Jeff Brouws’ motel photographs

So many photographers have been preoccupied with the road since the post-war period gave birth to car culture and the roadside as a staple of the American landscape. A number of the medium’s greats come to mind — people like Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, Inge Morath, Lee Friedlander, Stehpen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, and Alec Soth (to name just a few) — but one artist in particular stands out as the quintessential documentarian of the road: Jeff Brouws.

This is a photographer of the road for the road. So often America’s highways serve allegorically to represent personal and existential journeys, but with Brouws the focus is tighter — the coolness of the documentation reminiscent of the image of a crime. He examines the road not to build a narrative, but to record the remains of a story never adequately told, as though it was rewritten before the last chapter. 

For Brouws, it begins with the motel. The central theme of his work, what he refers to as “the myth of mobility,” is first spotted in the residue of motel culture that dots the contemporary roadside. You won’t find easy nostalgia here. On the contrary, the motel is offered as an artifact of an idealism that’s been replaced by the pragmatism of the storage unit. 

As he writes, “[The myth of mobility] alludes to the futility of our constant striving for success and achievement, while also metaphorically suggesting that the roads we travel (and infuse with so much meaning) may eventually lead nowhere — to a landscape where ‘the American Dream that isn’t quite what it seems’ resides.”

All Images by Jeff Brouws.

A sort of reversal is always at work in the motel sign — its glaring neon belies the humble structure it announces — but there are certain cases in which the outlandishness factor verges on the otherworldly. Such is the peculiar preoccupation with space that can be spotted on the North American roadside. 

Rocket ships, satellites, and flying saucers all grace motel signage (not to mention diners across the continent). This iconography is not the remainder of patriotic pride in the space race of the 1960s, at least not entirely.

You must shoot for the stars in the hopes of reaching your mark on the earth. One recalls the archer’s paradox: as much as you might want the sign to point at its target, to draw the traveler off the highway and into the parking lot, it must also point away from it in some capacity. The driver is not meant to look at the motel itself, but to be transfixed by the promise of the sign.

These markers thus quickly became figures of post-war American ambition, and there was nothing more ambitious than conquering space. Folded around the broad theme of travel, the space motel draws together many familiar registers: movement, exploration, colonization, and the fierce will to be free of obligation, shuttling as it were towards the outer atmosphere.  

The motel office as capitalist beacon

So much is made of the blazing neon of the motel sign that we tend to forget the importance of the yellow-hued office, glowing through the night under a red VACANCY marker.  If each component of the motel can be thought of as a typology — the sign, the humble building, the pool, etc. — the office has an obvious set of characteristics organized around a central goal: to exchange money speedily. 

Unlike the grand entrances of hotels with their plush sofas and soaring ceilings, the motel office is designed solely to be a site of commerce. Conversation is kept to a minimum here, seating is limited if it exists at all, and the space is intentionally unadorned, save for a calendar and a rack of travel brochures. 

The idea is to get the customer in and out as quickly as possible. A successful motel owner will protect the anonymity of his guests at all costs, and the humble architecture of the office must communicate this as a sort of reassuring promise in advance of the transaction. 

If this place could speak, it would say two things: 1) we are always open for business, and 2) we don’t care who you are as long as you pay. All around the continent these little huts pledge constant availability and capitalistic ease, two core attributes of the motel intertwined like either side of the same coin. 

Photos (in order) by David Shalloil, twurdemann, Jeff Brouws, Benoit Paillé, Jenny McG, and Thomas Hawk.

If ever there was a word made to be cast in neon glow, it would surely be rainbow. And if ever there was an obvious way to market a motel, it would be with the excitement and impermanence promised by the appearance of this sky surfing arc. It’s a glass-tubed match made in heaven, which is why rainbow motor courts once dotted the North American roadside in such supply it was as if they foretold the next gold rush. 

What to say about rainbows? More than you’d think. Despite its apparently simple beauty, the manner in which this meteorological phenomenon is witnessed has considerable symbolic weight, particularly as pertains to our conception of the motel.

A rainbow is an optical illusion in which light refracted through water droplets creates a colour spectrum. In other words, these sweeping arcs are not physical objects that could be touched or approached. On the contrary, no two people can see precisely the same rainbow, as its appearance is always dictated by one’s relationship to the light source. 

That’s either a lot of pots of gold or no gold at all. We might all witness a rainbow but what exactly we see is determined by the point from which we’re looking. Perspective is everything. Similarly, a motel might pose as a place for family recreation and wholesome adventure or as an anonymous hideout for criminals and cheats. It’ll be whatever you want it to be, as long as you know it’s temporary. 

The motel itself is an optical illusion. With its dazzling neon sign, its nearly invisible one-storey structure, entirely characterless rooms, and oasis-like swimming pool, one can place any narrative he wants upon such a place. It’s designed from the first to be something that’s malleable, that offers itself up for definition and re-definition each time a new car pulls into the parking lot. 

The canvas is yours, dear traveller.

Photos by Jonathan Hartsaw, Deborah Jane Seltzer, Brent Moore, The Boston Public Library. Postcards via Ebay. 

The motel sign finds its apotheosis in the original Holiday Inn marker, which is sadly fitting because the franchise would help to snuff out huge numbers of independent motor courts in the 1970s, leaving only vestiges of the quirky neon signage that lit up the North American road in the 1950s and ‘60s. 

From a design standpoint, it’s perfect. While brash in general, the green base and cursive font suggest casual comfort. It wouldn’t be a stretch to note the religious underpinning of the sign’s most outlandish feature, its glimmering crown reminiscent of the star of Bethlehem guiding travellers to the holy land below.

This was the south, after all. America was the promised land, and the Holiday Inn nominated itself first as “the nation’s innkeeper” and then as “the world’s innkeeper.” Be fruitful and multiply was a dictum taken very seriously.

But even if you were to spot and follow this shimmering beacon, one last push might be required to get you to take refuge at the inn for the night. A pulsing yellow arrow, the only pseudo-sleazy feature of the sign, would coax weary drivers into a hypnotic trance, exerting an almost gravitational force from the side of the road.

Photo by The Sign Museum on Flickr. 

If ever there was an apt example of the tension expressed between the blazing pomp of the motel’s neon marker and the humble accommodations it announces, we find it in the star-adorned sign of the 1950s-era roadside. For all the determination to characterize the motor court as insignificant and fleeting, the Christian iconography of its signage ties the place to thousands of years of religious tradition.

Yes, each and every roadside motel is just another Bethlehem inn, complete with a holy star guiding road-weary travellers to safety, comfort, and peace. It’s hard to reconcile at times, but the motor court once posed as the most wholesome of places, a site of refuge from the hard world, where an entire nation might reinvent itself with a good night’s sleep and a baptismal swim. 

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep,
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light —
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

Look for the star. Somewhere along the backroads of the country it still exists, a symbol of a lost time, a worn out set of values, and the broken promise of contentment that never arrives. 

There’s plenty of room at the inn.

Photos (in order) by Richard Meinick, Zack Huggins, Kim Jenkins, Philippe Reichert, David Gallagher, Eric Hart, So Cal Metro, Cardboard America, and jericl cat.

The half-life of neon is longest at 3.38 minutes. Most variations come in under the 60 second mark. Radioactive decay. To think, a whole world rose out of this, an element so scarce on earth that it could only live here contained in a glass tube. 

If you ruminate too much, America seems like it never made it beyond Tocqueville’s diary. The roadside, the motel, the dream of travel. To be temporary somehow became the ultimate success story.

You worry that this says everything about you. You worry that the pull of neon reveals a base desire to dig a hole and block out anything but the brightest light, some obnoxious beam that casts shadows like dismal reason. 

Maybe you want to be consumed.

So you wake up sluggishly, morning after morning. Perfume air, heavy drapes, nice light on the clothes rack that you never use. Happy but.

You were promised the Stardust sign.

Didn’t happen.

There are postcards on the night table. Grey light and scattered colors. We make gods of the shiniest things, and look at pictures as some sort of reprieve. 

Neon. The new. Energy.

It’s always the new energy. 

Have I been having nightmares again?

Elie Dahdou, Craigin Spring, John Greim, Julian Becker

Motel is a motel is a motel is a motel.

The history of North America is improbably wrapped up in a place that promises only a blank room and cable TV. You can’t even utter the word before an entire genealogy of the road flashes through your brain — conscious or not — like a neon sign shimmering in the black night. 

The rose motel, then, is another nominal archetype in the curious history of these transitional spaces, always already overdetermined, propping up a profoundly complicated narrative under the stilts of just four + five letters. 

Gertrude Stein’s most succinct language lesson might as well be about the humble motor court.

What’s in a rose, though?

There’s over 100 species of Rosaceae, all folded around two common traits: five petals and a prickly stem. Height varies, but you’d never need a botanist to identify one. Similarly, an architect would hardly be required to point out a motel.

The rose is a commonplace thing. It’s unremarkable and quaint at first blush. And yet for all its delicacy, there’s a lurking danger, lest one run her hand below the petals. Looking closely is discouraged, much as you’d be ill advised to undertake a close inspection of the sheets before settling in for the night at a roadside inn. 

And yet, for all its iconography, the rose has been contaminated by our very exposure to it. What does it mean anymore? It’s become a heart-shaped jacuzzi, an impotent paean to predictable romance. Anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, various moments of relationship drama patched with a hollow gesture. 

When conventionalism becomes this pervasive, it necessarily breeds a type of amnesia. We have difficulty seeing things that we often see. One must fight this tendency with careful observation and a contempt for familiarity that borders on fanaticism.

You have to write the word four times over to say it just once, clinging to some hope that you might still be able to unpack its identity, enclosed as it were by the gentle petals protecting its pollen. 

Rose is a rose is a rose is a motel.

If the twinkling lights of the mid-century motel deployed a frenzy of choice and the unfettered promise of adventure from the roadside, entering the room was always akin to a lobotomy. 

Off the road, pupils like darts, these stripped down spaces still slap you with the crass reminder of the chasm between wish and fulfilment — from excitement to terror in three minutes flat. 

Has anyone ever captured the ambivalence of this experience more honestly, more clinically than John Register?

The motel exerts a gravitational field of nostalgia, but Register offers an antidote in his stark representation of the spaces that exist at the heart of America’s putatively earnest modernity. Maybe our roots cling to empty rooms?

Our distaste for loneliness is so profound that we imagine the road as a place of communal journey, but when we wake up in the middle of the night in a random motel beside an anonymous highway, we can’t help but crave home.

But where is that, anyway? 

The thing that Register might capture better than anyone else is the profound bind posed by conventional notions of place and the desire to escape familiarity. 

What is this better thing that we’re alway after, hunting with such restless desire? Whatever it is — and it is something — the feeling of dread that accompanies not finding it turns the safest of places into monuments of discontent. 

Big things are on the horizon. Sit on that.