John Margolies roadside photos now available for download

More than 11,000 photos of roadside America that John Margolies took during a nearly 40-year career now are available for download from the Library of Congress.

The archive, which runs from 1972 to 2008, includes nearly 80 photos from Route 66. The entire archive is here; Margolies’ Route 66 photos may be found here. You may find more; Margolies probably shot some place he didn’t know were once on Route 66.

The Library of Congress stated Thursday the Margolies archive will be free to use and reuse this month only, with no copyright restrictions. His archive was made available digitally just a few weeks ago.

From the Route 66 photos, I found a few gems, many of them gone, including the Will Rogers Motor Court in Tulsa. The photo was taken in 1979:

Here’s Carroll’s Cafeteria in 1982, part of the U-Drop Inn gas-station complex in Shamrock, Texas:

A sign from Dean’s Restaurant in Tucumcari, New Mexico, in 1987:

The Sunset Drive-In Theatre along West Ninth Street (aka Business Route 66) in Amarillo, Texas, in 1977:

The Branding Iron Motel neon sign along Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1987:

In a Library of Congress blog post, Barbara Orbach Natanson explained Margolies’ work:

Traversing the country, he was drawn to the architecture that came to define travel by car, like motels, diners, and gas stations, but also to quintessentially American oddities: buildings in the shape of dinosaurs, the sculpted concrete and plaster obstacles of miniature golf courses, and parks featuring attractions from parrots to petrified rocks. […]

The architecture that drew Margolies’s eye was often derided by critics as aesthetically unstudied, tacky, or even ugly. Margolies, in turn, faulted architectural historians for idealizing canonical works that did little to reflect everyday, lived experience through their forms. In his view, ephemeral and vernacular architecture better told the story of 20th century America, and just as frequently, expressed the eccentricity and ingenuity of its makers. […]

Although much of the architecture Margolies documented was well past its heyday by the time he photographed it, he rebuked the word “nostalgia” in describing his work, stating “I don’t want to be ahead of my time. I want to be in sync with it.”

If you have a few hours to kill, here’s a video from a 2011 symposium of Margolies explaining his work:

(Hat tip to Brian Butko; images by John Margolies courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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