Photo: Lajitas, Texas – FM 170
Across the vast swaths of lands that make up the United States, a great network of highways was built to accommodate the demands of automobile travel. First introduced in 1910, cars have grown to be the predominant mode of transportation nationwide, becoming not only a means to an ends but part of the journey itself. The era of the road trip was born, and from it came a tradition that continues to this very day.
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American photographer Ryann Ford first made the epic trip across Route 66 in 2007 when she moved from Southern California to Austin. Once settled in, she began driving the back roads of Texas on her way home from various assignments and began to notice curious structures along the way. They were small rest stops built decades earlier, each evoking a distinct and picturesque character. Ford remembers, “I was drawn to the minimalist scene—a modest little structure set out on a beautiful landscape—and the mid-century architecture.”
Flower Mound, Texas – I 35
One day, while procrastinating on an assignment, Ford had a moment of inspiration and started surfing the Internet for photographs of rest stops. What she discovered shocked her to the core. News story after news story reported the demolition of rest stops around the country. The recession had hit the highways hard, and budget cuts were extreme. The rest stops had become a site for crime, drug dealing, and prostitution. This was a way for the government to kill two birds with one stone.
Sonora, Texas – I-10
A few weeks after Ford took the photograph at Flower Mound, she discovered that the rest stop was gone. From there on out, it was a race against time to document the rest stops before they disappeared. An architectural photographer by training and trade, Ford found a project that fit her personality to a T. Each photograph is simple, elegant, eloquent, a testament to the brilliance of humanity in its desire to bring beauty to the most quotidian of needs.
In The Last Stop, Ford takes us on the ultimate road trip, to remind us the means justifies the end. Ford approaches each rest stop with infinite grace, working to make sure the set up is perfect. Each structure is presented on its own. Liberated from the comings and goings of people, Ford’s photographs make us stop and look at that which we may see but not otherwise perceive. There is more than meets the eye to these curious locales.
Deming, New Mexico – I-10
Consider the photograph taken in Deming, New Mexico: a vast plan and open sky, with a discreet sign marked “Pet Area.” It’s the unexpected formality of it all that makes it the most delicious of kitsch. But it is Ford’s respect for the sign that makes her work so good.
“I really love to escape and photograph in solitude,” Ford reveals. “It’s such an amazing feeling, not having an distractions or people involved.” Inevitably, people (well, mostly truck drivers who had spent hours on the road without human contact) would be curious to know what she was doing, and would strike up a conversation to chat. But they seemed puzzled by her choice of subject matter.
Monument Valley, Arizona
“I’ve always been drawn to different things,” Ford observes. “I got a lot of strange looks. People thought I would be shooting a bird or a dog. I had a huge camera on a tripod. I would try to find the best way to get the best background. I’d so light meter readings and study the structure. I felt like a created a little bond with them. I became attached to them. I learned of the architects’ history, and why they did what they did. A lot of the mid-century modern architecture was really edgy for the time.”
As fate would have it, Ford’s photographs appear just as the rest stops began to vanish, reminding us of how quickly things change and how rare it is that people take notice. What was created in an innocent age is now slipping away, much like so much of human history. But with her photographs. Forde has frozen time, and in doing so, reminds us to look at the world in which we live while it still remains.
White Sands National Monument, New Mexico
Photos: ©Ryann Ford, from The Last Stop: Vanishing Rest Stops of the American Roadside, courtesy of powerHouse Books.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
