THE PROFANE AND PROFOUND: AMERICAN ROAD PHOTOGRAPHY FROM 1930 TO THE PRESENT A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Han-Chih Wang Diploma Date August 2017 Examining Committee Members: Professor Gerald Silk, Department of Art History Professor Miles Orvell, Department of English Professor Erin Pauwels, Department of Art History Professor Byron Wolfe, Photography Program, Department of Graphic Arts and Design THE PROFANE AND PROFOUND: AMERICAN ROAD PHOTOGRAPHY FROM 1930 TO THE PRESENT ABSTRACT Han-Chih Wang This dissertation historicizes the enduring marriage between photography and the American road trip. In considering and proposing the road as a photographic genre with its tradition and transformation, I investigate the ways in which road photography makes artistic statements about the road as a visual form, while providing a range of commentary about American culture over time, such as frontiersmanship and wanderlust, issues and themes of the automobile, highway, and roadside culture, concepts of human intervention in the environment, and reflections of the ordinary and sublime, among others. Based on chronological order, this dissertation focuses on the photographic books or series that depict and engage the American road. The first two chapters focus on road photographs in the 1930s and 1950s, Walker Evans’s American Photographs, 1938; Dorothea Lange’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, 1939; and Robert Frank’s The Americans, 1958/1959. Evans dedicated himself to depicting automobile landscapes and the roadside. Lange concentrated on documenting migrants on the highway traveling westward to California. By examining Frank’s photographs and i comparing them with photographs by Evans and Lange, the formal and contextual connections and differences between the photographs in these two decades, the 1930s and the 1950s, become evident. Further analysis of the many automobile and highway images from The Americans manifests Frank’s commentary on postwar America during his cross-country road trip—the drive-in theater, jukebox, highway fatality, segregation, and social inequality. Chapter 3 analyzes Ed Ruscha’s photographic series related to driving and the roadside, including Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962 and Royal Road Test, 1967. The chapter also looks at Lee Friedlander’s photographs taken on the road into the mid-1970s. Although both were indebted to the earlier tradition of Evans and Frank, Ruscha and Friedlander took different directions, representing two sets of artistic values and photographic approaches. Ruscha manifested the Pop art and Conceptualist affinity, while Friedlander exemplified the snapshot yet sophisticated formalist style. Chapter 4 reexamines road photographs of the 1970s and 1980s with emphasis on two road trip series by Stephen Shore. The first, American Surfaces, 1972 demonstrates an affinity of Pop art and Frank’s snapshot. Shore’s Uncommon Places, 1982, regenerates the formalist and analytical view exemplified by Evans with a large 8- by-10 camera. Shore’s work not only illustrates the emergence of color photography in the art world but also reconsiders the transformation of the American landscape, particularly evidenced in the seminal exhibition titled New Topographics: A Man-Altered Landscape, 1975. I also compare Shore’s work with the ones by his contemporaries, such as Robert Adams, William Eggleston, and Joel Sternfeld, to demonstrate how their ii images share common ground but translate nuanced agendas respectively. By reintroducing both Evans’s and Frank’s legacies in his work, Shore more consciously engaged with this photographic road trip tradition. Chapter 5 investigates a selection of photographic series from 1990 to the present to revisit the ways in which the symbolism of the road evolves, as well as how artists represent the driving and roadscapes. These are evident in such works as Catherine Opie’s Freeway Series, 1994–1995; Andrew Bush’s Vector Portraits, 1989–1997; Martha Rosler’s The Rights of Passage, 1995; and Amy Stein’s Stranded, 2010. Furthermore, since the late 1990s, Friedlander developed a series titled America by Car, 2010, incorporating the driving vision taken from the inside seat of a car. His idiosyncratic inclusion of the side-view mirror, reflections, and self-presence is a consistent theme throughout his career, embodying a multilayered sense of time and place: the past, present, and future, as well as the inside space and outside world of a car. Works by artists listed above exemplify that road photography is a complex and ongoing interaction of observation, imagination, and intention. Photographers continue to re-enact and reformulate the photographic tradition of the American road trip. iii Dedicated to my mother and the memory of my father ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It has been a privilege to write a dissertation in these years, and I owe tremendous debts of gratitude to several mentors who have inspired and guided me during this amazing journey. I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee at Temple University, Professors Gerald Silk, Miles Orvell, and Erin Pauwels for their advice and support. Dr. Silk has shared his enthusiasm about automobile culture, and its symbolism in modern and contemporary art with me since I arrived at Temple University. Dr. Orvell has offered his insightful comments and generous support over the years as I continue to move forward. Towards the completion of the dissertation, I also greatly appreciate countless exchanges with Dr. Pauwels as I envisioned the next phase of this project and navigated through the tradition of American art. In the meantime, Professor Byron Wolfe, who served as my external reader, provided helpful responses from the perspective of a professional artist, especially relating the visual representation of the West to the physical experience of road travel. Special thanks must be extended to Dr. Shao-Chien Tseng because this research was first conceived in her seminar on landscape and space more than ten years ago at the National Central University in Taiwan, where I iv completed a thesis on Stephen Shore’s photographic road-trip series. Like many road trips, writing a dissertation also requires substantial financial support. In the early stage of my dissertation research, I was supported by the Studying Abroad Scholarship from the Ministry of Education of Taiwan from 2012 to 2014. I was fortunate to receive a dissertation fellowship from the Terra Foundation for American Art that allowed me to be in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. (SAAM) from 2014 to 2015. William Truettner, senior curator emeritus and my mentor at SAAM, has been supportive of my research. He shared his personal account with me about automobiles in American life as someone who was born in the mid-1930s and grew up in Detroit. He also encouraged me to explore the iconographic connection between the West and automobile travel in America. It was at SAAM where I first crystallized my thoughts about the visual and material culture of automobiles and the roadside as a historian of American art, especially for shaping the first chapter on road photographs in the 1930s. As such, I have benefited from conversations and critical dialogues with my fellow colleagues at SAAM and other scholars I met during the period of my fellowship in residence in D.C. I am grateful to Amelia Goerlitz, manager of the fellowships and academic programs at SAAM, especially for her warm welcoming v personality and all logistical assistance. I also am indebted to various types of support from Temple University. I was a Graduate Research Associate at the Center for the Humanities at Temple University (CHAT) from 2015 to 2016, joining biweekly workshops and sharing thoughts with my colleagues in an interdisciplinary setting. In my last semester of writing, I was awarded a Dissertation Completion Grant from the Graduate School at Temple University. This support was crucial in allowing me to focus on writing, finishing the last mile and completing this dissertation journey in time. I am thankful for this opportunity. During the course of dissertation writing, I received grants from Tyler School of Art multiple times, specifically the Dean’s Grant and Thomas Eakins Travel Grant funded by the Art History Department, allowing me to travel and actively participate in national and international conferences to exchange ideas with scholars and colleagues. To this end, I want to thank Dean Hester Stinnett, Dr. Elizabeth Bolman, and Dr. Ashley West for their administrative support and continuous encouragement over time. Finally, I certainly need to thank my friends and family for spiritually and physically helping to sustain me through this long journey. I owe a great deal to my parents. I would not have accomplished this much and traveled this far without their vi sacrifices and unconditional love. This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Yang-Kuang (Maria) Lo, and to the memory of my father, Shou-Ning (John) Wang. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS…...……………………………………………………….viii INTRODUCTION ROAD MATTERS IN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY……………………………..….xx CHAPTER 1 THE VISUAL LEGACIES OF THE 1930S: WALKER EVANS AND DOROTHEA LANGE…………………………………………1 CHAPTER 2 ON THE ROAD IN THE 1950S: RETHINKING ROBERT FRANK’S THE AMERICANS…………………………….....86