Anna Fox & Karen Knorr: U.S. Route 1 (After Berenice Abbott)

Two photographers, Fox and Knorr set out in 2016 on a journey of friendship, adventure and collaboration stopping at motels, drugstores, cafes and Airbnb’s. Stopping, walking, getting out to meet people and explore a fractured US society in the age of Trump. Over 150 colour photographs made between 2016 and 2024 focus on small towns on this extended road trip from Key West in Florida to Fort Kent in Maine. In 1954, renowned US photographer Berenice Abbott journeyed along the length of U.S. Route 1, capturing the road, its towns, and inhabitants. From Florida motels to Maine potato farmers, Abbott memorialized communities up and down the East Coast. Over a nine-year period from 2016 - 2024 Anna Fox and Karen Knorr drove from Key West in Florida to Fort Kent in Maine, stopping at various points along the way to celebrate and extend Abbott's work from 1954. Photographing small towns, people, drugstores, cafes, hotels, motels and diners they set out to record contemporary life along U.S.1. during the age of Trump. Abbott started in Maine in 1954 and with her assistants the Gadds, made their way south to Key West with a number of trips over a two year period. Abbott aimed to look at this 300-year-old route, the way it was used and the life either side of it at the time when the building of an interstate national highway threatened to take most of its business. Like Abbott, Fox and Knorr are intensely engaged with the voice of photography and the way it can describe what it sees. They see this time as particularly relevant in the light of current environmental debate and societal discontent created by the disenchantment of working Americans with their governance and elites. The USA has a more divided country since 2016, drawing world-wide attention, because although it has been one of the most advanced liberal economies, it has remained increasingly conservative particularly when it concerns race, its gun laws and the marital age of consent for girls.