U.S.1 After Berenice Abbott

by Karen Knorr and Anna Fox

 

Les Rencontres d’Arles
7 July–5 October 2025

 

Karen Knorr and Anna Fox will be debuting their collaborative project, U.S.1 After Berenice Abbott, at Les Rencontres d’Arles this July.

In 1954, 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. During this trip, Abbott shot more than four hundred 8×10-inch photographs, and over two 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 collaborative road trip together based on Berenice Abbott’s Route One. Between 2016 and 2019 Fox and Knorr drove from Key West to Atlanta, from Washington DC back to Atlanta, sometimes going off piste to photograph small towns, people, drugstores, cafes, hotels, motels and diners along the way using their iPhones, their digital SLRs ad at times a Phase 1 medium format camera. They visited Rhode Island, Providence and New York in 2017 and then traversed Baltimore and Philadelphia in 2022, Maine in 2023 and finally New York, Florida and Maine again in 2024 finishing at the northern most point on Route 1, Fort Kent Maine.

Fox and Knorr have chosen this project for several important reasons: to re-call the significance of the work of Abbott, as too many histories of women photographers are neglected; to look at the significance of Route US1 and how life has developed around it since it is now a far quieter roadway; and what are the social and economic conditions explicit in today’s USA. Like Abbott they have been intensely engaged in the voice of photography and the way it can describe what it sees.

Find out more on the Rencontres d’Arles website.