Highway Astray 2025

Highway Astray explores the mythology, nostalgia, and economic realities surrounding Route 66. Once celebrated as the “Main Street of America,” the highway was officially decommissioned in 1985, yet it continues to hold a place in the American imagination.

Driving the route backwards from Los Angeles to Chicago over 3.5 weeks, Bảo Ngô and Victoria Durden undertook a self-directed journey that blended work, travel, and tourism. As Route 66 is on the verge of turning 100 years old in 2026, the two used photography and careful documentation to capture the contradictions of this seemingly iconic road full of rundown towns and decaying buildings alongside romanticized visions of Americana. Although approximately 85% of the route remains drivable, its mythology often outweighs lived experience. Route 66 is more popular with Western European and East Asian tourists than with Americans themselves, many of whom know the road through cultural products like Disney’s Cars (2006), John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), and popular songs like Bobby Troup's “Get Your Kicks On Route 66.” This is how Route 66 became a household name, even if most people didn’t really know what it was.

Highway Astray examines how Route 66 embodies a form of manufactured nostalgia—a longing for an “America’s Heyday” that may never have truly existed. In fact, the majority of Route 66 was built during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, making it a symbol of both hope and hardship. It became vital for migration, particularly for those fleeing the devastating agricultural collapse in the Great Plains. In other words, Route 66 was a path that many people initially took for necessity, not leisure.

It evolved into roadside attractions, motels, and themed museums staging an idealized past, echoing the utopian visions of places like Disney World. Yet the economic reality is stark: once-thriving towns collapsed after traffic was diverted to I-40, leaving behind communities struggling with disrepair.

Bảo and Victoria's photographs from the journey highlight tensions between myth and reality, memory and loss, labor and leisure—the illusion of Route 66, an exploration of a Highway Astray. The route also cuts through Indigenous lands— including Navajo, Acoma Pueblo, Muscogee, and Cherokee Nations—where histories of displacement complicate the very idea of an American “fairytale.”

Highway Astray is both a photo-documentary and a meditation on nostalgia, tourism, and the fragile utopias embedded in American consciousness, undertaken with the freedom and curiosity of a modern, mobile, journey of two freelance photographers taking their time to witness the real Route 66.