Description
A wonderfully compact vernacular record of a mid-century journey through the American West, containing 85 original photographs of roadside America, national-park landscapes, cities, casinos, dams, mountains and the people moving through them. Among the recognizable subjects are downtown Reno’s neon-lined Virginia Street, Hoover Dam, Southwestern desert and petrified-wood landscapes, mountain lakes and an early chairlift, together with views apparently including the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon and California scenes including the Golden Gate Bridge and distant Alcatraz. The Reno photograph is particularly evocative, catching the Nevada Club, Frontier Club and Harold’s Club during the city’s classic postwar casino era.
What makes the album work is the traveler’s-eye mixture of landmark and accident: a man reaching toward a deer, cars pulled beneath a roadside “SEA FOODS / TOURISTS WELCOME” sign, empty Western terrain, a huge piece of petrified wood, casino marquees, lake country, ski lifts and monumental public works. One photograph records the memorial inscription at Hoover Dam honoring the vision and labor behind its construction, firmly identifying that stop on the journey. Taken together, the photographs feel less like a collection of tourist views than an intact visual itinerary through the postwar West—Nevada gambling towns, California, the Sierra and the great Southwestern landscape all compressed into a modest six-by-nine-inch album.
A terrific little piece of postwar Western Americana—the American road trip before interstates, smartphones and a thousand identical photographs of every stop.
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