Description
A wonderfully intimate record of an American family on the road in 1946, beginning in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and traveling south through Texas and Louisiana before ultimately reaching Arkansas. Forty-five small original snapshots document the journey as it actually unfolded—not grand tourist photography, but the roadside sights, stops, people, landscapes and attractions that made up a mid-century automobile vacation. The diminutive format makes the album especially appealing: somebody took an ordinary little “Autographs” book and turned it into a pocket-sized photographic record of the trip, carefully mounting the pictures and identifying locations in ink.
The New Orleans material is particularly good, including photographs along the Lake Pontchartrain seawall and its amusement attractions, as well as scenes around the city and waterfront. Taken only a year after the end of World War II, the album captures an America newly back on the move: highways, family travel, regional attractions and the pleasure of simply seeing someplace new. The photographs remain together in their original sequence and context, which is exactly what makes vernacular albums like this so much more interesting than 45 disconnected snapshots.
A terrific little piece of postwar Americana—the whole 1946 road trip still together, exactly where the family put it eighty years ago.
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