Route 66: Alternative Perspectives
June 28 – September 27, 2025 in the Main Gallery
Coconino Center for the Arts is proud to launch the U.S. Route 66 Centennial Celebration with Route 66: Alternative Perspectives. A decidedly non-nostalgic and creatively interpretive photo-documentary of life along the Mother Road, the exhibition features Edward Keating’s Main Street: The Lost Dream of Route 66 and Wes Pope’s POP 66, along with Shades of Route 66: Celebrating Diversity along Historic Route 66.
EDWARD KEATING (1956-2021) – Remembered as a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist for his work during the aftermath of the September 11th attacks (2002) and a shared recipient for the Pulitzer-Prize for the series, “How Race is Lived in America” (2000), Eddie Keating originally studied at Columbia University while working as a photographer for the Spectator in the 1980s. Throughout his body of work, we find humanity in small, often forgotten places and moments, documenting the human passion that drives hope and change, or a reason to look a little closer. Keating’s “Main Street, The Lost Dream of Route 66,” endures as a collection of over a decades’ worth of driving, documenting, and living on the mother road. Approaching the project as a journalist, Eddie captured the collapsing social and infrastructural conditions surrounding both residents and travelers of the road. An unceremonious look behind Americana postcards and into the faces and places that others pass by “Main Street” historically preserves what Keating sought to frame as composition: a road and culture slowly displaced. Our thanks to renowned photographer and Keating’s wife Carrie Boretz for partnering with Coconino Center for the Arts to bring this exceptional exhibition to Flagstaff, AZ.
WES POPE has worked as an artist and educator in photography, videography, and multimedia journalism for over 25 years. Prior to holding staff positions at the Chicago Tribune, Rocky Mountain News, and the Santa Fae New Mexican, Pope served as a Lecturer in Photojournalism & Documentary Studies at Northern Arizona University in 2012 and is currently co-directing the Multimedia Journalism master’s program at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication in Portland. Outside of journalism, Pope has been continually exploring pinhole photography since 1998 as both a photoform and as documentary-style projecting. His culminating project Pop 66: A Dreamy Pop Can Camera Along Route 66 investigates how seemingly ordinary scenes are suddenly made extraordinary by the dynamism of pinhole exposure: Pope’s camera obscura blends clarity and distortion together as his frame and perspective take on the curvature of the pop can. Traveling Route 66 with pinhole cameras, Pope captures snapshots in time and through space that acknowledge a disappearing life along the mother road and that calls upon the guessed moment of exposure and the surprise result of the shot. Pope’s work is displayed at Coconino Center for the Arts with the support of the University of Oregon.
