TAKING TO THE OPEN ROAD WITH ROY STRYKER

Driving isn’t what it used to be. Today it’s a fearsome, 5 o’clock, fume-fraught battle--a way to get from here to there, quickly, without distraction. There was a time, about 40 years ago, when families packed picnics and spent Sundays on the road, leisurely touring highways less hectic and harried.

Pleasure riding hit a peak during the industrial age that followed World War II, accompanied by a booming car culture and a wave of optimism felt throughout a nation united by its victory abroad and proud of its material prosperity at home.

A photographic exhibition providing a winsome, nostalgic look back at the era and its urban autobahns is on view at UC Santa Barbara’s University Art Museum. “The Highway as Habitat: A Roy Stryker Documentation, 1943-1955,” with more than 130 black-and-white images, runs through Feb. 23.

Stryker, a sociologist who taught economics at Columbia University, organized a vast, poignant photo documentation of rural America in the ‘30s during the Depression. He performed the task for Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration, a federal program designed to help destitute and displaced farmers.

During World War II, Standard Oil of New Jersey hired Stryker for a similar job. After having been caught secretly granting a German chemical company exclusive rights to manufacture rubber for the war effort, the oil firm badly needed to improve its public image with a little PR.

“Standard Oil gave Roy carte blanche to create a pictorial documention of their operations,” said Ulrich Keller recently. A UCSB art history professor, Keller curated the university’s exhibit, selecting images from 70,000 photographs archived at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Sipping apple juice at an outdoor snack bar on the seaside campus, Keller explained, “Stryker made it clear from the start he didn’t want a narrow focus, he didn’t want the photographs to be taken solely with an eye toward advertisement.”

Managing a creative staff, not shooting the images himself, Stryker hired 10 principal photographers and another 15 who worked on and off, and “sent them into the field with a lot of knowledge,” Keller said. “Since he was a sociologist, not an art photographer, he didn’t educate them to be art photographers, rather he taught them about economics, sociology and the complexities of the oil business.”

An effective motivator, “he told them, ‘Wherever you go, look out of the window and photograph what you see by the roadside.’ He felt that the fast food and fruit stands, the countless filling stations, the state fairs, motels, billboards, artificial caves--the whole highway environment that occurred as a consequence of the development of the automobile culture--was socially and culturally significant.”

Though Keller, former curator at the George Eastman House, chose to focus this traveling exhibit on the human and mechanical inhabitants of the country’s highways, Stryker had photographed “anything that had to do with industrial American culture as related to oil,” wherever Standard Oil had operations, Keller said. “But because Stryker defined his documentary interests in a very broad sense, this archive becomes more important than one just for oil matters.”

Roadside truck stops and restaurants--one flanked by a giant bottle of “Oceanspray Cranberry Cocktail”--a crowded Greyhound station, and families squeezing cantaloupes at a fruit stand or spreading Spam for a roadside picnic populate the photographs in the exhibit. Hulking chrome-edged Chevies, distinctively ‘40s Americana, stream through crowded tollbooths, pass snow-covered turnpikes, or arrive at Smitty’s Esso station, a “Headquarters for Happy Motoring.”

Stryker aimed primarily toward factual, not aesthetic representation. He believed, as stated by Keller in the exhibition catalogue, that the documentary format “offered ‘more than a cold record,’ capturing ‘what the real thing sounded like, what it smelled like--and most important, what it felt like.’ ”

Keller said, however, that art was a concern of many of Stryker’s photographers, among them John Vachon, Charles Rotkin, Esther Bubley, Harold Corsini and Sol Libsohn, who used mostly Rollei cameras with a 2 1/2-by-2 1/2 format or 4-by-5 view cameras.

Keller, 41, came to the United States in 1970 from his native West Germany to take a job as assistant professor of Baroque art at the University of Louisville. He first became acquainted with the Stryker archive there.

“My interest in the photos has to do with my European background,” an easy-going Keller offered willingly. “I grew up in the post-war era when Germany was practically in ruins and wherever you went, you went by public transportation. In my town, maybe two very wealthy people owned cars.

“The all-embracing car culture occurring here during the ‘40s and ‘50s--the time of the big glistening Buicks, and the teeny-boppers at the drive-in like in the film “American Graffiti”--held great fascination for me and made America like a dream world. It was hard to imagine it existed at a time I was young and lived in a less prosperous world. So I began to study the archive to learn more about this very different country to which I’d come.

“Also, it seems that for a long time, people in America frowned on the vulgar billboards, the neon signs and the fanciful roadside architecture--restaurants built like a snowman or a duck. But during the heyday of Pop Art in the ‘70s, they began to see the beauty and imagination of this so-called ‘low brow’ visual environment.

“Maybe it wasn’t high art, but understanding and studying it helped me to appreciate rather than reject this whole highway habitat.”