Peter (Han-Chih) Wang

This dissertation argues that road photography can be considered an autonomous genre, providing a way of viewing and perceiving in its own right. Since the 1930s, an increasing number of photographers have focused on the automobile and highway culture as a quintessential American cultural and aesthetic experience. The visual representation of Americans on the road helps to define the American psyche of wanderlust; it not only recalls the tradition of moving westward and the Manifest Destiny of the nineteenth century but also establishes the new tradition of automobile travel as part of the collective memory for Americans.

My research identifies and locates road photographs made from the 1930s to the present within the development of American photography. It raises a series of issues such as the motives and contexts for photographers taking road trips, in work ranging from the documentary tradition to “fine art” photography. As the highway has altered and shaped the American lifestyle, this study examines the aesthetic of the sublime and the ordinary revealed in photographs as part of the representation of the visual and material culture of the American highway. I examine works by key photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange in the 1930s, Robert Frank in the 1950s, Lee Friedlander in the 1960s, and Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, and Joel Sternfeld in the 1970s and ‘80s, as well as Andrew Bush, Martha Rosler, and Amy Stein since 1990.

My study will also consider the common ground that road photography shares with the same genre of highway travel in other mediums, including American literature and road movies, as well as other visual arts such as painting and sculpture. The project further investigates the underlying message of frontiersmanship that both nineteenth-century American landscape photography and road photographs in the twentieth century imply. Fundamental issues such as the relationship between humanity and nature as well as the ways in which human presence and absence are depicted in the roadside landscape are central to this study. The ultimate purpose is to analyze road photography as an artistic statement about the road in visual form, as well as how it embodies a range of statements about American culture, considered in discrete historical periods.