The great American road trip is a concept etched in the minds of travelers around the world. Books like Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” and John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”, songs like “ROUTE 66” and movies like “Easy Rider” highlight the open roads and amazing scenery of America’s Southwestern highways. Empty asphalt stretches through the hot dusty lands of last chance gas, cheap motels, and lonely cactus.
Photographers especially harbor secret desires of leaving it all behind in favor of an adventure through the American heartland between the coasts. Walker Evan’s portfolios of the vernacular, architecture concerned with domestic and functional rather than monumental buildings, and everyday people struggling to survive. Farms, truckers, laborers, signs trying to entice those passing through to slow down and stop for a moment.
The book that no doubt inspired a generation of photographers to hit the American highways and small towns was Robert Frank’s “The Americans”. Wildly popular in France and Europe no doubt even today you will find European photography enthusiasts on the highways and in the national parks inspired to make the great American road trip from this book.
The United States is a vast country with so many different regions and experiences of course from the great cities like New York City, Chicago, Los Angles, Houston, to regions like the Pacific Northwest, New England and south. Each with its own treasures, sights, food and even accents. But for many worldwide who grew up on a steady diet of Hollywood Westerns and car commercials, it’s the American Southwest – Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico that captures the imagination of the Great America Road Trip.