American Route 66: Home on the Road

Rating:
Summary: Cameras On The Road
Review: Jane Bernard and Polly Brown are accomplished, widely-published Santa Fe photographers who spent three years on American's most legendary trail. American Route 66: Home on the Road (172 p., Museum of New Mexico Press, 2003, $45) "winds from Chicago to L.A." These superb color and black-and-white photographs merge with their subjects mini-oral histories and the photographers' journal entries.

We discover that an elongated Lake Woebegone populated by people such as Charles and Gazelle Stewart, who have surrounded their petrified wood store with towering folk-artsy dinosaurs designed to make kids demand to stop the car. Gazelle recalls how Jerry Seinfeld came in one day with his bodyguard, "a little bitty man...with such a huge gun he could hardly keep his pants up." Seinfeld wanted a $3,000 meteorite, but the power was down, so they couldn't run his credit card. They trusted him anyway.

"We'd make more money," Charles says, "if I'd stop making so many dinosaurs."

Rating:
Summary: Cameras On The Road
Review: Jane Bernard and Polly Brown are accomplished, widely-published Santa Fe photographers who spent three years on American's most legendary trail. American Route 66: Home on the Road (172 p., Museum of New Mexico Press, 2003, $45) "winds from Chicago to L.A." These superb color and black-and-white photographs merge with their subjects mini-oral histories and the photographers' journal entries.

We discover that an elongated Lake Woebegone populated by people such as Charles and Gazelle Stewart, who have surrounded their petrified wood store with towering folk-artsy dinosaurs designed to make kids demand to stop the car. Gazelle recalls how Jerry Seinfeld came in one day with his bodyguard, "a little bitty man...with such a huge gun he could hardly keep his pants up." Seinfeld wanted a $3,000 meteorite, but the power was down, so they couldn't run his credit card. They trusted him anyway.

"We'd make more money," Charles says, "if I'd stop making so many dinosaurs."

Rating:
Summary: On the Road with Polly and Jane...
Review: Polly Brown and Jane Bernard are the Thelma and Louise of Documentary photography, shooting their way down the Mother Road with eyes and hearts wide open. Steinbeck, Kerouac, Mick Jagger, and Elvis would all love this book, and so do I.