To Look for America

Some of the most seminal works in photography have used the idea of the road trip to define who Americans are. Walker Evans spent a decade during the Great Depression compiling his masterpiece American Photographs. Robert Frank’s The Americans portrayed the angst-ridden post-war United States of the 1950s. In the 1970s, Stephen Shore captured the textures of American life in American Surfaces, while in the early 2000s, Alec Soth’s poetic series, Sleeping by the Mississippi, portrayed life along the country’s second-longest river. These photographers journeyed through the “open road,” capturing the essence of their nation, standing witness to the world they chronicled.

, the is both reflective of the land he saw and the personal relationship he had with it. First exhibited as part of a group show last August at the Experimenter Gallery in Kolkata, it was recently displayed at the Cincinnati Arts Museum in the United States.