We are delighted to share a few images from Craig Easton’s new series – Notes on the American Road Trip

“Part of a work-in-progress … these works explore the power that photography has had in shaping perceptions of the United States of America around the world. Why does a boy from Edinburgh, Scotland know about Hale County, Alabama? Or Nipomo, California? What influence has photography had in establishing and maintaining American cultural, economic and political power?

Much of what I know of America I know through photography, through books and music and movies. That ‘soft power’ is power, and photographs are often co-opted to carry messages quite distinct from that which they originally set out to communicate. What do these images say? And is what they say true? There is often a perceptual shift, and when there is, what level of complicity does the photographer have?

The photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were, at times, searing critiques of US society, but as years have passed they’ve come to embody complex notions of American identity and, in consequence, they’ve often reinforced the hegemony of US culture globally.

In the 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir saw America with a European sensibility, a set of foreign eyes. Her perspective differs vastly from those of US natives such as Steinbeck or Salinger or Lee.

When, a decade later, another European, Robert Frank ‘sucked a sad poem right out of America’, his photographs were considered so controversial that no US publisher would make the book. It was, though, published in France. Only later, once it had achieved critical success, was it published in the US, but crucially with the original texts removed and replaced by Jack Kerouac’s poetic ode to Americana.

So, like Frank and like de Beauvoir, I came to see this vast, complex, beautiful and puzzling country for myself; an America that delights and confounds in equal measure, attracts and repels, fascinates and intrigues.” Craig Easton Jan ’26

Some of the images from this series will be on show at the Griffin Museum of Photography January 9 – March 15, 2026
www.griffinmuseum.org