Peter Kayafas
Purple Martin Press, New York, 2009

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.

His work shows Zen discipline—it is both patient and instantaneous. Within these seeming contradictions, Kayafas has, over time, made many secrets visible. In his view, under his aegis, America’s secondary roads abound with primary subjects. If his photographs reveal a classical sense of form, an insistent purity of surface, Kayafas’s outlook has fought to keep itself militantly Democratic. Anything, around the next bend, might qualify as fascinating. O Public Road!—like some black-and-white Chinese screen—compresses decades’ travel into the folding wonder of a single trip.

—Allan Gurganus from the Afterword to the book

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