The open road is one of the most fertile myths the United States has exported to the rest of the world. Novels like Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," films like "Thelma & Louise," and a good number of Bruce Springsteen songs are prime examples of American popular culture's eagerness to sell us, with the scent of gasoline and sun-baked asphalt, the idea of ​​freedom on the back of a car. This reformulation of one of the pillars of American identity, the discovery of new territories (first by horse-drawn wagon, then by train, and finally by automobile), has its counterpart in the world of photography: contemporary artists like Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Alec Soth, Todd Hido, and Bryan Schutmaat, among others, continue to drive their cars alone, far from the big cities, in search of the essence of their country. His photographic plates are full of views of nature, almost abandoned villages, solitary types, secondary roads, restaurants, motels and gas stations, neon signs...
Iberian Vernacular Imaginary
Nearly 10,000 kilometers east of California, a parallel universe unfolds, an Iberian vernacular imaginary based on the unique world of Spain's road network. Deployed in the 1960s during the Francoist developmentalism, the spiderweb of national highways was, and still is, a radial system centered on Madrid, but supported by a network of routes connecting the six main roads.
The national highways and their peripheral counterparts, such as the one running parallel to the Mediterranean coast, spontaneously created a popular subculture. The world before today's freeways and highways is populated by restaurants with trucker menus, budget hotels and guesthouses, brothels, silhouettes of the Osborne bull, Pegaso trucks, family cars without air conditioning, Serrano hams awaiting customers, cassette tapes, and faded postcards on gas station displays.
In eastern Spain, thanks to a territorial similarity with the American West (the most notable feature being the Tabernas Desert, used in the 1960s and 70s to film the so-called "spaghetti westerns"), a unique fusion of Iberian and American vernacular culture developed. This blend of local kitsch and American myth is physically expressed in some establishments that imitate those along Route 66; or in those cars manufactured in Detroit, Michigan, which were once used for film productions and, once filming wrapped in Almería, were abandoned. Alone on the RoadEsteban, a naturally creative and entrepreneurial individual, has fulfilled his obsession with recovering real images and those from television from his childhood, back in the mid-80s. One winter, he repeatedly took to the road alone, searching for the places that best represented that universe he had glimpsed during family summer trips, those holidays when series like "Verano Azul" or "Knight Rider" were broadcast during siesta time. His aim has been to connect the current Iberian reality with a historical moment and a country in transition, when the dashboards of Renault 18s were still decorated with framed photos of children and the slogan "Don't Speed, Dad." For this inner and outer journey, through time and space, Esteban, embracing solitude, has traveled time and again along the roads of eastern and central Spain.
Always armed with a versatile digital camera, perfect for documenting his unique road trip, Esteban's settled and reflective visual style, with its desaturated colors, connects more closely with the philosophy and aesthetics of the large-format photographs of the aforementioned American photographers. It also evokes the "A1, The Great Northern Road" project by the English photographer Paul Graham, which depicts the reality of a country and implicitly pays homage to his own childhood.The adventures and misadventures Esteban experienced, both joyful and enduring—essential in a journey of initiation on the open road—can be glimpsed in the photographs contained in this book. They are fragments of a time that seems frozen, observed with respect, but also with subtle irony and, at times, a touch of melancholy.
They are, ultimately, a sincere and honest tribute to a time and place whose echoes still reach us. They are also, though it may not seem obvious, an unfiltered self-portrait of a photographer who enjoys living his own particular, yet universal, adventure.
 
Rafa Badia