The American Drive-in Theater

For more than a dozen years I've been photographing Drive-in Theaters across America. At the peak, around 1960, there were over 4,000 of these giant outdoor movie theaters scattered across every corner of the United States. Most are gone now, but over 300 drive-ins survive and have even managed recently to make the expensive conversion to digital projection, required by movie distributors. I became fascinated with these amazing structures, vernacular architecture on a mammoth scale. It was intriguing to see how the theaters, each one unique, but all with common elements—screens, towers, marquees—related to the different characteristic landscape in the different regions across America. I've now photographed more than two hundred theaters, most of them still active, in nearly all of the lower 48 states. The pictures are mainly shot with 8x10-inch and 7x17-inch cameras on black&white film. Prints vary in size, from same-size contact prints in platinum/palladium to large pigment ink prints. The large negatives allow for highly detailed description of the theaters in big prints. Goals for the finished project will be to exhibit the photographs and publish a book from the work