Lange's subject in this photograph is the road, specifically, the seemingly endless Highway 54 as it cuts through the vast New Mexican desert. The road dominates her vision of the southwestern landscape—the land flanking the road has only dry patches of grass and small shrubs, and the sky is empty. Although a road suggests a driver and passengers traveling by car, no people are seen in this picture. Nonetheless, because Lange must have been standing on the road to take this picture, we have a sense of traveling on the road ourselves.
America developed a "road culture" in the 1930s. The era's most talented balladeer, Woody Guthrie, wrote song after song about this "hard traveling," including "Going Down the Road," "I Ain't Got No Home," "Lonesome Soul Blues," and his ode to Highway 66, "Will Rogers Highway." In the novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck described the significance of the highway he called "the main migrant road": "66 is the path of people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there." |
