ate, which television programs he watched, what photographs he took, how many miles he drove, and how many postcards he distributed on each day of his trip. The journal also includes postcards of the towns where he stayed as well as some of his own photographs alongside hotel, restaurant, and gas station receipts.

You can read an in-depth interview with Shore on Seesaw magazine here.

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Now that my journey across England is nearing an end, I wanted to look at the notion of the road trip in photography. While I’ve already touched on the timeline of British photographers who have used the road trip as a vehicle for documenting England/Britain, I want to now turn my attention to the work of American photographers. I’ll do this over several blog entries (I will look at European photographers in a future post).

Highway culture has long been a quintessential part of American identity and is also reflected in the canon of contemporary American photography who have worked within the tradition of the road trip across America. Names such as Jeff Brouws, Tim Davis, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Todd Hido, Dorothea Lange, Ed Ruscha, Lise Sarfati, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Alec Soth, Mark Steinmetz, Joel Sternfeld, and Garry Winogrand and others, have all embraced the genre. Several of whom have been major influences in my own work (particularly in Motherland), notably the work of Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld.

By way of an introduction to the genres I’m posting up details of an exhibition that was held at the Yancey Richardson Gallery last summer called Easy Rider: Road Trips Through America, which focussed on the road trip in American photography.

Jeff Brouws, Route 248, Four Buttes, Montana, 2004

The following text is taken from the Easy Rider exhibition press release-

“Easy Rider explores the common themes of social commentary, cultural geography and photographic biography produced by the marriage between the road and photography. Included are photographs and videos dating from 1935 to 2006.

The road allowed Farm Security Administration photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to document the plight of Americans suffering floods and dustbowls during the Great Depression. Similarly bleak, Robert Frank’s mid 1950s road trips yielded a portrait of the nation at odds with the projected optimism of the era and culminated in The Americans, a landmark publication, which influenced generations of later photographers.

The open road as a symbol of freedom is exemplified in Allen Ginsberg’s 1964 shot of Neal Cassady at the wheel of Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster bus; Cassady’s incessant cross-country journeys were a primary inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s definitive Beat generation novel On the Road. Having spent four years riding with the motorcycle gang the Outlaws, Danny Lyons produced the book The Bikeriders, which emblazoned motorcycle counterculture onto the American psyche and inspired the film Easy Rider.

Subsequent generations of photographers continued to take to the road in order to explore the cultural landscape. Traveling on a 1969 Guggenheim to study the effect of the media on public events, Garry Winogrand recorded America’s restlessness through its political rallies, peace demonstrations and space shuttle launches. In the 1970s Mitch Epstein looked at recreation across America while Joel Sternfeld’s wryly-funny photographs often showed man at odds with nature. Alec Soth followed the watery artery of the Mississippi River to make pictures of the dreams; both lost and fiercely held, of those he encountered. More recently, Tim Davis traveled the country to seek out the presence of politics in today’s life; in St. Louis he found a wall mural of the United States depicted as one grotesquely stretched red state.

Several photographers have looked closely at the details and detritus of American culture for clues to its soul. William Eggleston’s photograph of an elegantly wallpapered restaurant wall plastered over with the business cards of its patrons shows commercial aspirations trumping style. On the bare chipboard walls of Reverend and Margaret’s Bedroom, Soth memorializes a moving display of family photographs while Lisa Kereszi’s discovery of a biker bar’s photographic collage of women flashing their breasts reveals the misogynist underbelly of road-worshipping motorcycle culture.

Many photographers have constructed a kind of biography of roads traveled, places visited and people encountered, often including themselves and family m embers. In 1962, Ed Ruscha photographed isolated gas stations along Route 66 filling half the picture frame with the street at his feet. Lee Friedlander frequently incorporated himself into his car images, staring into the camera through the windshield or via the side view mirror. In his witty series America and Me, recent Bard graduate William Lamson photographed himself interacting with elements of the roadside landscape, always hiding his face but freely revealing the shutter release. Poolside at a roadside inn, Stephen Shore incorporated his young wife Ginger into a minimalist composition of color and light. Accustomed to working on the road, Justine Kurland adjusted to motherhood by photographing her young son living with her in a camper van on an extended road trip.

Jeff Brouws has made a career of photographing along highways, evolving from cataloguing the relics of small town roadside architecture to documenting the negative impact of thruways in the 21st century. His 2004 image of a rusting red car upended in a field presents a pessimistic view of contemporary road culture: the car as a dinosaur on the road to nowhere.”

My subsequent posts will look at the work of individual photographers.

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I’ve long been fascinated by the tradition of the road trip in photography, partly thanks to the work of some of my early photographic influences notably Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld and of course Stephen Shore. All have employed extended journeys as an avenue for exploring America’s cultural landscape. Interestingly, Shore is just about to publish a new book with Phaidon aptly titled Stephen Shore: A Road Trip Journal

Similarly many writers and artists have also made extensive journeys to produce work, from H.V. Morton’s In Search of England and JB Priestley’s English Journey to Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain and Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space.  In his diaries, J.M.W. Turner talks about extended summer trips around England, where he’d take time to visit his patrons and undertake new commissions.  He worked in areas that attracted well-to-do summer tourists and their families, sketching scenes they might like to remember and admire again in watercolours.

Here’s an article from the New York Times in 2004 called Travels With Walker, Robert and Andy about the ”on the road” tradition in photography.

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