O Public Road! Photographs of America by Peter Kayafas

“Peter Kayafas has spent twenty years out there breaking the speed limit of the intelligible. He has photographed eateries and ruins and horizons, the starts of parades, the aftermaths of tornados, human faces, human backs. In terms both of mileage and vision, he has earned his Union Card for Loners. Other traveling sages enjoy cranky membership; Robert Frank and Walker Evans come to mind. But travel, openness, talent carried to the force of love, these have helped make Kayafas The Road’s favored recent disciple, co-dependent.

Somehow the road yields up to him its collective privacies. Billboards promise one thing---surrounding desert begs to differ. Out there, in Kayafas’ lexicon and lens, an elk can seem a unicorn. That con man might prove the Messiah caught hitchhiking. Atop each homemade grave-marker, a bead of our recombinant national DNA awaits. Kayafas is especially attuned to how man-made objects interpret the very landscape that inspired then ruined them.”

-Allan Gurganus

From the essay “The Faraway Nearby: Peter Kayafas and the Road”

Distributed by RAM Publications, www.rampub.com