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‘ROAD TRIPS THROUGH AMERICA’ AT YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY

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NEW YORK CITY — The Yancey Richardson Gallery presents its summer exhibition, “Easy Rider: Road Trips through America,” which pays homage to the tradition of road trips in American photography. The exhibit is on view through September 8.

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, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Frank Gohlke, Lisa Kereszi, Dorothea Lange, Mike Powers, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Mark Steinmetz and Garry Winogrand.

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 to explore the cultural landscape. 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. More recently, Tim Davis traveled the country to seek out the presence of politics in today’s life.

Many photographers have constructed a kind of biography of roads traveled, places visited and people encountered, often including themselves and family members. 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.

The gallery is at 535 West 22nd Street. For information, www.yanceyrichardson.com or 646-230-9610.