The Long Way Home: Roadside Images of a Lost Americana

From San Jacinto College Central Campus:

“Amateur photographer Carter Hicks (b.1957) captures the essence and sometimes irony of the American landscape in vacant roadside buildings, dilapidated signs and the eclectic nature of everyday working people scattered across the Southeastern United States.

The Long Way Home: Roadside Images of a Lost Americana pays homage to the forgotten industry, enterprise and people of small towns on the periphery of the interstate highway.

Carter Hicks began his love affair with taking pictures as a student photographer for his high school yearbook and later a staff photographer for the student union at Davidson College, where he graduated in 1980 with a degree in physics.

Soon thereafter, he took a job with Compaq Computer Corporation as a systems engineering project manager, working firsthand on the early development of personal computers. Following retirement, his life in Texas would set in motion annual road-trips back to North Carolina, his beloved home state. To make things more interesting, he began to take the “long way home”, navigating the backroads through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee.

He was drawn to the vast sea of abandoned buildings, defunct manufacturing sites and overall ill repair of many small towns and rural areas that were once thriving. The expressway network sparked by Dwight Eisenhower in the mid-1950’s had many positive impacts while also compromising the livelihood of smaller towns, many of which were poor and minority communities. These images are a reminder of those forgotten places.”