There's a reason Route 66 keeps pulling people back to it. Something about that ribbon of road — two thousand four hundred miles of diner signs and collapsed motels and wide open sky between Chicago and the Santa Monica pier — seems to hold the whole American story in its asphalt.
Edward Keating spent eleven years trying to photograph what that story actually looks like now. The result is Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66, a body of work currently on exhibit at the Amarillo Museum of Art through August 16th — and the subject of a special gallery talk this Friday evening.
Keating came to Route 66 the way many of us do: with history already in his bones. His mother grew up in St. Louis, where her father ran the city's first Ford dealership. In his early twenties, Keating set out on a cross-country drive along the old highway, only to find himself stranded and broke in a Flagstaff motel room. He came back in 2000 as a New York Times staff photographer, covering all twenty-four hundred miles in three weeks. What started as an assignment eventually grew into something more personal — a decade-plus meditation on the people and places the rest of the country had largely stopped noticing.
Keating shot the route as both a journalist and a memoirist, and the distinction matters. These aren't postcard images of roadside Americana. His photographs sit closer to an elegy — for small-town economies, for a version of the middle class that used to find its footing along stretches like this one, for the gap between what the road promised and what it delivered.
He knew about gaps between promise and reality in other ways, too. In 2001, Keating received the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his coverage of the September 11 attacks — images made during the days he spent at Ground Zero, breathing air that would eventually cost him his life. He died of brain cancer in September 2021 at sixty-five, believed to have been caused by his exposure to toxic materials at the site. Main Street was his sixth book of photographs, and among his last completed works.
This Friday's event at the Amarillo Museum of Art brings together two people who knew him best. His wife, Carrie Boretz Keating — herself an accomplished photographer — will speak alongside their daughter Caitlin Keating, a journalist, filmmaker, and producer. The evening opens with a cocktail reception at 6:30pm CT, followed by the gallery talk at 7:15.
Admission is $10 for non-members; AMoA members get in free. Tickets are available at the door or in advance at amoa.org.
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