anna fox and karen knorr exhibit 'slice of american life' in arles

U.S. ROUTE 1: BERENICE ABBOTT, ANNA FOX AND KAREN KNORR

As part of the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles festival, Anna Fox and Karen Knorr take viewers on a photographic journey across U.S. Route 1, documenting the cultural, social, and environmental conditions explicit in today’s United States. The exhibition, on view at Palais de l’Archevêché until October 5th, retrace the journey taken by American photographer Berenice Abbott in 1954. Between July and September of that year, Abbott and assistants and chauffeurs Damon and Sara Gadd, drove back and forth along Route 1, the U.S.’s oldest road, stretching from Fort Kent, Maine, at the Canadian border in the north to the Florida Keys in the south. According to the late photographer, whose project was never published and remains relatively unknown to this day, the historical Route 1 offers ‘a realistic picture of a true cross-section of American life.’

More than half a century later, Anna Fox and Karen Knorr offer a contemporary retelling of Berenice Abbott’s 1954 expedition, seeking to shed light into the photographer’s overlooked project while documenting the evolving identity of the United States during a politically fractured era.

Karen Knorr and Anna Fox, Balsam Valley, 2023 | all images courtesy of the photographers unless stated otherwise

lookING for america AT LES Rencontres d’Arles 2025

Set against the legacy of Berenice Abbott’s extensive photographic archive, Fox and Knorr began their own journey along U.S. Route 1 in 2016, starting in Key West and eventually making their way north to Maine. Like Abbott, they documented motels, diners, storefronts, signage, and the everyday lives of Americans, but did so through the lens of post-2016 political unrest, social upheaval, and a rapidly transforming digital landscape. The resulting body of work, made with a mix of iPhones, DSLRs, and a Phase One medium format camera, resists nostalgia. Instead, it focuses on the contradictions and tensions of the present.

In contrast to the commercial optimism captured by Abbott in the 1950s, Anna Fox and Karen Knorr’s images linger on the subdued, often uneasy quiet of a slower U.S. Route 1. Once a major artery of American progress, the road today has a less forward-looking spirit. Their photographs trace the undercurrents of contemporary American life: the remnants of local economies, the signage of political allegiance, and the architecture of disenfranchisement. ‘They searched for a sense of what is happening today and how that differs from what Abbott and Gadd found,’ writes Dr. Charlene Heath in the exhibition essay for Les Rencontres D’Arles. This search became particularly charged during the Trump presidency, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fox and Knorr continued their project by gathering images from social media, including documentation of the January 6th Capitol riot. The line between observation and participation, fact and filtered performance, became a subtle undercurrent in the work. What began as a road trip became a drawn-out search for the identity of America.

Karen Knorr and Anna Fox, Biscayne, Blvd 2025

DOCUMENTING the evolving identity of the United States

Anna Fox and Karen Knorr’s U.S. Route 1 (After Berenice Abbott) at Rencontres d’Arles focuses its attention to roadside architecture and landscape as a device for social commentary. Cafés and motels sit alongside gun shops and protest placards, and cheerfully painted exteriors front histories of exclusion or economic decline. Fox and Knorr don’t editorialize overtly, but their framing choices are deliberate, drawing out the dissonance between place and policy. In one image, a sunny Southern storefront is disrupted by a mural of Trump and Elon Musk seated beside Robert Kennedy eating burgers on Trump Force One.

This moment was captured through the digital feeds on social media, and speaks to the ways photography has shifted since Abbott’s time. The road is no longer just a site of discovery. It has become a scrolling feedback loop. As Heath notes, the project is informed by contemporary movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, as well as the rollback of reproductive rights. Though rarely shown directly, these forces haunt the spaces Fox and Knorr depict, hinted at through shuttered shops and bumper stickers.

Karen Knorr and Anna Fox, Fort Pierce 2024

Though long-established in their own right, Anna Fox and Karen Knorr approach U.S. Route 1 as a unified artistic inquiry. Fox, known for her incisive portraits of British social life, brings a sense of saturated realism and cultural critique. Knorr, whose conceptual images often explore class and gender, contributes a more formal, staged sensibility. Together, they navigate the road’s visual and political terrain without forcing a single narrative.

Both artists also share a commitment to supporting women in photography. As co-founders of the research initiative Fast Forward, they continue to advocate for greater equity in the field. This ethos permeates the project. ‘Despite being one of the most advanced economies, USA is still surprisingly conservative,’ Heath observes. The photographs illuminate to this conservatism in ways that are subtle and accumulative.

Karen Knorr and Anna Fox at Rencontres d’Arles 2025 | exhibition image © designboom