Easy Rider: Road Trips through America
Yancey Richardson GalleryChelsea
535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor, 646-230-9610
July 11 - September 8, 2007
Opening: Wednesday, July 11, 6:00PM - 8:00PM
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The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present
our summer exhibition Easy Rider: Road Trips through
America which pays homage to the tradition of road
trips in American photography. Highway culture has
long been a quintessential part of American identity.
Easy Rider explores the common themes of social
commentary, cultural geography and photographic
biography produced by the marriage between the road
and photography. Included are photographs and videos
dating from 1935 to 2006 by Jeff Brouws, Tim Davis,
William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Robert Frank, Lee
Friedlander, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Gohlke, Ernst Haas,
Todd Hido, Jodie Vicenta Jacobson, Lisa Kereszi, Justine
Kurland, William Lamson, Dorothea Lange, Danny Lyon,
Nathan Lyons, Christian Patterson, Mike Smith, Ed Ruscha,
Lise Sarfati, Vicki Sambunaris, Stephen Shore, Rosalind
Solomon, Alec Soth, Mark Steinmetz, Joel Sternfeld, and
Garry Winogrand and others.

The road allowed Farm Security Administration photographers
Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to document the plight
of Americans suffering floods and dustbowls during the
Great Depression. Similarly bleak, Robert Frank's mid
1950s road trips yielded a portrait of the nation at odds
with the projected optimism of the era and culminated
in The Americans, a landmark publication, which influenced
generations of later photographers.

The open road as a symbol of freedom is exemplified in
Allen Ginsberg's 1964 shot of Neal Cassady at the wheel
of Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster bus; Cassady's incessant
cross-country journeys were a primary inspiration for Jack
Kerouac's definitive Beat generation novel On the Road.
Having spent four years riding with the motorcycle gang
the Outlaws, Danny Lyons produced the book The Bikeriders,
which emblazoned motorcycle counterculture onto the
American psyche and inspired the film Easy Rider.

Subsequent generations of photographers continued to take
to the road in order to explore the cultural landscape.
Traveling on a 1969 Guggenheim to study the effect of the
media on public events, Garry Winogrand recorded America's
restlessness through its political rallies, peace demonstrations
and space shuttle launches. In the 1970s Mitch Epstein looked
at recreation across America while Joel Sternfeld's wryly-funny
photographs often showed man at odds with nature. Alec Soth
followed the watery artery of the Mississippi River to make
pictures of the dreams; both lost and fiercely held, of those he
encountered. More recently, Tim Davis traveled the country to
seek out the presence of politics in today's life; in St. Louis he
found a wall mural of the United States depicted as one grotesquely
stretched red state.

Several photographers have looked closely at the details and
detritus of American culture for clues to its soul. William Eggleston's
photograph of an elegantly wallpapered restaurant wall plastered
over with the business cards of its patrons shows commercial
aspirations trumping style. On the bare chipboard walls of Reverend
and Margaret's Bedroom, Soth memorializes a moving display of
family photographs while Lisa Kereszi's discovery of a biker bar's
photographic collage of women flashing their breasts reveals the
misogynist underbelly of road-worshipping motorcycle culture.

Many photographers have constructed a kind of biography of
roads traveled, places visited and people encountered, often
including themselves and family m embers. In 1962, Ed Ruscha
photographed isolated gas stations along Route 66 filling half the
picture frame with the street at his feet. Lee Friedlander frequently
incorporated himself into his car images, staring into the camera
through the windshield or via the side view mirror. In his witty
series America and Me, recent Bard graduate William Lamson
photographed himself interacting with elements of the roadside
landscape, always hiding his face but freely revealing the shutter
release. Poolside at a roadside inn, Stephen Shore incorporated his
young wife Ginger into a minimalist composition of color and light.
Accustomed to working on the road, Justine Kurland adjusted to
motherhood by photographing her young son living with her in a
camper van on an extended road trip.

Jeff Brouws has made a career of photographing along highways,
evolving from cataloguing the relics of small town roadside architecture
to documenting the negative impact of thruways in the 21st century.
His 2004 image of a rusting red car upended in a field presents a
pessimistic view of contemporary road culture: the car as a dinosaur
on the road to nowhere.