“Here I was at the end of America – no more land – and now there was nowhere to go but back.” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Road trips have been central to the evolution of American photography—but why? Perhaps it’s because the road serves as a unifying thread across generations, offering a visual record of both continuity and change in the landscape. If “road trip” photography truly exists as a genre, it encompasses everything from visual poetry and joy rides to political polemics and journeys of self-discovery. The westward pull, deeply rooted in the national psyche, continues to drive these journeys—a longing for reinvention. For freedom. To discover the very essence of America itself.
In the beginning there was Walker Evans, who never specifically made a project about the Open Road, but essentially was a road photographer, in that the car itself was integral to his work. Evans was particularly interested in exploring small towns and the idiosyncrasies within them, in the turbulent 1930’s. His seminal book American Photographs from 1938 gave birth to the idea that a travelling photographer could shoot and sequence a body of photographs to narrate a response to the nation as a whole.
His sensibility and influence is seen in all the subsequent projects of the great Americans of the road – in Robert Frank’s The Americans, Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces, Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects, Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, and later in developed by Justine Kurland, who elaborated on Evan’s idiom.
Perhaps the most influential body of work in American “road” photography is The Americans by Robert Frank. Frank’s worldview is clear—he values honesty and shuns anything phony. The Americans is both a celebration and critique of 1950s America, initially met with harsh criticism but now regarded as a masterpiece.
Funded by a government agency, Frank took over 27,000 photos during this project, before narrowing them down to just 83. Each image speaks to the U.S.’s diverse people and landscapes, the American dream’s weight, and the universal call to the wild.
‘Motoring’ and the road trip were marketed as consumerist experiences from the dawn of the automobile industry. Yet despite this fact, early road photography is often critical of consumerist culture and materialism. It’s as though “road” photography is informed likewise by both the hopes and disappointments of the USA as a great social experiment. Travelling photographers have repeatedly used this idea as a diving board, as if monitoring whether the experiment was a success or a failure.
One of the most under-appreciated but likewise one of the most important projects to deconstruct this idea is Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures, a personal odyssey across the United States, in which he slept in more than 400 homes, ranging from the destitute to the extremely wealthy, for more than 5 years.
However, not all “road” photography from the 20th Century criticises the nation. Other photographers have attempted to show the freedom and flightiness that the American roads inspire.
One such practitioner was Danny Lyon, who, immersing himself within his subject matter, produced The Bikeriders, a seminal work of photojournalism, accompanied by a landmark collection of photographs and interviews documenting the abandon and risk implied in the name of the bike gang Lyon was part of- the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. The year was 1968 and Easy Rider still hadn’t made its way into the American consciousness. Lyon’s work heralded the dawn of the counterculture era, in full leathers and side view mirrors.
It’s certain visual tropes of Americana such as Lyon’s bike gang which now help cement the nation in our collective consciousness. America as we imagine it is full of cliches. They confirm our sense of possibility, our fears of inequality, our expectations of both the sublime and the banal. Through their work, the greats of American “road” photography have both helped fuel and deconstruct these cliches.
The grandfather of modern color photography, William Eggleston, alongside Stephen Shore, particularly in his project American Surfaces, essentially catalogue these American tropes in both a poetic and regimented manner. Documenting everything from fast food meals to Cadillac cars, diners to dive bars, billboards to dashboards, these legends have created a visual encyclopaedia of what we consider modern America.
Later, both Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and Joel Meyerowitz would go on to elaborate on these – depicting stranger than fiction scenarios which prove that America truly is the land of infinite possibility. One recalls Sternfeld’s iconic image of a firefighter in a pumpkin patch as a house fire consumes a property in the background, an image consumed by orange.
More recently, Mike Brodie, who ran away from home at 17, offers a more raw take on the American road. Spending years riding freight trains and hitchhiking across the country, Brodie documented his transient lifestyle with a Polaroid camera he found behind a car seat. His images capture the unvarnished truths of a hidden, itinerant America, presenting a deeply personal yet universally resonant vision of freedom and survival on the margins.
Over a decade after his acclaimed debut, Brodie returned with Failing, a quieter, more introspective chronicle of life after the fire of youthful abandon. Now older, more rooted, and weathered by the detours of adulthood, the golden optimism of his early work gives way to a more fractured poetry. Yet the road still pulses beneath it all. Its promise may be bruised, even broken, but it remains — magnetic, inescapable, and always calling.
If there’s one thing certain about today’s USA, it’s that there is no single way to define the country. Yet the work of these photographic legends, along with a new generation of photographers – like Brodie and the more nostalgic Arnaud Montagard, for whom the lure of the road remains strong, offers a bridge between the old world and the new. From the mountains and canyons to the skyscrapers of the East Coast and the shores of Big Sur, this journey may be the best path to uncovering the ultimate truth of the nation—hidden behind the curtain of the American Dream
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