The idea of the great American road trip – a voyage outwards into new experiences, and inwards into a new consciousness – began in earnest with Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, in 1957. Two years later, it was Kerouac who wrote the introduction to the first US edition of The Americans by Robert Frank, a now classic photography book in the iconoclastic spirit of the Beats.
Although photographers from Ansel Adams to Walker Evans had photographed America, David Campany chooses The Americans as the starting point for his critical journey into the photographic road trip, noting that the Swiss-born Frank set out with his Guggenheim Grant to do something new and unconstrained by commercial diktats. His aim was to photograph America as it unfolded before his somewhat sombre outsider’s eye.
From the start, Frank defined himself against the traditional Life magazine school of romantic reportage. “I wanted to follow my own intuition and do it my way, and not to make any concession – not to make a Life story... those goddamn stories with a beginning and an end.”
To a degree, every photographer included here has journeyed in the long shadow cast by The Americans, and found their different ways to escape it.
In 1963, Ed Ruscha self-published Twentysix Gasoline Stations, in which he chronicled, in a formally rigorous way, the gas stations he passed on his regular trips home from LA to Oklahoma City. Like Frank, Ruscha wanted to avoid any trace of romanticism, but he created a kind of non-style that seemed to dispense even with subjectivity. He was looking, he said, for the “huh?” factor, and the impact of his cheaply produced, limited-edition book resonates to this day.
Inge Morath is the first photographer in the book to move from monochrome to colour for her series The Road to Reno, which was made en route to the set of The Misfits in 1960. More intriguingly, she also kept a written diary of her thoughts about a country that bemused and baffled her. “Practically nothing announces the approach of one of the most extraordinary places I was to see on this trip,” she writes of Las Vegas, emerging out of the desert and “wearing stage makeup in full daylight with the sophistication of a ham actor in an ambulant road show”.
As befits its title, The Open Road ranges far and wide – from Victor Burgin’s static road movie, US 77, to Alec Soth’s dreamlike Sleeping by the Mississippi, which nods to Evans, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, but still manages to evoke yet another America of the imagination.
Campany deftly traces the road trips made by pioneers of colour, like Shore and William Eggleston, and also directs us to the “immersive and angry realism” of the overlooked Jacob Holdt, whose American Pictures is a visceral critique of rampant consumerism and, as Holdt put it, “the alarming human costs involved in not having a welfare state”.
Interestingly, Ryan MacGinley and Justine Kurland are included, but Vanessa Winship’s understatedly powerful recent series, She Dances on Jackson, is an omission. Instead, Campany ends his survey with Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs’ series The Great Unreal, which, even more than Todd Hido’s shadowy Ohio, evokes an America that seems to have been hallucinated rather than photographed.
The journey outwards – and inwards – continues apace; if anything, America seems to have grown more indistinct and unreal in the camera’s gaze of late, more David Lynch than Robert Frank. The road trip, then, is still a trip in every sense of the word.
The Open Road is published by Aperture (£40). Click here to buy it for £30
