Explore Highway to the West

Read About This Photograph by Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange’s subject in this photograph is the road—the seemingly endless Highway 54 as it cuts through the vast desert of New Mexico. The road dominates Lange’s view of the southwestern landscape. The land alongside 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, there is a sense of traveling on the road.

America developed a “road culture” in the 1930s, when cars became more affordable. The era’s most talented balladeer, Woody Guthrie, wrote song after song about this “hard traveling,” including Going Down the Road (Feeling Bad), I Ain’t Got No Home, Lonesome Soul Blues, and odes to Highway 66, which runs from Chicago to Los Angeles.

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.”

Questions

Write or discuss your responses.

• Find Highway 54 on a map. Which part is pictured here?
• How would a journey down this road seem different if the path curved and the surrounding vegetation was lush?
• Why do you think Lange chose to photograph a road like this? What did it represent?
• Why do you think creative artists, such as songwriter Woody Guthrie and novelist John Steinbeck, focused on the subject of roads and highways?