Beginning in the late 2000s, the Library of Congress began to acquire photographer John Margolies’s (1940-2016) extraordinary archive celebrating the vernacular and novelty architecture of America. The endeavor was especially important given that, in many cases, the motels, gas stations, diners, movie theaters, coffee houses and other roadside buildings captured by Margolies’s lens no longer existed in any other form.
The often eccentric and unique architecture of the constructions had been insufficient to save them. But Margolies had long believed passionately that the roadside’s heyday—ushered in by the rapid uptake of the automobile in the 1920s, essentially over by the 1980s thanks to the advent of the interstate network—deserved to be documented while that was still possible.
Often gaudy, sometimes goofy, America’s commercial roadside buildings had been reviled for much of the twentieth century by the modernist architectural elite as vulgar and kitsch alongside the more famous Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, authors of the groundbreaking Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Margolies was one of several figures within the postmodern movement in architecture whose work changed this established opinion.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, a handful of roadside buildings —thanks to the attention drawn to them by Margolies and others—found their way on to the National Register of Historic Places. This made their continued survival more likely. For instance, Margate, New Jersey’s Lucy the Elephant, almost a century old when listed in 1971; the shell-shaped and dilapidated Shell Service Station in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1976; in 1983, the train car-style Miss Bellows Falls Diner in Bellows Falls, Vermont.
This last’s nomination report cited Margolies’s 1981 book The End of the Road, where this diner was one of a number featured. In a heartfelt text accompanying the images, Margolies had written:
“The commercial architecture by the side of the road is very important; it is America’s definitive contribution to the art of design in the twentieth century”.
It seems at least some in the National Park Service (which administers the National Register) were sympathetic to this view, as the listing of roadside buildings on the Register picked up speed over the next two to three decades. Hence the Library of Congress’s 2007 acquisition of 3,000 of Margolies’s color slides, with the stated intention to secure the rest when funds allowed it, can be viewed as setting the seal on Margolies’s and the other postmodernists’ achievement.
An architectural critic and curator earlier in his career, Margolies built up his archive of around 13,000 photographs over numerous road trips undertaken over nearly four decades, from the early 1970s to the late 2000s. Besides this bounty of Kodachrome images, he also accumulated a wealth of related ephemera, including postcards, road maps (with his routes marked out with a Sharpie), tourist brochures and the like.
To celebrate Margolies’s work, and to draw attention to its efforts to acquire his full archive and collection, in March 2011 the Library of Congress held a symposium entitled “Marvels of Roadside and Mainstreet America: the Itinerant Eye of John Margolies“, featuring the photographer himself and a handful of appreciative scholars. Happily, this event was filmed and is available to view online. In his introductory remarks, the Library’s Ford Peatross invokes one of America’s greatest writers to explain his organization’s interest in Margolies’s project:
“Emerson espoused that truth and beauty were to be found not only in the fine arts but also in the commonplace, and that the exploration of ‘the near, the low, the common’ was key to the creative development of a young nation”.
Peatross plausibly links Margolies’s work to the best in America’s political tradition:
“Few things, in fact, are more American, democratic and individualistic than the roadside and mainstreet icons recorded by John Margolies”.
He then continues with some remarks clearly intended to justify looking, as Margolies does, at flashy—some would say tacky—commercial buildings with an appreciative eye:
“The great American designer Charles Eames (whose archive is also here [at the Library of Congress]) believed that good design is an expression of purpose that recognizes and responds to a need, and is, by nature, ephemeral”.
And he quotes Eames:
“It may, if it is good enough, later be judged as art”.
Peatross’s introduction is followed by a rare appearance (at least rare on film) by Margolies, who takes his audience through a compelling one-hour overview of his project.
There seem indeed to be very few films of the exuberant, inspiringly passionate John Margolies in existence. And this despite him having given numerous lectures throughout his career. Indeed, before I watched this video recently, I’d never heard the man speak, even though I’d been a fan of his photographs for a while.
Many of those familiar with Margolies’s work today likely first encountered it, as I did, through ”old roadside pics”, a fairly large account (approximately 51,000 followers) on what was formerly Twitter. While the monetized X has come to be dominated by engagement bait at the expense of quality niche content, the old Twitter used to be a truly great platform for new discoveries of all kinds. The account’s profile picture is one of Margolies’s most iconic photos: a vividly pink “cowboy” shrimp toting a brace of six-shooters and sporting a Stetson. When he’d visited Houston, Texas in 1983, Margolies had found this rootin’-tootin’ crustacean looming over the road, enticing drivers into Christie’s famous seafood restaurant. His memorable picture of it well represents the whimsical and comical side of the American roadside.
While the monetized X has come to be dominated by engagement bait at the expense of quality niche content, the old Twitter used to be a truly great platform for new discoveries of all kinds.
Yet there’s considerably more to the Margolies archive than this, as “old roadside pics” amply demonstrated over the three years it was active, from 2020 until 2023. The account drew from a vast fund of images, as the Library of Congress had, as it turned out, managed to acquire almost the whole of the remainder of the Margolies archive and ephemera collection in 2015—the year before Margolies’s death aged 76—and had made the images free to use.
The purchase of the archive and collection was important not only from a documentary point of view, but also from an artistic one. Margolies had been guided by a powerful aesthetic vision, as evidenced by his images’ unity of style: each building, sign or other subject was captured in the sun, below blue skies, without cars or people cluttering the picture.
”I wanted to make them iconic”, the photographer told his 2011 symposium audience, ”and I wanted to make them relate visually one to another”. He would head out from whatever motel he was staying at shortly after dawn to enjoy the benefit of the quiet streets; sometimes he’d wait until evening for similar conditions to return. At times he’d have to persuade a motorist to move his or her car—not infrequently this meant buying them a drink. In these ways, Margolies managed to contrive scenes free of automobiles and people.
The resulting images possess a dreamy, even utopian air. The presentation of each subject in isolation—and free of sentimentality, however cute or goofy the subject—together with the choice of saturated colors (vivid hues being a Kodachrome hallmark), gives these images of roadside Americana a Pop-Art quality, that for me brings to mind not just Warhol and Lichtenstein, but also mid-sixties Godard. There is a democratic eclecticism on display too, an equal openness to the ugly and the beautiful, the tawdry and the sublime.
As I’d long had an eye for pre-WW2 architecture, especially modernism, it was the photos in that line which first drew me in: three elegant motel units in streamlined Moderne style, bright white in a Hot Springs, Arkansas morning; a chocolate-brown brick Art Deco movie theatre, the Highland, in St Paul, Minnesota; a pale pink Egyptian revival Ford dealership in Klamath Falls, Oregon; GREYHOUND hanging vertically in Columbia, South Carolina, the elegant white-on-blue depot sign full of romantic promise against the sky.
Although the Margolies archive includes plenty more in this modernist vein, his overall aesthetic approach was undoubtedly postmodern. A modernist would not have seen fit to photograph tea pot- and flying saucer-shaped gas stations, miniature golf courses featuring dinosaur and Buddha statues, duck-shaped shops and fish-shaped restaurants, three fifths of a giant donut serving as an entrance to the “Donut Hole“, or a sign displaying the top-hatted and monocled “Mr Peanut“. Always willing to entertain the aesthetic merits of buildings and signage disdained by more snobbish critics as low trash, Margolies was consistently postmodernist and anti-elitist throughout his career.
A modernist would not have seen fit to photograph tea pot- and flying saucer-shaped gas stations, miniature golf courses featuring dinosaur and Buddha statues, duck-shaped shops and fish-shaped restaurants.
This may be why his pictures have always reminded me of certain parts of another visionary postmodernist work, Jean Baudrillard’s Tocquevillian travelogue / essay America (1986). Take this passage, in which the French maverick describes finding, wherever he goes in the US,
“the light irony and neutral humor of things that have become banal, the humor of the mobile home and the giant hamburger on the sixteen-foot long billboard, the pop and hyper humor so characteristic of the atmosphere of America, where things almost seem endowed with a certain indulgence towards their own banality. But they are indulgent towards their own craziness too. Looked at more generally, they do not lay claim to being extraordinary; they simply are extraordinary. They have that extravagance which makes up odd, everyday America”.
These sentences could easily be describing that now mostly vanished America found in Margolies’s photographs. Yet Margolies’s America is Alexis de Tocqueville’s also. At the opening of the first volume of Democracy In America (1835), the French thinker writes:
“Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions”.
Of course, Tocqueville does not mean that there are no rich or poor Americans, but rather that the citizens of the country are socially and politically on a similar footing. For Tocqueville, the essence of American democracy was a combination of equality and individualism, and these are among the things most celebrated by Margolies’s photographs.
American mobility is also very much honored—in a sense, John Margolies turned the second half of his life into one long road movie. That movie plays in the mind’s eye when one browses through his photographs or listens to his talk at the “Roadside Marvels” symposium.
Margolies’s commitment to democratic values is visible in the attention he paid to the work of obscure small-town architects and even the untrained. What was to be fought for was recognition for unsung architectural heroes and their creations, while to be fought against were the cultural amnesia and narrow-mindedness that come with homogenization. Architectural historian Gabrielle Esperdy (who spoke at the 2011 symposium) offers a description of an earlier Margolies project, the Telethon collective, which fits his roadside photography too:
“A celebration of untutored design, a critique of modern homogenization, a refusal of the conventions of taste”.
Margolies’s enthusiasm for “odd, everyday America” placed him beyond the pale for modernist architects and critics, who above all were appalled by his fondness for “ducks”. Robert Venturi, architect and architectural theorist, coined that term in Learning from Last Vegas to describe buildings designed to look like something else (Flanders, New York’s Big Duck shop, selling ducks, dairy and duck eggs, had inspired the name).
There are whole flocks of ducks in the Margolies archive. Take, for instance, his 1977 photo of Wigwam Lodge in Tempe, Arizona, one of a number of pictures showing teepee-shaped buildings, often in a somewhat dilapidated state. Margolies seems to have taken few such photos after 1989: as he relates in his 1995 book Home Away from Home: Motels in America, many of these Native American-themed buildings were demolished in the later years of the last century, there being no place for them in politically correct times.
By 2011 Klamath Falls’s Egyptian revival Ford dealership probably no longer existed, Margolies speculated at the “Roadside Marvels” symposium. In commercial terms. it had been dead when he’d visited in 2003. At any rate, no architect could design a similar building today without being condemned for “orientalism”. The same is true of one of the real jewels of the Margolies archive, Atlantic City, New Jersey’s historic Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel. Margolies got to this building just in time. This hotel, at which Winston Churchill had been an honored guest in 1916 (“Blenheim” refers to Blenheim Palace in England, the Churchills’ ancestral home), appears Moorish and resplendent in white and gold in some of the last photos of it, snapped mere weeks before its demolition in 1978.
More than just an exercise in dry, theoretical postmodernism, Margolies’s photography, with its blend of populism, eclecticism and humor, powerfully evokes an important current, a prominent mood, that ran through late 20th century American culture. The current I have in mind I might call “the postmodern moment”: that cultural phenomenon lasting from perhaps the late 1950s (according to Jean-François Lyotard’s and Fredric Jameson’s periodization) to around 2000. In this respect, Margolies’s work bears comparison with the Californian novels of Thomas Pynchon and the pop art of Andy Warhol (Margolies even appeared in Warhol’s film Camp).
Like the work of those more famous peers, Margolies’s oeuvre offers many welcome reminders of a culture and a sensibility less inhibited, more given to jokes and play and, arguably, more imaginative than anything you’re likely to encounter today. For what appeals to me in the kaleidoscopic array of signs and buildings captured by Margolies’s lens is not only the sheer variety and individuality on display, but also the distinctive, droll way in which many of his subjects treat the past, with a curious blend of naivety and irony. Perhaps this playful and irreverent sensibility, which figured so prominently in postmodern culture, was a victim of the much-touted “end of irony” occasioned by 9/11.
It may then be fitting that, soon after the passing of that “postmodern moment”, Margolies brought his career to end. He admitted that his project might be said to be incomplete, given that his coverage of Maine, New Hampshire and other New England states was sparse, of Alaska and Hawaii non-existent. If at least some old roadside buildings still exist in these states, there’s an opportunity for someone to work at filling in Margolies’s gaps. Of course, any new roadside photographs would not use fondly remembered Kodachrome, the film having been discontinued in 2009 (this may have been a factor in Margolies’s calling it a day). Anyone hoping to reproduce, digitally, the unique look of Kodachrome images, that startling, almost hallucinatory vividness, would likely be disappointed.
What’s more, anyone following in Margolies’s footsteps would have to contend with the issues that AI has introduced into photography: doubts whether a given image has been excessively manipulated, or whether it is real at all. Entirely fake, but very believable images have become so easy for even the untrained to create, with very little time and effort required, that the field is now faced with quite serious problems.
The reality of the new situation was highlighted in 2023 when German artist Boris Eldagsen revealed that the image with which he had just won the Sony World Photography Award was AI-generated. Refusing the prize, he said he wanted to expose the lack of clear rules separating AI art from photography.
The normalization of AI images and AI-enabled manipulation of photographs is subtly changing the meaning of the photographic image. Don’t like that overcast sky in your snaps of San Francisco? You can swap it out for unbroken sunshine in seconds, complete with recalculated light and shadow for everything in the frame. Something Baudrillard wrote in America has taken on a new, ironic connotation:
“In reality it is not always sunny in California. You often get fog with the sun, or smog in Los Angeles. And yet you retain a sun-filled memory of the place, a sunny screen memory”.
But the sunny “screen memories” possible with AI are challenging for a documentary project like Margolies’s. Rampant digital manipulation takes the focus away from the photographer’s subject (which is devalued by its uncertain reality) and places it firmly on the photographer him or herself.
It has become questionable whether photography can still be made to serve democratic ends. Another concern is the digital remastering of old photographs, something I hope never to see Margolies’s images subjected to. Let the roadside continue to speak to us in its own authentic language, that tongue John Margolies was fluent in.
