A dusty stretch of road, cleaving its way through far-off, majestic spines of snowcapped mountains. An open vista of turbulent ocean, battering against rugged cliffs and foreboding boulders. A heroically battered vehicle, practically bursting at the seams with tents, surfboards, sleeping bags, and clear-eyed young adults (always the coolest kids you know) sporting a perfectly positioned cigarette and a pair of gleaming Ray Bans. Few things are as synonymous with summertime as the road trip, and, likewise, few photographic genres resonate as clearly with the season as the road trip series.
Because of its visual allure and popularity, road trip photography has become almost ubiquitous in contemporary visual culture. While certainly not a new development, this genre of photography has recently delved into occasionally troubling thematic waters. If it can be taken seriously, these issues need to be addressed and considered when analyzing a body of work identified with the road trip.
First, and crucially, it’s important to demarcate or at least work toward a set of criteria that defines “road trip” photography. The primary organizing principle of this type of photographic series can vary from project to project, but a few important themes and concepts emerge regularly.
If nothing else, the ostensible theme is simply the photographer’s journey from point A to point B. The structural skeleton underneath this theme has manifested itself in any number of ways, from the deadpan documentary of Stephen Shore (American Surfaces, Uncommon Places), to the historical conceptualism of Joel Sternfeld (On this Site: Landscape in Memoriam), to the cultural illustration of Sam Fentress (Bible Road).
More recent series, however, are organized along arguably broader and certainly more nebulous themes: freedom, the American West, capital-Y Youth Culture. Aesthetically, the mountain ranges and crashing waves lose their sublimity when viewed in list of photographs tagged #roadtrip. Where we expect fresh air, the images are stale.
Where Shore set out to document, more contemporary photographers seek to mythologize the ordinary, to place a grand metaphor before the content itself. Christy Lange describes American Surfaces as falling “somewhere between a ‘visual diary’ and a social document - a record of ‘what the age we were living in looked like.’ It is both about the culture that [Shore] encountered and his encounter with that culture.” Blogosphere and Instagram road trip photography more often than not swings to the far end of that divide, choosing to exhibit a modern youth culture without engaging critically with it.
This is not to say that the works are worthless - even the average series under this umbrella can be visually well-polished (or intentionally rough, but either way intent is present) and at some times deeply compelling, activating visceral emotion through engagement with the sublime.
In essence, once some of the thematic elements are boiled down or stripped away, much of what is labeled road trip photography can also be classified as landscape photography. Skill, much less technical ability, is secondary in this argument. Yes, there is often an obvious element of artistry, but in a completely different vein than the solemn permanence of Ansel Adams or even the more radical environmental tone adopted by Ed Burtynsky. This is not a prima facie problem — landscape photography is of course its own well-established and aesthetically robust genre. But is the blurred distinction between the two problematic when a series of images is presented as cultural documentary?
Generally this type of image making and sharing is harmless, simply a byproduct of a culture that creates, exchanges and digests visual information constantly. At best, photographs in this paradigm can become a rallying point, something each viewer can participate in and bring an individual experience to (fundamentally, a trait that photography in general accomplishes). At worst, they become merely visual noise.
The problem arises when basic travel photography of this sort dons the guise of cultural documentary in an attempt to express more than simply the photographer was present at a certain location for one-two hundredth of a second.
Two common (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) manifestations of this problem are the celebration of a wild youth culture and a fascination with lower levels of class stratification. Both (the former more subtly than the latter) demonstrate the photographer’s occupation of a privileged perch from which square-cropped and heavily filtered images descend. Here the two currents converge into a central difficulty of this work if these are the contemporary representations of youth culture, why are they so narrow?
The celebration of adventurous youths reclaiming the wilderness is one that is heavily and arguably inherently commercialized. A central example is Ryan McGinley’s “Go Forth” print campaign for Levi’s. Take away the logos and there is not much distinguishing the campaign from any number of roadtrip photography series. It’s hard to claim a sense of non-institutionalized detachment and freedom when the images are being used to sell blue jeans.
Unlike Shore, who encapsulated the aesthetic and the character of the 1970s in his work, engagement with something other than mountains or the ocean in contemporary road trip photography takes an awkward and gawking stance to anything culturally different. Faded locations of the south and Rust Belt take on a special allure, but only in their ruin and warning. Even if treated objectively, photographing individuals of other classes and races can be a serious stumbling block. It’s all too easy to stray into cultural tourism and issues of representational politics on the road trip.
Does any of this matter? Does a photographer have an ethical obligation to trim any representational or moral issues from his work? The question is much more complex and applies to a much larger scope than discussed here, and expands beyond art into communication in general. It is certainly worth engaging with - if nothing else acknowledging the problematic nature of your photographs gives a deeper and more informed presence to the work.
In the volume Photographs Not Taken, edited by Will Steacy, Alec Soth describes a trip to Colombia with his wife in order to adopt their daughter. “I usually have to travel in order to find my eyes,” Soth writes, “But I was unable to take serious pictures of my baby and wife and the new bond forming among us. I needed to know all the streets in order to make pictures. But even though I photographed street dogs and strangers, every picture was an attempt to see my child.”
Maybe, on a fundamental level, road trip photography is nothing more than a widely-shared and widely-utilized method of visual organization. Ignoring conceptual frameworks, aesthetic attitudes or problematic issues, this genre of image making allows the photographer to make sense of the immense, to bring order to variable chaos. Instead of life forming an organizing principle for photographs, in this way photographs become an organizing principle for life.
