Can there be any escape from the feeling that we have squandered our responsibilities?” Cole wrote. “Roads, whether we like it or not, are reminders. Cole touches on this seemingly symbolic death of the West, something he wrote is a common theme in Adams’s work, and he points out that Adams’s work fails to acknowledge who the West really belonged to – European settlers, or dispossessed Native Americans? In turn, along with the death of the American dream, the picture seems to represent the death of the American West, the two of which are near synonymous in Americana mythology, and the death of a way of living that people still struggle to adhere to. Loman’s struggle was their own – working down an endless, empty road to a dream that only exists when their eyes are closed. I think that an analysis included in the book I read said that when the play came out in 1949, the men in the audience had tears streaming down their faces. But his fixation on winning – something he is never able to achieve – makes his life devoid of true happiness.
He gets married, he buys a house, and he has two kids. The main character, a mediocre salesman named Willy Loman, works all his life to get there, and objectively, he does it. Its emptiness, however, is almost reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, which mourns, in a way, the death of the idealistic “dream” that may or may not have ever existed.
When I look at the picture, I feel like it almost represents the twentieth century’s version of the American Dream: An open road, a frontier that’s still rugged somehow even in its civilization, and a promise for potential. Cole discusses how Adams’s work sets up landscapes in an alluring, mysterious way, and he describes the open road in the picture above as something “full of promise,” that “suggests… something more is there.” Teja Cole reflects on Robert Adams’s legacy as a landscape photographer in his article, “ Dispatches from a Ruined Paradise,” published by The New York Times. As published in The New York Times article “ Dispatches from a Ruined Paradise,” by Teja Cole. ‘‘Along Federal Highway 287, 1977.’’ Credit Robert Adams.
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