Coast to Coast

The dark americana of Thomas Hoepker’s Coast to Coast is the second in our summer series exploring American road trips made by Magnum photographers.

“Would you like to discover America?” asked the editor-in-chief. He pointed at me and at my friend, the writer Rolf Winter.

We sat in the conference room of Kristall, a bi-weekly picture magazine in Hamburg, Germany. “Sure”, we said, “but what exactly do you want us to do there?” “I think”, replied the editor, “You’ll fly to New York and then you rent a car and you drive westward until you meet the Pacific, and then you drive back on another route and you take pictures and write about what you see. No time limit”. We liked the brief briefing and nodded. The year was 1963 and I was 27.

I did indeed love America, ever since two American Sherman tanks had rattled into our small Bavarian village in May 1945, ending the war for us. Two soldiers, one black, one white, in full battle gear jumped out and handed Hershey Bars and Spearmint gums to us children. Later, in high school in Stuttgart, I met Jimmy. He said he was a Private First Class, which sounded quite impressive to me. First Class Jimmy hailed from South Carolina and he organized a German/American youth group. Together we listened to jazz from the AFN radio station.

Jimmy taught us basic English; he also had plenty of Wrigley’s sticks of gum for us. And Jimmy had a magic contraption, a gizmo made of plastic, resembling binoculars. There was a slot into which you could insert a disk with small cut-outs and when you looked through the lenses, with both eyes, you would see colorful photos in magical 3-D. Through this I was introduced to the wonders of America, like the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Grand Canyon. My favourite however was a picture of a bunch of girls in teeny bikinis, gliding over water on skis and holding American flags.

We found an America which had little to do with my childhood dreams. Sure, there were grandiose landscapes but also many days of nothingness. Any new little town looked pretty much like all the others we had seen. Gas stations, drug stores, car dealerships, roadside diners, churches – so many churches! Also, for our taste, far too many flags. Yes, people were nice, friendly, spontaneous, more so than in our part of the world. But why were they so ignorant about other countries? Why so intolerant about other people, especially if they had dark skin?

For my work, I had a guiding star: Robert Frank’s book Les Americains, first published in 1958, by Robert Delpire in Paris, because, at that time, no publisher in America would touch Frank’s dark and brooding pictures. I had seen the first edition in a bookstore in Hamburg, shortly before my American trip, and I was deeply moved and inspired by it. Inspired to such an extent that I got quite excited when we drove out West in ’63 and I saw on my map that we were near the town of Butte, Montana. Frank’s pictures from Butte had stuck in my mind and I just had to go there… quite foolishly. But worthwhile nevertheless. Butte was also good to me and gave me some decent images. Robert – I’m standing on your shoulder, but I can’t even reach up to your belt!

Thomas Hoepker, New York, January 2013. Taken from Heartland, An American Road Trip in 1963. For more from the American Road Trips series, see Inge Morath’s Road to Reno.