Anna Fox & Karen Knorr: U.S. Route 1 (After Berenice Abbott)

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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 2024 focus on small towns on this extended road trip from Key West in Florida to Fort Kent in Maine.

In 1954, renowned US photographer Berenice Abbott journeyed along the length of U.S. Route 1, capturing the road, its towns, and inhabitants. From Florida motels to Maine potato farmers, Abbott memorialized communities up and down the East Coast. Over a nine-year period from 2016 - 2024 Anna Fox and Karen Knorr drove from Key West in Florida to Fort Kent in Maine, stopping at various points along the way to celebrate and extend Abbott's work from 1954. Photographing small towns, people, drugstores, cafes, hotels, motels and diners they set out to record contemporary life along U.S.1. during the age of Trump. Abbott started in Maine in 1954 and with her assistants the Gadds, made their way south to Key West with a number of trips over a two year period. Abbott aimed to look at this 300-year-old route, the way it was used and the life either side of it at the time when the building of an interstate national highway threatened to take most of its business. Like Abbott, Fox and Knorr are intensely engaged with the voice of photography and the way it can describe what it sees. They see this time as particularly relevant in the light of current environmental debate and societal discontent created by the disenchantment of working Americans with their governance and elites. The USA has a more divided country since 2016, drawing world-wide attention, because although it has been one of the most advanced liberal economies, it has remained increasingly conservative particularly when it concerns race, its gun laws and the marital age of consent for girls.

Author Bio

Anna Fox is an acclaimed contemporary British photographer and is Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts where she currently holds an AHRC Impact Award for the project Fast Forward Women in Photography. Fox's solo shows have been seen at Photographer's Gallery, London, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago amongst others and her work has been included in international group shows including Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant Garde at Tate Liverpool and The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain. She was shortlisted for the 2010 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize and her work is included in collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, The National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Yale Centre for British Art.

Karen Knorr (USA / UK) was born in Germany and grew up in San Juan Puerto Rico in the 1960's. She Is Emeritus Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts. She lives in Hackney, London. Karen Knorr won the V International Photography Pilar Citoler Prize in 2010. She has been nominated for the Deutsche Brse in 2011 and 2012 and Prix Pictet in 2012 and 2018. Karen Knorr's work is included in collections worldwide including Moma (San Francisco), The Museum of Fine Art (Houston) Museum of Art and Photography, (Bangalore) Tate Museum (London) and Pompidou Museum (Paris). In 2025 she had a solo exhibition of her series Fables and Other Stories at Matmut Centre of Contemporary Art, Rouen, France.

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."