Signed; Esteban de Sande - Carretera & Manta - 2024

The highway is one of the most fertile myths that the United States has exported to the rest of the world. Novels like "On the road" by Jack Kerouac, films like "Thelma and Louise" or a good handful of songs by Bruce Springsteen are good examples of the desire of North American popular culture to sell us, with the smell of gasoline and asphalt heated by the sun. , the idea of ​​freedom on the back of a car.
This reformulation of one of the pillars of American identity, the discovery of new territories (first by horse-drawn cart, then by train and finally by automobile), has its correlation in the world of photography: contemporary authors such as Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Alec Soth, Todd Hido and Bryan Schutmaat, among others, continue driving their cars alone, far from the big cities, in search of the essence of their country. His photographic plates abound with views of nature, almost abandoned towns, lonely guys, secondary roads, restaurants, motels and gas stations, neon signs...Iberian vernacular imaginary
Almost 10,000 kilometers east of California, a parallel universe develops, an Iberian vernacular imaginary, which is based on the particular world of the Spanish road network. Deployed in the 60s of the last century during Franco's developmentalism, the spider web of national highways was, and still is, a radial system centered in Madrid, but supported by a network of routes that connect the 6 main roads.
The national roads and their peripheral sisters, such as the one that runs parallel to the Mediterranean coast, spontaneously created a popular subculture. The universe prior to the current highways and highways is equipped with restaurants with menus for truck drivers, cheap hotels and guesthouses, hostess bars, silhouettes of the Osborne bull, Pegasus trucks, family cars without air conditioning, mountain hams waiting for customers. , cassette tapes and faded postcards on gas station displays..
In the east of the peninsula, and thanks to a territorial similarity with the American West (whose most notable point is the Tabernas desert, used in the 60s and 70s to film the so-called "spaghetti westerns"), a fusion was also created particular between the popular Iberian and American vernacular. This mix between the local tawdry and the Yankee myth has as its physical expression some places that imitate those of Route 66; or those cars manufactured in Detroit, Michigan, which were once used for film productions and which, once filming was finished in Almería, were abandoned to their fate.alone on the road
Esteban, naturally creative and enterprising, has made his obsession with recovering real images and those taken from television from his childhood, back in the mid-80s, a reality. During one winter he took to the road alone again and again, in search of the places that best represented that universe intuited in summer family trips, during those vacations in which the series "Blue Summer" or "The Fantastic Car" were broadcast at nap time. His desire has been to connect the current Iberian reality with a historical moment and a country in transition, when the dashboards of Renault 18s were still decorated with little frames with photos of the children and the legend "Don't run dad."For this interior and exterior journey, in time and space, Esteban, entrusted to solitude, has traveled again and again along the roads of eastern and central Spain, always armed with a versatile digital camera, perfect for recording his particular road and blanket. However, its settled and reflective visual style, with desaturated colors, connects rather with the philosophy and aesthetics of the large photographic plates of the American photographers mentioned above. Also with the project "A1, The Great Northern Road" by Englishman Paul Graham, which tells the reality of a country and implicitly pays tribute to one's own childhood.
The adventures and misadventures enjoyed and suffered by Esteban, necessary on an initiation trip on the road, can be sensed in the photographs contained in this book. They are fragments of a time that seems frozen, observed with respect, but also with fine irony and, on some occasions, with a melancholic aftertaste. They are, in short, a sincere and honest tribute to a time and a place whose echoes still reach us. Also, although it may not seem obvious, it is an unfiltered self-portrait of a photographer who enjoys living his particular and, at the same time, universal adventure.
by Rafa Badia