The Road as America's Mirror
America has always defined itself by the road. Our highways are more than infrastructure; they are metaphors for freedom, movement, and agency. To take the wheel, to choose a route, to wander into the unfamiliar has long symbolized possibility and independence. Whitman sang of the open road. Kerouac mythologized it. Families once loaded into station wagons to see the country for themselves. Driving was not just about arrival. It was about charting your own course, testing your independence, and learning to inhabit a vast and varied nation.
That is why some of the most revealing portraits of the United States have come from those who traveled with a camera. Two moments, separated by seventy years, capture the changing meaning of the road. In the 1950s, Robert Frank and Todd Webb each received Guggenheim grants to document "the American way of life." Their journeys produced contrasting but complementary visions of a booming, self-confident nation. Seven decades later, Karen Knorr and Anna Fox retraced U.S. Route 1. Their project presents a very different country. Together, these bodies of work tell us how our civic life has shifted—from confidence to fragility, from taking the wheel to surrendering it, from seeing the road as a mirror to treating it as a pipeline.
Frank and Webb: Confidence Through the Windshield
Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) remains a landmark of twentieth-century photography. Out of 27,000 exposures, Frank distilled 83 images into a searing portrait of diners, jukeboxes, funerals, and flags. His was a harsh critique, but leveled from within a society secure enough to confront itself honestly. Frank's America was booming and dynamic and capable of absorbing criticism because it had confidence in its own strength.
Todd Webb's photographs provide a gentler counterpoint. A middle-aged Midwesterner, Webb traveled more slowly and did so on foot, bicycle, even by sail. He chronicled storefronts and small-town parades with affection. He could find beauty even in wreckage; one famous and memorable image transforms a junkyard of Packards into something sculptural.
Together, they captured a society still on the move. They didn't simply look at America; they traversed it, lingering in towns most people bypassed. They recorded a country tied together by rituals that bridged difference: parades, congregations, civic clubs, and Main Street habits. Their agency mattered. They chose their routes, stopped where they wished, met strangers along the way. The road was both mirror and classroom—a way of encountering America in its fullness.
Knorr and Fox: Fragility Along Route 1
Seven decades later, Karen Knorr and Anna Fox spent nearly a decade documenting U.S. Route 1. Their exhibition U.S. Route 1 (After Berenice Abbott)—currently at Les Rencontres d'Arles—brings together 150 color photographs that reveal a sobering America.
Their Route 1 is lined with shuttered storefronts, hollow strip malls, and abandoned motels. Billboards proclaim religious and nationalist slogans. Veterans are left behind. Some moments verge on the surreal: a wax figure of a slave displayed as kitsch, a clown wandering through a mall. Critics describe their work as confronting abandonment, gun culture, and division. Where mid-century photographers found promise, Knorr and Fox reveal fragility.
Even their decision to drive Route 1 carries significance. To take the wheel with intent, to encounter difference on the ground is increasingly rare. Americans, especially younger ones, delay or forgo licenses. They rely on parents or ride-shares that move them between curated points. Navigation is ceded to algorithms. The detour, the wrong turn, the unexpected diner, once common experiences, are vanishing. Knorr and Fox remind us what is lost when we stop making such journeys: the practice of seeing the country unfiltered, the humility that comes with encountering places not designed for us.
What Changed: From Joiners to Passengers
The difference between eras reflects deeper changes in civic life. Mid-century America was a society of joiners. People moved more, traveled farther, and encountered others unlike themselves. Shared rituals gave diverse communities a sense of belonging.
That fabric has unraveled. Americans now move less, join less, and know fewer people outside their circles. Religious attendance has collapsed, volunteering has declined, and loneliness has surged. In 1990, only 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2021, that number quadrupled to 12%. Social media narrowed horizons further, reinforcing echo chambers.
For younger Americans, the decline in driving captures this trend perfectly. In 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds and 80% of 18-year-olds held driver's licenses. By 2021, only 25% of 16-year-olds and 60% of 18-year-olds were licensed. Among 19-year-olds, the licensing rate fell from 87% in 1983 to 70% in 2010. By 2023, only about 33% of teens 19 and under had licenses, down from 45% in 2003.
What was once a rite of passage has become optional. Even Uber's CEO recently noted his adult son hasn't acquired a license, preferring ride-shares. The message is clear: for a rising generation, taking the wheel is no longer central.
The Loss of Agency
The loss is not simply practical. It is cultural and civic. Without driving, young Americans have fewer encounters with the unexpected. They don't stumble into small-town diners or wrong-turn parades. They move from one curated node to another, carried by parents or apps, insulated from the unplanned.
Driving once provided not just mobility but humility: the realization that the country is vast, varied, and not designed to conform to you. Without it, empathy shrinks, resilience weakens, and civic trust withers. What is being lost is agency itself: the ability to choose, to discover, to see for oneself. A generation that no longer drives itself may be less prepared to steer the nation forward.
Roads as Pipelines, Not Mirrors
This is why Knorr and Fox's work matters so deeply. Their photographs remind us what happens when the road ceases to be a mirror. Frank and Webb could only make their portraits because they took the wheel, moved through America on their own terms. Knorr and Fox did the same. But most Americans, especially the young, no longer do.
When we stop driving, we cede agency. We allow algorithms to decide where we go and what we see. Roads without drivers are not mirrors; they are pipelines. They move us efficiently but show us nothing. We glide between curated destinations without inhabiting the places in between. The unexpected detour, the chance encounter, the human surprise vanish. And with them vanishes the civic practice of meeting difference face-to-face.
A society that does not drive is a society that no longer wanders, no longer discovers, no longer learns humility by being a stranger in a strange town. It is a society of passengers, not participants—discontented, disconnected, and blind.
Serendipity has become nearly extinct. Social media feeds us pre-digested itineraries and step-by-step scripts for experiencing every place and culture. We follow the same ten restaurants, photograph the same scenic overlooks, perform the same rituals of consumption masquerading as discovery. The algorithm has replaced the accident. The curated has conquered the unexpected. And in this endless reproduction of identical experiences, the genuine gifts of human encounter—surprise, discomfort, growth—wither away. We are all following the same maps to the same destinations, and the social world grows more impoverished with every perfectly planned journey.
Reclaiming the Road
America's roads remain mirrors. The arc from Frank and Webb to Knorr and Fox is not just about changing photographic styles. It's about civic health and the question of whether or not we are still willing to take the wheel, to encounter difference, to recognize ourselves in the process.
The lesson is clear: America can only be understood through its differences. Parades and picnics, junkyards and diners, strip malls and veterans' halls; all are part of the same civic fabric. To ignore them is to unravel who we are.
But younger Americans are losing the habits that once made the road formative. They inherit it not as a mirror but as a corridor of convenience, navigated by algorithms and driven by others. Without the practice of taking the wheel, they lose the civic muscle that comes from agency, discovery, and encounter.
That is the warning in Knorr and Fox's Route 1. They did what Frank and Webb did seventy years earlier; they took the wheel, chose their stops, lingered where algorithms would never lead. Their 150 photographs are not merely documents of decay but proof of what becomes visible when we still make such journeys. Each shuttered storefront exists because they drove there themselves, stopped, looked, and recorded. Their work is both portrait and demonstration showing not only what America looks like when we stop looking, but what we might still see if we reclaim the practice of looking for ourselves.
If we fail to heed this lesson, we risk raising a generation of passengers—young Americans who inherit Frank's critique and Webb's affection as museum pieces rather than living practices, who no longer know their own country because they no longer choose their own routes through it. This is not mere nostalgia for the open road. It's about the fundamental skills of democratic citizenship; the ability to navigate disagreement, to be comfortable with discomfort, to find common ground in unexpected places. These are precisely the capacities we need to bridge our political and cultural divides, yet they're the very skills a curated, algorithmic existence fails to develop.
The story these photographers tell, from Frank's 27,000 exposures to Knorr and Fox's decade-long journey, remains worth seeing precisely because they saw it themselves, unmediated and unfiltered. Each transformed the road from pipeline to mirror. And in doing so, they preserved not just images but a way of encountering America that is rapidly vanishing.
Making the deliberate choice to drive through difference, to seek the unexpected, to inhabit the uncomfortable is worth saving. Because without it, we lose more than mobility. We lose the very capacity to see ourselves.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.
Photo: Pexels.
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