Glen Canyon Dam

Joel Sternfeld’s “Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona,” August 1983. 

Photo: National Gallery of Canada

There is a lot of mystique surrounding the open road, particularly in the American psyche. In films and novels as in real life, a road trip can be a means to self-discovery, as we find our internal truths by traveling far outside our usual surroundings. 

In the Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip, 18 photographers take this time-honored route to explore places, eras — and themselves. 

There is a fair selection of contemporary photographers, but plenty of vintage images going back to the 1950s. Interestingly, many of the older bodies of work are drawn from photography books on the larger themes of travel. 

Robert Frank’s The Americans was published in 1959 and filled with images gleaned from his road trips spanning the country from New York to San Francisco, and a longitudinal route from Butte, Montana, to Miami Beach, Florida. In black-and-white, he caught moments of ordinary days and celebrations, as well as troubling images of America like a segregated streetcar in New Orleans. Frank pictures America as a melee of optimism and desolation. 

Ed Ruscha’s book Twentysix Gasoline Stations from 1963 is represented by three images of filling stations. Each is framed from across the street, catching the full expanse of their concrete domain, angular architecture and advertising signs. As the exhibition text notes, “Ruscha understood that America was becoming defined by its ongoingness.” It’s a statement that still echoes in the predictability of the gas station-minimart-fast food empires. No matter how far we may roam, we will encounter unchanging sights that are inherently part of our Big Box country. 

The driest sense of humor in the exhibition belongs to Joel Sternfeld. What we find in many of his images is the oddity of life that is at times farcical. A large color picture shows us a family visiting Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam in 1983. While Mom, Dad and the kids lean over a concrete wall to admire this massive, brutalist piece of industrial architecture, the youngest of their brood sits and stares at us from a playpen set up on the pavement. 

In another Sternfeld image, a U-Haul truck has backed into the driveway of a subdivision where houses have been newly finished and grass is waiting to grow. Household contents spill out of the back of the truck, and it is then that you notice a mother nursing her baby while seated on a folded up cushion. It is quite a modern take on the very traditional image of a mother and child, here settling into the golden light of freshly minted suburbia. 

Lee Friedlander’s “American Monument” project also focuses on a sense of the uncanny and odd, but here in the way sculptures and memorials dot the landscape, folding the past and present together in daily life. Many of the monuments are related to war, which makes their juxtaposition with the relative tranquility of the quotidian all the more jarring. Doughboy, Stamford, Connecticut, is a view along a downtown street lined with department stores and women walking, one pushing a stroller. As though emerging from the leafy foliage of a park, the sculpture of a soldier points his weapon like he’s ready to shoot through the peace of this midday scene. 

Contemporary photographer Justine Kurland echoes some of these touches of irony, but also draws out the poetic nature of modern bohemia. Her body of work includes photographs taken while traveling the country in a van with her young son. She captures the landscape along the highways and byways, as well as people she meets along the way. The young woman playing the accordion in “Claire, 8th Ward” is locked in intensity with the red instrument, a world away from the people milling around the front door of the pink house across the street. It is just a glimpse of a moment, fleeting away as we are always just passing through.

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