Evolving over its 250-year history, the road trip stands as a defining American experience, linking the country’s vast landscapes to the restless spirit of its people. Its codification as a photographic theme owes much to later figures like Walker Evans and Robert Frank, who captured the nation’s dance between aspiration and unease.

Yet the origins of this tradition lie earlier, in 1926, when British-German photographer E.O. Hoppé embarked on a transcontinental journey, visiting more than 120 cities and photographing natural landscapes as he traversed the country from east to west and north to south. A monumental undertaking in both scope and ambition, Hoppé created the first coherent visual lexicon of America in motion in the seminal gravure-printed photobook Romantic America (1927).

What distinguished Hoppé was not merely his mastery of composition, but his keen sense of cultural irony. Working at a moment when the nation was being reshaped by industrial expansion amid shifting cultural identities, Hoppé recognized that the country defied simple narratives. He saw America not as a monolith of progress nor as a pastoral idyll, but as a terrain of collisions and contradictions. His photographs capture the vast and unfamiliar beauty of the Southwest, the mechanized grandeur of industry in the Midwest and Northeast, and the intimate humanity of those inhabiting the spaces between.

This rediscovered body of work also embraces Hoppé’s portraits of American subjects, underscoring his awareness of the country’s profound cultural heterogeneity. Through Hoppé’s lens, America emerges as a raw and vivid experiment, an audacious portrait of a nation grappling with modernity, identity, and the accelerating pace of social change.