Museum of Contemporary Photography
First Floor
On The Road:
Dave Anderson: Rough Beauty
Farm Security Administration
Dorothea Lange
September 5-November 5, 2008
Gallery Hours:
Monday through Friday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Thursday 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Sunday 12 p.m. - 5 p.m.
Opening Reception
September 4, 5-7 p.m.
The Museum of Contemporary Photography has chosen to focus on the philosophical and personal results of travel: learning the difference between the real edges and the ideal, mostly fictional, center of America; discovering the possibility of reinventing the self in transit to and from anywhere; and learning how big this country really is in physical expanse and how very small it can be in individual cultural awareness. These are the central themes of Kerouac’s novel.
-- Rod Slemmons, Director
Rough Beauty 
Between 2003 and 2006 Dave Anderson took over 50 trips to Vidor, Texas, and photographed the town and its residents. Known primarily for its long history as a Ku Klux Klan town, Vidor is a small community struggling with issues of extreme poverty and isolation in southeastern Texas. Anderson’s pictures explore a place and its people as they cope with the burden of their past. The place is reminiscent of the places that opened the eyes of Kerouac and his friends to an America that unfolded in front of them as they drove or hitch hiked back and forth across the country.
(Roadkill No.1 by Dave Anderson)
Farm Security Administration Photographs / Dorothea Lange
The exhibition features the Museum’s collection of social documentary work commissioned by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. Beginning with Dorothea Lange, seventeen photographers, hired from 1935 through 1943, fanned out across the country and produced tens of thousands of negatives. Many of these
document the exodus of jobless
people on the road from east to west, either to work as migrant laborers or on WPA sites such as the Grand Coulee and Fort Peck dams. This model of relocation and self redefinition, both individually and 
nationally, is the background and subtext for Kerouac’s On the Road describing his experiences of 1947. The exhibition also offers an expanded view of the work of Dorothea Lange, both during and after her work for the FSA. The Museum’s collection of
her work is the result of a major gift from her family.
(Southern Pacific Billboard by Dorothea Lange
Ditched, Stalled and Stranded by Dorothea Lange)
Robert Frank's The Americans
Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to Robert Frank’s book The Americans which was published at the same time as On the Road. The Swiss immigrant Robert Frank’s photographic images provide a contrast to the interpretation of America expressed in the words of his American ‘hipster’ counterpart Kerouac. Their ways of describing and interpreting what they saw were equally strange, but illuminating in their difference.