Art show features Route 66 photography

If you’re traveling through Pennsylvania in the next few days or so, you may ought to head to New Hope Arts Inc. in New Hope to see the “Automania: Second Gear” exhibit that includes works by photographer John Slavin.

Here’s how CentralJersey.com describes the show:

A wooden sign that points left to L.A. and right to Chicago rests on the windshield of a banged up, rusty classic car, its hood missing and all the guts along with it. A nearby truck also appears to have lost its way in the brush, off the dirt road that leads to a tiny white home, dwarfed by the mountain chain behind it.

Photographer John Slavin captured vintage images like this one while traveling along highway Route 66, the former Mother Road, in the 1990s. With two Leica cameras and a bag full of Kodachrome, he documented what he saw in various towns on the historic route — gas stations, diners, motels, cafes.

”Basically what I tried to do was document all of that before it went away, it’s been disappearing over the years,” Mr. Slavin says.

The exhibit also includes paintings, photographs, historic gas pumps and other memorabilia.

Some of Slavin’s Route 66 images can be seen at his website here. A few include things or people that are gone, including the Roy Rogers Museum in Victorville, Calif., and Russell Soulsby at his gas station in Mount Olive, Ill., and Juan Delgadillo of the Snow-Cap Drive-In restaurant in Seligman, Ariz.

The exhibit will be up through Aug. 14.

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