George Stewart U.S. 40 Photographs - Illinois
 In 1949 and again the following year, George R. Stewart made two cross-country treks on U.S. Route 40. All told, he spent almost four months on the road photographing and documenting the landscape and everyday life along the road. His purpose was to record what he saw as he passed. His record captured the grand and the mundane. The resulting book, U.S. 40, was published in 1953. Accompanying his 114 photographs were 92 interpretive essays written in an accessible and enlightening manner. It provides readers with an armchair view of a roadtrip across the continent.
For the past 40+ years I've been revisiting all of the scenes in the book and documenting changes that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century. (In 1983 Thomas and Geraldine Vale published an update titled U.S. 40 Today that showed 72 of the 114 scenes (63%). For the past few years I have been revisiting each scene and shooting a variety of media including:
- High resolution digital images.
- Medium format B&W negatives and color transparencies using a camera that is an exact clone to the one Stewart used.
- 35mm B&W negatives and color transparencies.
- 360-degree virtual reality images of each scene.
My goal is to have these images published in the first complete update to Stewart's original book. Here are links to many of my U.S. 40 photographs. If you are a publisher and are interested in my work, please contact me.
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Feedback: Do you have corrections or contributions for this page? Want to make a suggestion? Click here to send me an e-mail. I am espcially interested in memories, stories, postcards and photographs. Thanks!
Last updated: 2011-04-01 19:37:06 |
