Balsam Valley, Maine, 2023 © Anna Fox and Karen Knorr, courtesy of Centre for British Photography and Les Filles du Calvaire Gallery.

In 1954, photographer Berenice Abbott journeyed along the length of U.S. Route 1. From Florida motels to Maine potato farmers, Abbott memorialised communities up and down the East Coast. During this trip, she shot more than two hundred and fifty 8×10-inch photographs, and around one thousand smaller images using her Rolleiflex camera, representing her largest portfolio of photographs devoted to a single subject. In 2014 after the publication of David Campany’s book, The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip, Anna Fox and Karen Knorr decided that they would make a collaborative road trip together based on Berenice Abbott’s Route One.

Following in the tracks of Berenice Abbott and her colleague/assistant Damon Gadd (also accompanied by Sara Gadd), Karen Knorr and Anna Fox set out in 2016 to start a record of contemporary life along U.S. Route 1. during the age of Trump. They started in Key West in 2016 and aimed North for Maine, not knowing how long this trip might take. Along the way Fox and Knorr searched for a sense of what is happening today and how that differs from what Abbott and Gadd found. Using their iPhones, digital SLRs and a Phase One medium format camera, they photographed small towns, people, drugstores, cafes, diners, hotels, motels, farms, factories, street signs and advertisements. Abbott focused on the road and its signs, local industry, how goods moved both north and south, the rapid growth of the use of the motor car and the development of tourism. Fox and Knorr wanted to re-call the importance of Abbott’s work, looking at the significance of U.S.1 and how life has developed around it, since it is now a far quieter roadway. From 2016 – 2024, Fox and Knorr traversed the U.S. Route, considering current environmental debate and societal discontent created by the increasing disenchantment of working Americans with their governance and elites. Covid stopped all travel between 2020 and 2022, but Fox and Knorr continued to take photographs off social media networks during the Jan 6 storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters. In 2024 they made two last trips to Maine and Florida, concluding this chapter of their work.

Fox and Knorr’s series is being shown alongside Abbots work at Rencontres D’Arles. To find out more please go to the direct link.