Route 66, which opened in 1926 and was in use until 1985, ran from Chicago to Santa Monica on the California coast. Parts are still designated as “Historic Route 66” but the road as it once was is no more. John Steinbeck called it the “Mother Road” in The Grapes of Wrath. It has also been called the “Main Street of America” and has a role in Jack Kerouac’s beat generation classic On the Road.
It was, of course, also immortalised in the song (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66. Written in 1946 by Bobby Troup, the R&B classic mentions a lot of places along the route but one is conspicuous by its absence. The writer’s wife, Cynthia, said: ‘What I really can’t believe is that he doesn’t have Albuquerque in the song.’
Perhaps this 1969 image by Austrian photographer Ernst Haas can make up a little for the omission. Shot after dark, it perfectly captures the automotive energy of the road in rich colour, the lights reflecting off the sheen created by rainfall. Route 66 symbolises so much about America: the frontier, the automobile, the road, and an association with westward migration.
Haas was no American, so perhaps we can speculate that the mythology of Route 66 was extra romanticised for him. Certainly in this image there is something alluring, almost dream-like, about the depiction of the jumble of signage proclaiming so many places to stay; we are on a freewheeling road trip, here expressed in neon and colours, with a graphic perspective leading us to adventure. Stare at the image long enough and you start to read it almost as a series of abstract lines and hues. And this is what Haas specialised in – a poetic approach that often found him experimenting with blurred images and the new colour films of the day to achieve a painterly effect.
Haas was born in Vienna in 1921 and studied for one semester at the city’s Graphic Arts Institute (Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt). During World War II, while the city was occupied, he worked occasionally in a photographic studio.
After the war, Haas began his career as a photographer, trading 10kg of margarine, which he had been given for his 25th birthday, for a Rolleiflex camera. In 1949, Robert Capa, photographer and co-founder of the newly established Magnum Photos co-operative, asked him if he would like to join the organisation, which he did. And in 1951 he moved to the US and started to experiment with Kodachrome, a colour reversal film made by Kodak.
Haas worked for a number of publications, including LIFE (which in 1953 published a 24-page photo story on New York City, the first time the magazine had given so many pages to a photo essay in colour), Vogue, Esquire, Geo, Stern, Look and Heute. In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective of Haas’s work, the first single-artist exhibition of colour photography ever to be displayed at the museum.
Route 66, Albuquerque, NM, 1969 by Ernst Haas is available as a C-type print from the Atlas photography gallery.
The Haas Estate is represented exclusively by the Atlas Gallery in the UK
