Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of David Freund’s Gas Stop. The 11 × 14-inch gelatin silver prints featured here are drawn from the artist’s expansive project, photographed in 47 states between 1978 and 1981.
Freund’s black-and-white gas station photographs feel especially resonant today. They describe an American narrative embedded in the vernacular landscape—where architecture, commerce, and daily life intersect. Initiated in the wake of the 1970s oil crisis, the work reflects a moment when fuel shortages and rising prices reshaped the nation’s relationship to mobility. That cyclical volatility persists, and the gas station remains a quiet register of broader economic and cultural shifts.
Working with a handheld 35mm camera, Freund achieves a level of compositional clarity more often associated with large-format photography. His images are structured through a careful orchestration of space—horizontal bands of land and sky, the geometry of pumps and signage, and the measured placement of incidental detail—while retaining a responsiveness to chance. In this way, the work sits in dialogue with photographers such as Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, and Robert Adams following the landmark New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition, while distinguishing itself through a subtle narrative density and sense of lived immediacy.
The prints themselves are notable for their tonal richness and precision, translating the acuity of Freund’s negatives into finely calibrated gelatin silver prints that reward close viewing.
Freund, in discussing his photographs of gas stations, states:
"On the first morning of an intended photographic project, outside my motel was a gas station, from which I photographed a dark, rolling tanker truck as its four black tires passed a line of four half-buried white tires. In the misty distance was a grazing horse, framed by the back of the truck. In front of the station was a large, hand-lettered sign advertising milk, and across the road was a small, local motel. As someone later commented, “These are about everything.” That morning, I became aware of gas stations as a locus for many elements that characterize America."
The book Gas Stop was published in 2016 by Steidl Verlag as a four-volume boxed set—West, Midwest, North, and South—comprising 720 pages and 574 photographs.
Freund received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other institutions. His work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1 and the George Eastman Museum, among others, and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliothèque Nationale.