 The Great Black Highway stretches out before us on the plains of America, a straight arrow pointing towards the horizon. The siren song of photographic possibilities it sends out is as strong today as it ever was. That same song that lured the likes of Walker Evans. Henry Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Lee Freedlander and Stephen Shaw to load up their cameras, fill their gas tanks and head out to create their own chapters in the album of the American Roadship Photography. These photographers and countless others have set out on their own individual roads of discovery, which sooner or later have all converged into a super highway of images that have combined to fill our minds with the photographic cliches that those of us from outside of America think of when we close our eyes and in our heads go out on that journey into the land of strange and limitless possibilities. How's it? How's it? Way back in 2001, I was sitting in the plane looking out the window as it descended through the clouds. I was getting my first glimpses of the USA. She was teasing me for a bit with glimpses of the suburbs and the endless roads. Then suddenly we dove under the clouds and a horizon exploded before me. It was flat, so very flat and wide with nothing breaking their eye as far as I could see. It was a suggestion that this land was big, that it was far, far bigger than anything I had experienced. Growing up, I'd had a diet of American TV, American films and American culture. In South Africa we even called trousers pants. So those first few days in America felt extremely surreal. Everything was at once familiar and yet oddly new. I got stupidly excited about seeing yellow school buses and there was a sign that said that there was gas, food and lodging to be had at the next off-ramp. That's the time. I thought that was just the name of a film and not an actual real sign. At the heart of those images in my head though, it wasn't the TV or the films or the books like on the road that I read. But it was the images of photographers who had taken that childlike wonder and who had gone west to, in the words of Gary Weinergrad, to see the world or to see how it looked photographed. This book, The Open Road, is an excellent celebration of road trip photography as a genre. Much like using a AAA roadmap, we're going to use it to seek out promising stops as we go on our own journeys of discovery. Is road trip photography even a genre? It can encompass everything from the journeys of discovery, both of the landscape and of self-discovery. It can also be visual poetry or simply just hopping in the car with a camera and seeing what transpires. Like so much art, it's all about the vibe of the thing. You'll know road trip photography when you see it. Road trip since the 1930s has been an essential theme in American photography. And this is possibly because the road itself is that one commonality between modern day photographers and those early day pioneers. Obviously the cameras and the cars and the places and the size have changed. But the road itself, the tarmac remains. To my mind, the roots of road trip photography come from Walker Evans. Although he didn't specifically embark on a road trip per se, you know, celebrating The Open Road, he did create a body of work that explored the small off-the-track towns, their unique characters and personalities. His photographs created during the Depression laid the idea for subsequent photographers that you could travel around and you could create photographs that had a narrative about America as a place. This idea of a narrative was some novel at the time that apparently in the original pressing of his 1938 book, American Photographs, there was even a warning in block caps, no less just so you know how important it was, that the images within the book were to be looked at in sequence, not hopping from here to there, but as a natural journey. Great images obviously certainly do exist. But it's a reminder to us that so often the stories these photographers weave are told in the gaps between the images. So this is a fantastic book called Photography and the American Road Trip and it's a really good way of getting into a couple of the greats of road trip photography. So when I was researching this video I found it was great. There were lots of little connections between you know all the people who helped sort of lay the foundations for photography. So Walker Evans used to drive around you know Robert Frank when he was doing his road trip. Robert Frank was friends with, or worked at the same place as Cartier Brisson when Cartier Brisson was doing his road trip and you know Robert Frank was friends with Jack Karawak and so there's a whole narrative that holds these guys together. I would really encourage you to find some of these books like this that give you such a snapshot of individual photographers and can open up your eyes to what on the face of it might just be a simple defined genre but it's so broadly expressive it can mean so many different things to different people. Of course no discussion about road trip photography could even consider to leave out Robert Frank. I mean you know his work The Americans is the Bible which most people hold up as a definitive work in the genre. Of course like a lot of definitive works at the time it wasn't particularly well received and it's only laterally that I think that the visual language of people in general has caught up with being able to fully appreciate the work that he puts into his photography. Earlier in the episode I kind of stumbled over or tripped over Gary Winogrand's statement that he wants to or he photographs the world to see what it looks like photographed and of course now we're going to see how he sees the world when it's photographed and the phrase snapshot quality comes up a lot when you sort of look at certainly photographers who kind of do road trip photography and I'll talk a little bit more in depth later on about the difference between a photograph and a snapshot but I feel that the best road trip photography has this idea of it's something that is not contrived it feels like a slice of real life that it is something that is happening unlike say a lot of you know sort of more art photography which has a more unreal element about you know this is just an average everyday scene we can see ourselves in it but then it's so much more and that's what I think gives these photographs an intimacy and of course I suppose these days broadly speaking a lot of people would call this street photography but I always sort of felt that the difference is certainly for me is that a lot of these are more small town they are the fringes of America and of course America is such a large continent that all these communities can exist and ostensibly they're all the same place they're all America but they're not America they're little snapshots of their own their own societies their own little communities that are completely unique of course here's our old friend William Eggleston and his photography now again you know this idea of snapshot-esque quality and I know that Eggleston was a certain belief that Eggleston is not overly keen on his work being defined or you know having that label attached to it and somebody like Stephen Shaw is and of course I've talked at length about Eggleston so I'm not going to dwell on him too much so I first say if you are interested I will link to his video in the cards above so if you want to go and see more of his work and hear my thoughts on whether or not he is the world's most overrated photographer then go and have a little look see Lee Friedlander is a really great example of having a common thread that runs through your photographs and if we look at this image here of this couple looking at Mount Rushmore he hasn't taken the obvious way of photographing Mount Rushmore he's decided to treat it slightly different I think that's a really good example of trying to make the obvious less obvious and throughout all of these photographs that we're looking at here there are monuments to you know to war dead to civil war things to you know to anything so the common theme is a monument and these are fairly typical there's nothing groundbreakingly sort of different about them but as you sort of carry on you can sort of see that the monuments stay but what they're surrounded in starts to sort of dominate more until we get to a point like this where the monument itself is almost lost this is in LA and we have these two figures here just in this kind of this jungle and there's a slight bit of road intruding on them through there but of course here we have the urban jungle of New York and the monument is very central where we have the real jungle but throughout all of these images there's that monument over that thread that runs through it so you know that they are kind of like the same body of works even though the scenes are quite disparate there's a commonality it's not in America but my own favorite road trip is the 800 miles from Joberg to Cape Town you know the small towns, the wide open skies, the empty roads you know the dusty scrub of the crew and those purple mountains on the horizon they never fail to inspire me I'd love to hear what's your favorite place to drive and to be inspired not just in America but the world where would you love to go and just spend some time behind the wheel with a camera letting happen chance just take you where it will let me know in the comments below I'd be fascinated to hear John Meravitz is going to help me illustrate a thing that I think is what is needed to have proper road trip photography you know and there's some of the more obvious pictures here but one of the things about road tripping is that it gives gives one a sense of insulation you cut off from the world for long periods of time and especially on a wide straight open road your mind is drawn to inspector you start thinking about things in a way that you don't when you're in the everyday environment so what happens is all of a sudden the small details the small interests they get more power when you're thinking about them and so you drive past a scene like this which ordinarily if you saw on your commute to work you wouldn't give it a second thought but when you've been facing the same strip of open road for hours at a time all of a sudden this run down play park in the middle of South Dakota assumes great importance it becomes something tantalizing something to be explored and is worth looking at when you stop at the side of the road for a break and a drink and something to eat then the train, the car next door with those milkshakes assumes a visual importance that ordinarily may not have if you've just dropped in around the corner on a Sunday afternoon just to have a slurpee or something it's that which I think is you need to have in your mind as you know to be a road tripping photographer is the ability to let your mind wander to let it just drift away and to let the small things assume a greater importance originally this video is going to be about just Stephen Shaw and I you know it's kind of and I will come back to him and do more in depth but this is his images from Uncommon Places and I mentioned earlier this idea of snapshot qualities and I think one of the things that people sort of say oh but that's just a snapshot they forget that it isn't a snapshot because at this time this was an unusual thing to photograph nowadays images of food and all sorts of things have become fairly commonplace because everybody's got a camera they take pictures of pretty much everything but those days when it was film when you do money every time you trip the shutter people were more circumspect about what they took so they confused the idea of this being a snapshot because it's a picture of a melon and some pancakes but it's not a snapshot because the person in 1973 would not have taken a picture of that because they would go well that cost me money I'm going to take a picture of my child instead so these are not snapshots they are thoughtful they're taken with purpose whereas a snapshot certainly in the context of the 70s or whatever was a picture possibly of your family of something of interest that wasn't just a picture of some light bulbs or this which is a store that's being loaded with some onions and some oranges and things of that nature I'm sure the people who worked there every single day saw this and would say well why are you taking a picture of that and now some 40 something I can't even say 74 47-ish years later now we know what US 10 Post Falls Idaho on August 25th looked like and that's the beauty of these things Joel Sternfeld is responsible for two of possibly the most famous road trip photographs certainly that I spring to my mind and these are the lovely, lovely, he says paging through and hoping that it will turn up in a second but in the meantime let's have a look at some of his wonderful work but I've not seen his wonderful work look at that, that is a little baby because of course if you're going to go see a dam put a baby in a cot that's how we roll all great but his photography again it has that sort of snapshot equality but like I was saying with Stephen Shaw that it's not a snapshot because we've got these two examples this is one I was thinking of is that we have this very famous picture of the house burning and the firemen buying some pumpkins and the obvious thing what most of us would do would be to take a picture of the building on fire I think we would be naturally drawn to that and then you would have missed all of this and that itself, the house burning isn't really particularly interesting so we certainly wouldn't be looking at it some 40 odd years later but it's because he stepped back he explored the possibilities, he was open to what was going on around him and the same with the elephant these days this crowd of onlookers here as an elephant is drenched with water to stop it dehydrating would all be on their phones and they'll be taking pictures and stuff and missing the point and possibly a lot of photographers would run in and try and get onto the elephant themselves and then they would miss everything else that's going on, giving it a time and a place and I think that's what road trip photography is about is showing us that this exists in this large continent where so many things where you can drive around a corner and find an elephant lying in the road being hosed down coming up slightly more to the modern day of course we have Alex Soth who has a channel on YouTube which I would recommend you go and have a look at he's an extremely eloquent photographer and he comes speaking about photography these images here were taken in Louisiana Arkansas, Mississippi and they have again this kind of quietness that they've been lost and that's one of the things about America is that so many things can fall through the cracks that these places exist and they just keep on trucking and if you look at these these are from 2000 and 2002 and they don't feel any different in terms of time and place and space to somebody like, you know, William Eggleston certainly the reds here that's probably why Eggleston sort of jumped into my mind and what have you and it's a reminder that America is it is a large place that in some respect evolves very quickly and in other respects just never seems to change jumping forward a couple of years now we're looking at just in Curland and and it's interesting, you know, if you go back to think about the world of Walker Evans, you know, he documented the birth of modern America now we sort of see it coming up to the modern age or down at the modern age and the face of America has changed in some respects it's still the same this gas can here so spare some gas and these could be people in their jalopy who are heading out to California, you know, you never know so there are echoes and similarities now this gentleman with his suitcase under what looks like a dusty side lay by along the road so the clothing and the way the people look has changed in many respects but the people themselves there are echoes of those images of of Walker Evans, of the depression and of course this is 2011 so it's 2008 so it was in America's next great depression and it's interesting to see that the more things change the more they stay the same at the end of this book there are two photographers Teo, Honorato and Nico Krebs and their photography is absolutely wonderful, I love what's going on here that they have a more of an arty kind of feel and I hesitate to use that word when talking about photography but it definitely feels like there's more of an artistic quality which is somewhat at odds with some of the photography that we looked at previously which had a kind of more snapshot aesthetic and please don't get me wrong, I like both of them the only reason I say this is kind of more of an arty thing is that they tended to I think looked at the compositions and made them more graphic and probably that's what I'm sort of responding to, certainly these two photographs here remind me of as a Robert Adams image of his stuff in the New West but at the same time these are very William Eggleston and here's something going on which I quite like at first I'm sort of going what's going on here and they've obviously gone around and this feels like it's some sort of motel that's been either set up to be like this, there's some sort of visual play going on, this one's called Night's In and this one's called Night's Out and I can't quite figure out, I don't want to look into close because I'll stick my head within the frame but I think what they've done is they've taken a motel room and they moved everything outside into the wide bush this and I quite like because it stops you this is what I'm saying about the artiness of their work coming through, it's extremely interesting and they've brought their own road with them which I quite like and I like this very much there's some potato fries there on the edge of the Grand Canyon there's a little bit of playfulness and it's a reminder that you don't necessarily need to be earnestly serious I think about any photography really, feel free to play with the expectations of the genre and just do your own thing, they haven't got a road they've made their own road and a little sunset there so it's fantastic I hope you enjoy it, there's a very brief look at this book and I would certainly recommend getting a copy it's wonderful to see these photographers to read the essays I think it's important if your monographs come with the essays, read the essays there's so much insight into the workings of these photographers and make your enjoyment of the photography so much better photographers have been feeling the pool of the open road now for decades and as the world begins to open up again, I hope that you'll be inspired by some of the photography you've seen here to go on your own journey of discovery doesn't have to be across the wide open plains of America, even just if it's a highway between towns try and see the world through the eyes and pass by, see what exists on your very doorstep click on the playlist here to discover more in-depth videos about some fantastic photographers that I know you're going to love watching thanks for being here and I'll see you again soon