“For me, the original idea came from a love of the road trip as a rite of passage in America,” says Denise Wolff, senior editor at photography publishers Aperture. “The idea that if you have a car, you have freedom to escape, to discover, to find yourself, to lose yourself. It’s a powerful call, one that is part of the American identity and culture.” Working with British author and curator David Campany, Wolff has edited a book called The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip, published 18 months ago and which has now been turned into an exhibition in Detroit.

“The road trip is so familiar, and so much a part of modern photography,” says Campany. “But the question we wanted to explore was a deeper one: why is it that so much of the best photography of America happens to have been made on the road?” The road trips range from the 50s to the present and include, he says, “Monochrome and color. Planned trips and haphazard trips. Images made on the fly, and images made slowly with large format cameras. Personal projects, and attempts to document the nation for posterity. Projects by men and women. Projects by American photographers and photographers from other countries. We didn’t go out of our way for this coverage – it just happened.”

The result is a winningly eclectic yet complimentary compendium of photographic tours of America, from the famous to the little-known. It sets off in the mid-1950s with The Americans, Robert Frank’s grainy look into the dark heart of the American Dream. It meanders across the country with acknowledged American greats such as the relentlessly inquisitive Garry Winogrand and the mercurial Joel Meyerowitz. It then moves on to their heirs such as the melancholic Alec Soth, the poetic Todd Hido, and the humanist Justine Kurland. And all along the way it takes in the views of non-Americans, such as the conceptualism of British artist Victor Burgin and the starkly affectionate pictures of Frenchman Bernard Plossu, before ending its journey in 2008 with the overtly constructed photography of Swiss duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs.

Of the non-Americans’ projects, none has more power than the Danish Jacob Holdt’s five-year word and image odyssey into the dark underbelly of 1970s America. Of the Americans’ work, Joel Sternfeld’s deeply considered, surprising and unsettling photographs reward repeated revisiting, as Denise Wolff explains: “The way he portrays America’s faults and hopes at the same time and with humor, riding the line in each picture between disquiet and affection. Only a master could strike such a balance, and so gorgeously as well.”

Campany and Wolff had a wealth of great material to work with. “The number of photographers who made their very best work on the road is extraordinary,” Campany says. “Although the Open Road shows you a big handful of them, there are so many more out there. Road trips have never gone out of favor. Attitudes change, but the desire to travel independently is such a profound part of the way the country understands itself.”

Phillips 66, Flagstaff, Arizona. Photograph: Edward Ruscha

With a subject almost as vast as the road itself, how did they decide what to leave out? “We made a decision at the onset that this book and show would explore bodies of work in depth, rather than just presenting a survey of the best individual pictures that have been made while on the American roads,” Wolff says. “The road trip needed to have inspired the work, and the resulting body of work needed to make a significant contribution to the genre. The works featured in the show and book are also in conversation with each other.”

“All of the projects have a critical dimension, as if they are monitoring the great American experiment in democracy and nationhood,” Campany adds. “Critical art can often be dry, but on the road photographers seem to find social comment and creativity go hand in hand. Maybe that comes simply with being observant of the world around you.”

Much of the important photography left out of the main survey is considered in the book’s well-researched introductory essay, which provides context for the selection. It touches on projects as diverse as the Russian duo Ilf and Petrov’s 1935 American road trip, and American artist Doug Rickard’s very 21st-century Google Street View photographs. It also deals with unseen influences. “Walker Evans looms large for a number of photographers featured in the book and exhibition,” Wolff says. “Though his American Photographs wasn’t necessarily all made on road trips, it was made over his substantial travels and makes an expansive statement about America.”

Outside Memphis, Tennessee, 1960. Photograph: Inge Morath

Campany explains why presenting the Open Road as a book made perfect sense, and why an exhibition adds a further dimension. “Many of these photographers conceived their projects very much as books,” he says. “The page is a very natural way to encounter carefully printed and sequenced photographs. The exhibition expands on this, responding to the way photographers have also explored the possibilities of different ways of printing, of large-scale images made for the wall, complex groupings of pictures and so on. The Open Road is a big show, with around 120 images, but ways the projects are expressed in the gallery is very varied.”

“The book allows for a more in-depth experience of the ideas, the history, the pictures,” Wolf adds. “The show is more immersive, and the way the works speak to each other on the walls is more immediate. Being able to see Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Lee Friedlander’s American Monument together in the same room, people can connect the striking similarities and differences instantly.”

The road runs through American culture, and photographs have played a leading role. “The phrase ‘open road’ comes from Walt Whitman’s epic poem Leaves of Grass. But all the arts have been attracted to it,” Campany says. “The immediacy, distillation, intimacy and big themes that you find in great photographs have been a great source of inspiration for writers, film-makers and musicians for many decades.”

Florida, 1970. Photograph: Joel Meyerowitz,

“They say if you get far enough away, you’ll be on your way back home,” sang Tom Waits in his song Blind Love. The Open Road also has a kind of circularity, as Campany remarks: “The Open Road begins and ends with projects by Swiss photographers. Robert Frank came to America in 1947, and by 1954 he was making the greatest images of his life, reshaping the future of photography and making an extraordinary impact on America’s sense of itself. So many of the pictures he made are now icons. Today the very idea of the road trip is full not of icons but of cliches. What can a photographer do in the era of Facebook, Flickr and Instagram? The Swiss duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs take on all the cliches, twist them, invert them and make them into something fresh. Just when you think photography has reached the end of the road, it renews itself.”