Roger Vail

Roger Vail: Rod & Custom

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present Roger Vail: Rod & Custom, an online exhibition of photographs made at Midwestern raceways in 1967 and 1968. The exhibition brings renewed attention to an early and important body of work by Vail, one that preceded his better-known studies of carnivals and amusement rides and established many of the visual concerns that would continue throughout his career.

Working at the raceways, Vail turned his attention not only to the cars, but to the young people and social world that surrounded them. Hot rods, customized automobiles, drivers, spectators, and the improvised environment of the track together describe a particular aspect of American youth culture at the end of the 1960s. Vail approached the subject with the directness of documentary photography, but his pictures are equally distinguished by their attention to form, surface, gesture, and the often unexpected relationships between people and machines.

The photographs were recognized early. In 1969, Rod and Custom was presented as a one-person exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, organized by Hugh Edwards, the museum's influential curator of photography. Edwards was an important advocate for photographers whose work extended the possibilities of the medium, and Vail's exhibition placed the young photographer within a photography program notable for its serious attention to both established and emerging artists.

The original silver gelatin prints presented here date from this early period. Seen more than half a century after they were made, they retain the specificity of their moment while offering a remarkably concentrated view of a culture built around speed, customization, mechanical ingenuity, and display.

In 1970, Vail shifted his attention from the raceway to another distinctly American arena: the carnival. Using an 8 x 10-inch view camera, he began photographing amusement rides in the evening, employing long exposures that transformed their movement into extended passages of light and form. The apparent stillness of the camera and the continuous motion of the rides produced pictures in which several moments are compressed into a single image.

Vail returned to the carnival in the 1990s, extending the project in both black-and-white and color. Although formally quite different from Rod and Custom, the later work can be seen as a continuation of concerns already present at the raceway: machinery, speed, spectacle, youth culture, and the photographic problem of describing motion within a still image.

Vail earned his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1970, he joined the faculty of California State University, Sacramento, where he taught photography until his retirement in 2006. His work has been presented in more than forty solo and group exhibitions and reproduced in numerous publications. In 2006, one of his carnival photographs appeared on the cover of LIFE, accompanying Garrison Keillor's essay “At the Carnival.”

Roger Vail's photographs are held in numerous public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; Crocker Art Museum; and Princeton University Art Museum.

With Rod & Custom, Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to reintroduce a significant early body of Vail's work and to make available a selection of original prints from the gallery's archive.