Old Route 66

Artist Thomas Barrow (American, born 1938)

Date1972

Mediumgelatin silver print, toned

DimensionsImage: 4 1/8 × 13 9/16 in. (10.5 × 34.4 cm)
Support: 14 × 24 in. (35.6 × 61 cm)

ClassificationsPhotograph

Credit LineGift of Thomas F. Barrow, 2023

Object number2023.4.1

DescriptionTwo images. Image on viewer's left (proper right) of a large drum on a cement "platform" near telephone poles. Right (proper left) image includes the drum and poles, along with a tipi and building. Images are toned pink.
eMuseum Notes

Emuseum Notes

In this print from the series “Pink Stuff,” Barrow uses a fairly banal picture to comment with sophistication and wit on photographic conventions. The doubling of the image is a visual recollection of the nineteenth-century stereograph, two separate images of the same subject mounted on a rectangular card, which appear three-dimensional when seen through a viewer. Barrow’s photograph doesn’t work like that, but the repetition of a similar scene calls into question the authority of a single frame and requires close looking to determine differences between the two images and how having them side by side alters their meaning. In another twist, the print and series title are pink, an unexpected color for photographs at the time. Barrow recalls that when he was working in Rochester, New York, at the George Eastman collection of photographs, he and his friend Robert Fichter debated about what would be the most “unphotographic” color at a time when the black-and-white print dominated the field. “Fichter said pink”, Barrow says, “a color very much out of favor then. Shortly thereafter, I found some old instructions on how to tone the prints pink.” The subject of the picture chimes with Barrow’s love of cars and automobile culture, the subject of his thesis work in the late 1960s, a few years before this photograph was made.

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