Richard McCabe was born in Mildenhall, England and grew up in the American South. He received an MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University in 1998. That same year he received a fellowship to the American Photography Institute, National Graduate Seminar at New York University. Over the last 17 years he has lived and worked in New York City and New Orleans, Louisiana. His art has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums throughout the United States. Mr. McCabe works primarily in photography, painting, and installation art. Currently, Richard is the Curator of Photography at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana. Today we share his series, Roadside Ruins.
The Roadside Ruins Project is an on-going series of photographs made from 2007 to the present. These photographs document disappearing vernacular structures that inhabit the back roads of the American landscape. Over the past two years the Roadside Ruins Project has been photographed exclusively with a 1960s era Polaroid Land camera and Fuji Instant Film.
With this project the camera functions as a tool of preservation. These photographs of Americana – Motels, signs, fruit stands, juke joints, gas stations, faded buildings, and mom & pop shops are a testament to an America that existed before the Interstate Highway system.
These photographs represent a perfect world of saturated color that exists within a parallel universe, far from the complicated, hyper-digitized, and gentrified world of today. These ghosts of the past, stand as reminders of the diversity and uniqueness of American roadside culture.
For the past two years, McCabe has photographed exclusively with a 1960s era Polaroid Land camera and Fuji instant film. In December 2014, McCabe had a solo exhibition – Once Around the Sun – Instant Photographs by Richard McCabe, at Boyd Satellite Gallery, New Orleans.
To view more of Richard’s work, visit his website.