ISBN 978-1-907112-75-1
Pub date July 2025
Hardback with dust jacket
Format 26 x 21.5 cm
Pages 208
Illustrations over 150 colour
Essay by Dr Charlene Heath
Exhibition at Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, July – September 2025
Book launch at Librairie du Palais, Arles, Thursday 10 July, 3-4pm
Book Launch at The Photographers’ Gallery, London Thursday 24 July 2025 6-8pm
Two photographers, Fox and Knorr set out in 2016 on a journey of friendship, adventure and collaboration stopping at motels, drugstores, cafes and Airbnb’s. Stopping, walking, getting out to meet people and explore a fractured US society in the age of Trump. Over 150 colour photographs made between 2016 and 2025 focus on small towns on this extended road trip from Key West in Florida to Fort Kent in Maine.
In 1954, photographer Berenice Abbott journeyed along the length of U.S. Route 1. From Florida motels to Maine potato farmers, Abbott memorialised communities up and down the East Coast. During this trip, she shot more than two hundred and fifty 8x10-inch photographs, and around one thousand smaller images using her Rolleiflex camera, representing her largest portfolio of photographs devoted to a single subject. In 2014 after the publication of David Campany’s book, The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip, Anna Fox and Karen Knorr decided that they would make a collaborative road trip together based on Berenice Abbott’s Route One.
Following in the tracks of Berenice Abbott and her colleague/assistant Damon Gadd (also accompanied by Sara Gadd), Karen Knorr and Anna Fox set out in 2016 to start a record of contemporary life along U.S. Route 1. during the age of Trump. They started in Key West in 2016 and aimed North for Maine, not knowing how long this trip might take. Along the way Fox and Knorr searched for a sense of what is happening today and how that differs from what Abbott and Gadd found. Using their iPhones, digital SLRs and a Phase One medium format camera, they photographed small towns, people, drugstores, cafes, diners, hotels, motels, farms, factories, street signs and advertisements. Abbott focused on the road and its signs, local industry, how goods moved both north and south, the rapid growth of the use of the motor car and the development of tourism. Fox and Knorr wanted to re-call the importance of Abbott’s work, looking at the significance of U.S.1 and how life has developed around it, since it is now a far quieter roadway. From 2016 – 2024, Fox and Knorr traversed the U.S. Route, considering current environmental debate and societal discontent created by the increasing disenchantment of working Americans with their governance and elites. Covid stopped all travel between 2020 and 2022, but Fox and Knorr continued to take photographs off social media networks during the Jan 6 storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters. In 2024 they made two last trips to Maine and Florida, concluding this chapter of their work.
Despite being one of the most advanced economies, USA is still surprisingly conservative. The second amendment to the United Sates Constitution protects the right of people to keep and bear arms. Girls as young as 14 are allowed to marry (with parental consent) in 27 states. On June 24, 2022, America’s top court overturned the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling which had given women abortion rights up until 24 weeks and opened the door for states to ban abortion outright.
The criminal justice system in the United States has a very large imbalance in the composition of races incarcerated, specifically between blacks and whites. Black males are not only the victims of violence and discrimination but have an incarceration rate twenty-five times higher than that of the total population. Black Lives Matter, a decentralised social movement was formed in 2013 by three women, and global support culminated in the founding of Black Lives Matter Global network advocating for the eradication of systematic racism and prevention of police violence. Prior to this, in 2006, the #MeToo movement was started by Tarana Burke, a women’s advocate, to support survivors of sexual violence, especially young women of colour. It gained widespread attention in 2017 after news reports surfaced about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct.
On November 5, 2024, Donald Trump won the US presidential election for the second time. Barely two weeks later, on November 17, an image began circulating on social media that signalled the start of what will be an unprecedented period in the United States: Trump and his right-hand man Elon Musk with Robert Kennedy aboard Trump Force One enjoying a meal of McDonald’s hamburgers.
BIOGRAPHIES
Karen Knorr USA/UK was born in Germany and grew up in Puerto Rico in the 1960’s. Knorr’s work is shown worldwide.Her most recent solo exhibitions include Fables and Other Stories shown at Centre d’art contemporain de la Matmut, France (2025) and Intersections shown at Sundram Tagore, New York (2024). Her work is collected by the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Tate Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore. Emerita Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Karen Knorr, Hon FRPS, is an advocate for women in photography, co-founder and on the steering committee of Fast Forward: Women in Photography. Since 2020 Knorr has been selling small-scale special editions of her work on Artist support Pledge to raise funding for charities including Ukraine, The Trussell Trust, Black Lives Matter, Give India, LA fire Fund, Fast Forward: Women in Photography.
Anna Fox Hon FRPS was born in the UK and studied at The West Surrey College of Art & Design in the 1980’s. Fox is Professor of Photography at University for the Creative Arts where she directs the research project Fast Forward: Women in Photography. Working in colour, Fox first gained attention for Work Stations: Office Life in London (1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher’s Britain. Her work has been published and exhibited across the world and most recently has been included in: The 80’s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain and This is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Her solo shows have been seen at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Shanghai Center of Photography and in 2010 she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. Fox’s work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore amongst other institutions.
Berenice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s. Her road trip project U.S.1 was made in the mid 1950s in collaboration with her assistant. She explains their reasons for making it: “We wanted to capture visually the character of an historic section of the United States, its beauties and incongruities and all. If visible evidences of the past survived, we wanted to photograph them before bulldozers and derricks moved in.”
