Mainstream and Marginal: Situating the American Roadside Photographs of John Margolies

Beginning in 1972, the photographer John Margolies (born 1940) spent thirty-six years documenting commercial vernacular buildings across the United States. His body of work, now including an archive of thirteen thousand photographs and related ephemeral material, is an unparalleled record of the American roadside in the second half of the twentieth century. Margolies’s photographs have appeared in numerous popular magazines, books, postcard collections, and even magnet sets. He has presented his work in slide lectures, for the general public and academic audiences alike, for more than three decades. He has attracted a devoted following of roadside enthusiasts, including many who, as is evident on the Internet, have followed in his tire-tracks, crossing the country to visit and photograph the same roadside buildings.¹ While most scholars of commercial vernacular architecture are familiar with Margolies’s photography, his work as a whole has received little scholarly scrutiny. The current acquisition of the Margolies’s archive by the Library of Congress is an opportune moment to consider the significance of this collection and to examine, in depth, the contextual and theoretical framework from which Margolies’s work emerged. This consideration will reveal how his architectural photography evolved from his earlier activities as a critic and curator and will make evident the relationship between his work and the mainstreams and margins of architecture’s evolving discourse during the past half-century. What follows provides the critical backstory for a singular documentary archive of commercial vernacular architecture in the United States.

From Resorts of the Catskills (1979) to Roadside America (2010), Margolies has published more than a dozen books.²Resorts is a serious exhibition catalogue in which scholarly essays on architectural and social history by Elizabeth Blackmar, Elizabeth Cromley, and Neil Harris accompany one hundred of Margolies’s photographs. Roadside is a sumptuous coffee table book with a foreword by architecture curator C. Ford Peatross, a profile by design writer Phil Patton, and more than four hundred of Margolies’s photographs packaged as a fine art publication. Most of the intervening volumes strike a different tone. With titles like Fun along the Road (1990), Ticket to Paradise (1991), and Pump and Circumstance (1993), these books are breezy, cutesy, even goofy, with jam-packed pages that idiosyncratically document a range of commercial building typologies through vintage postcards, maps, brochures, matchbooks, and, most especially, the photographer’s own pictures.³ The one notable exception is The End of the Road, Margolies’s first solely authored book, which appeared in 1981.

Introduced by a highly personal, almost elegiac text, The End of the Road is a collection of color photographs of gas pumps, neon signs, roadside stands, drive-in movie theaters, and motels. Each building is framed in dignified isolation emphasizing sculptural form and graphic sensibility in a manner that would characterize much of Margolies’s subsequent photographic output. The Trail Drive-In Theater, on Route 66 in Amarillo, Texas is typical (Figure 1). Built in 1954 and in operation until around the time Margolies photographed it in 1977, the Trail Drive-In is past its prime, with a turquoise-painted exterior that is faded and peeling. The photograph depicts the side flank of the theater’s screen tower with a ticket kiosk in the foreground. Shot with a 50mm lens and slow film, this is a straightforward portrait of a building, although Margolies obviously chose the façade with signage to individualize his depiction. With a deep depth of field, sharp outlines, and saturated colors, the subject is at the center of the frame. The sky is blue; the shadows are long; the scene is depeopled. There aren’t even any cars—an especially noticeable absence in a roadside picture but a hallmark of Margolies’s work, intended to present the building with as few distractions as possible.⁴

Not all of Margolies’s subjects are buildings on the verge of abandonment. His 1979 photograph of the Alamo Plaza Motel on Route 70 in Memphis, Tennessee, depicts a building with a tidy lawn and a freshly painted façade (Figure 2). Here, Margolies pulls back...