Baseball parks and all-day breakfast: Jim Dow’s photographs of 1970s America

I used to think of photography in illustrative terms, and my time as a design student solidified that notion. Images were secondary to text, which was intended to sway a person to favour a product, idea or story. But when I enrolled in the graduate programme at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965, under the photographer Harry Callahan, I was surrounded by people who saw photographs as extensions of their internal, thinking selves. Trying to catch up, I employed different approaches and explored a variety of subjects: streets, buildings, some portraits. I even took pictures for the yearbook.

Late in the fall of 1965, I met Walker Evans. I had no idea who he was or anything about his work. But his book American Photographs completely changed the way I thought about photography. The pictures were descriptive, literate and distinct. They could be read slowly; information was packed into every square inch. They were intense but not dramatic. Rigorous in their making, they demanded attentive scrutiny. It was clear that I had a template for my education through a classic method: at first emulate, then lease the space and ultimately own the process, until taking pictures was no longer a re-enactment.

I began to travel when I could. I went to new, unfamiliar places, looking for subjects that struck a chord of familiarity. I was learning, figuring out what was me and what was someone else.

After graduating I bought a larger view camera, which allowed me more freedom to use the full range of the mechanisms to adjust perspective and focus. I began to accumulate different lenses, coming to understand that I could achieve a kind of respectful middle distance, neither so close as to eliminate context nor so far away as to complicate with excess information. Done carefully, the framing of the picture gave fresh life to what was in front of the camera and, as time went on, I was no longer replicating anyone.

My interest in photography has never been driven by an assumption that the present is somehow damaged goods and the past a more honest ideal. Nor is it to assume my superiority to the subject by employing any form of “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” irony. I’ve always done straightforward, sharp-focus, very slow photography. Although I don’t take pictures of people, I constantly interact with people. Conversations can be long, exposures often take minutes, and getting permission and setting up also require time. One’s thinking about the image itself frequently evolves during the process, even while the shutter is open. A car might pull up and park, a person walk through and sit down, the light can change, all potentially adding to or detracting from the final picture.

These pictures were made on numerous trips around the US between 1967 and 1977, a 10-year span not quite in alignment with the oft-disparaged 1970s but close enough. Commencing with the later unfulfilled hopefulness engendered by the civil rights movement and the Great Society legislation, the period came to be characterised by stagflation and gas lines. Jimmy Carter’s presidency was a run-up to the Awful ’80s of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, “Just Say No”, the beginning of the end for Pax Americana and, in due course, burgeoning Boomer self-involvement.

During that decade, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship and worked for the Seagram Corporation’s bicentennial project photographing courthouses. I criss-crossed the country in two different cars and a van six times and made countless smaller east-west and north-south journeys.

From the first, my plan was to travel by US- and state-numbered highways, getting on interstates only when unavoidable. The result has been an encyclopedic roll call of a number of routes: US 2, 6, 11, 20, 41, 51, 61, 62, 80, 90, 99 (old), 119 and 301 are favourites. Some go north to south, others east to west, and a few run diagonally. Many of them follow old Native American trails or 19th-century rail lines, often twisting and rambling, dictated by river bends, mountain ranges, politics, even serendipity.

At last count I’ve driven up and down US 11, in full or in part, more than 10 times over half a century. The old two-lane, three-lane, sometimes four-lane highway has proven a bonanza. In the medium-sized and smaller cities and towns, the road itself is a Main Street with no bypass or alternative. It is a horizontal, visual strip mine sometimes running for a mile or two. I’ve taken more than 60 different pictures along or hard by the right-of-way. Among the subjects are six minor-league baseball parks and five drive-in movie theatres. There are restaurants that serve breakfast, BBQ, pizza and hot dogs. There are signs for coffee, Dr Pepper, parking, motels, hamburgers and political candidates. There is the Big Pencil, an arrow into the front of a stationery store. There are grocery stores, beer and juke joints, a defunct guitar shop and abandoned gas stations. There are windows for a beauty salon, shoe repair, dance studio and lunch. And there is a pawnshop, a “sno-ball” stand and a taco truck. Roads like these have been a rich and continual source for pictures, but the most fruitful has been US 11.

I never travelled around the US to find myself. I went to find people, places and things I didn’t know about. Leaving familiar confines is an outward-facing process best done by car on older two- or three-lane roads, stopping, looking and listening every step of the way.

This is an edited extract from “Signs: Photographs by Jim Dow” published by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. An exhibition of the same name runs at the museum until October 9

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