Eva And Tony Worobiec Have Been Invited To Show Their Work At The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock
Eva and Tony Worobiec have been invited to show their "Icons of the Highway" project at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock. The exhibition will run from 9 January to 27 June 2010.
A brief description of the Exhibition follows written by Roger Watson the Curator of the Museum
The photographs of Tony & Eva Worobiec spin a tale of a life in America that once was. These images are as American as apple pie and George Washington, both fact and fiction run together into a story of a dream that never quite materialised, of a once upon a time place where the past was for squares and the jet propelled future was everything. A mirage in the desert that seemed so real you could taste it but in the end left you hungry.
Take a step back in time and see what was. Let the story swim around you, all the crazy movies you have seen of America, all the carnival like colours that tried to turn Saturday night into one big amusement park. These photographs show the survivors of a time that the truly nostalgic fondly remember and the rest of us cannot believe ever existed at all.
On any Friday or Saturday in summer, just at dusk, on the edge of towns and cities across the expanse of Americas mid-west lie the neon lit symbols of the brash but optimistic years of 1950 and 1960. Motels, diners, cinemas and other road side attractions sprung up in the post war period for automobile crazy Americans to enjoy. The mom & pop operations catered to an expanding leisure class who were seemingly pulled to the highway to see the sites of the American landscape.
Usually low to the ground, with plenty of parking, the motels offered a home away from home with all mod cons. Signs boasting of Colour TV and Air Conditioning were intended to not only match your home appliances, but surpass them. King sized beds, swimming pools, magic fingers automatic massage were all available to lure in the road weary travellers.
The diners, often shiny aluminium Air Stream caravans, were able to offer you meals or just a cup of coffee at any hour of the day or night. Hear the faint echo of the waitresses in their uniforms shouting out their orders with a slang filled banter understood only by the short order cooks. They called the truckers honey or sweetie and kept filling your bottom less cup of coffee
The cinemas, or Movie Palaces, were often in the heart of small towns, rather than on the outskirts, but they shared the love of colourful neon and bright lights. They all seemed to use some version of the vaudeville theatres with lots of red velvet and brocade, a small stage with proscenium arch and frequently a pipe organ which was played before and between the films by a man dressed in a tuxedo. Somebodys notion of the best of the posh world was now available
to the common man
Like middle aged cocktail waitresses, these building were built, not for the glare of daylight, but for the shadowy magical light of twilight and nights, drawing your attention with their flashiness and boasts of offering you something better than what you could get at home, their siren song written in neon. Their promises of soft beds, home cooked meals or a night of escapism, courtesy of Hollywood via Las Vegas, give us insight into the desires and dreams of the post-war middle class in America.
The exhibition will be on at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock from 9 January to 27 June
2010.
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