CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/1/2014

The Open Road: Photography and the American Roadtrip

Joel Meyerowitz's 1970 photograph, "Florida," is reproduced from The Open Road, Aperture's essential paean to photography and the American roadtrip. David Campany quotes Meyerowitz, "'I began to understand that the car window was the frame, and that in some way the car itself was the camera with me inside it, and that the world was scrolling by with a constantly changing image on the screen. All I had to do was raise the camera and blink to make a photograph.' Meyerowitz had returned from [a] European trip with fresh eyes, alert to the profound changes in America. Where the best road trip photography of the 1950s and '60s had been either angry or melancholic (and frequently both), much of the defining work of the 1970s was perplexed, fascinated, and even surreal in tone. Meyerowitz was attuning himself to the nation's wild incongruities, ideological contradictions, and dark rituals. Most often his subject was leisure and even this was a source of unsettling humor."