Pentagram has designed a new book for photographer Ryann Ford. The oversized, coffee-table volume, The Last Stop: Vanishing Rest Stops of the American Roadside, is the Austin-based photographer’s loving homage to the last vestiges of a uniquely American icon. Published by powerHouse, the book features a series of 85 contemplative studies of the simple, sometimes playful, roadside attractions that become an architectural genre when viewed together.
The open road has always been a magnet for Ford. It was in 2007 that she was struck by a recurring sight: humble, solitary rest stops. Nondescript blurs outside the car window to most, the quirky rest stops seized Ford’s attention—mock adobe dwellings in New Mexico, Depression-era stone houses in Arizona, faux oil rigs in Texas. What were the stories behind these playful pieces of Americana? After some research, Ford was alarmed to learn that rest areas were being closed and demolished all over the country. With countless commercial options at nearly every highway exit, and states needing to cut expenses, those old rest stops were considered no longer necessary.
Ford immediately felt an urgency to capture images of as many of these remnants of Americana as she could before they were gone forever. She spent years on the road, ducking under fences, stepping over fallen trees, and hiking through snow and sandy deserts to reach some of those iconic rest stops, and in doing so, she learned that they are so much more than toilets and tables. For the past several decades, rest stops have given millions of travelers from around the world rest, relief, hospitality, and nostalgia.
Ford photographed rest stops all over the U.S. including out of the way spots on the road like Organ, New Mexico; Raymond, Illinois; Homewood, Kansas; Fish Camp, California; Sidney, Nebraska; Austin, Nevada; Wendover, Utah; Rexford, Kansas; Story City, Iowa; Tappen, North Dakota; Rock Springs, Wyoming; Avon, Minnesota; Lathrop, Missouri; and Lajitas, Texas where she captured the image of the faux teepees that grace the front jacket of the book.
To help the reader out on this photographic road trip the Pentagram team included a small map graphic and the exact latitude and longitude coordinates for each rest stop with the book’s simple titling. Joanna Dowling, a cultural historian, writer, and creative director who pioneered research on rest area history, wrote the introduction titled “A Brief History of Rest Stops,” and legendary Texas performer Joe Ely contributes a rambling poem called “Lord of the Highway” for the foreword. Vince Michael, an expert consultant and speaker in heritage preservation, wrote the afterword.
The Last Stop does far more than capture the remarkable, effective design of our nation’s rest stops. It preserves a moment in time that is quickly fading, a period in the American travel experience worth remembering, when the journey was just as important as the destination. They shaped our collective experience of golden-age car travel across the United States.
