The University of Tulsa next month is hosting Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Edward Keating’s “Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66” exhibit that was published as a book a few years ago.
The exhibit by the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities at 101 E. Archer St. will run from Oct. 6 through Nov. 18.
Here’s what the news release states about the show:
MAIN STREET is the result of 11 years of traveling along Route 66 — the 2,400-mile highway connecting Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California. Called the “mother road” in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Route 66 has inspired countless artists and writers, including Andy Warhol and Jack Kerouac. Following the path of migrant farmers and others, Keating has ventured westward and back along Route 66, documenting the lives of Americans along the way.
Keating approaches the route as both a journalist and memoirist. His photographs bring attention to the lives and myths scattered along the stretch of Route 66 and serve as a metaphor for the deterioration of middle-class America. According to New York Times journalist Charles LeDuff, MAIN STREET “is about those who traveled its length and those who settled along the way, wherever their bones and their broken cars dropped them.”
The exhibition is also personal mythology, constructed from the artist’s own recollections of the road: Keating’s mother grew up in Saint Louis along Route 66 where her father owned the city’s first Ford dealership. In his early 20s, he embarked on a cross-country trip on Route 66, but found himself, rock-bottom, in a broken-down motel in Flagstaff, Arizona. In 2000, he returned to Route 66 as a New York Times staff photographer, traversing all 2,400 miles in three weeks. The book is a milestone for an artist who has spent a life wandering along the main streets and back roads of America’s most mythic highway.
Keating earned his Pulitzer for his photos during the 9/11 attacks on New York City. Sadly, the news release states Keating’s ultimately fatal cancer in 2021 “was contracted as a result of his exposure to toxic materials at Ground Zero of 9/11.”
I helped Keating with a few technical aspects of the book and met him once at the Pow Wow Restaurant in Tucumcari, New Mexico, when he was doing some fieldwork for the book and freelancing. The Route 66 News book review of “Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66” is here.
A paperback version of the book can be purchased here (Amazon link). The hardback version sold out quickly and is going for as much as $500.
(Image of the now-deceased Ed Goodridge in his office of the now-closed Vernelle’s Motel near Newburg, Missouri, from Edward Keating’s book, “Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66.”)