On Sunday, September 17, the Center will present a public artist’s talk by Japanese photographer Kōzō Miyoshi, in conjunction with Longer Ways to Go: Photographs of the American Road, an exhibition of photographs from the Center’s collection currently on view in the Norton Family Photography Gallery at Phoenix Art Museum. During the 1990s, while he was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Miyoshi traversed what remains of Route 66, the “Main Street of America,” creating placid, meticulously composed images with an 8 x 10 view camera. Miyoshi chose the title “Middle of the Road” to refer to his habit of standing dead-center in the road to make a photograph with his tripod-mounted camera, a gesture that reveals signs of past use in the form of tire marks, seams, and cracked pavement, while reminding us that, at least at the moment Miyoshi took the picture, no one was coming. Made soon after Route 66 was removed from the federal highway system, when local preservation efforts were just getting under way, Miyoshi’s images form a compelling document of the landmark’s transition from highway to scenic byway, from America to Americana.

Member's Print Viewing & Reception
From 2-4 pm the Center will host a Member's only Print Viewing & Reception in collaboration with the Kōzō Miyoshi public presentation. Not a member yet? Sign up here.

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Kōzō Miyoshi is a Japanese photographer whose work is in the collections of The Art Museum, Princeton University; The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; The George Eastman Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Hallmark Collection, Kansas City, Missouri; Nihon University, Tokyo; and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. The Center for Creative Photography published Far East and Southwest: The Photography of Kōzō Miyoshi in 1994. In the Road, a collection of Miyoshi’s photographs of Route 66, was published by Nazraeli Press in 1999. In 2011, Miyoshi released Northeast Earthquake Disaster Tsunami 2011, a portfolio of photographs of the aftermath of the 2011 quake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s northeast coast and caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. A selection of photographs from the portfolio was included in In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11, a 2015 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.