David Campany first got the idea for his photobook Gasoline after finding a photograph in a second-hand shop, reports Rebecca Horn of Wired. The photograph shows a woman in Hopper-esque light, slumping over her steering wheel as she waits in line for gas in Baltimore in 1979, writes Horn.
Campany concedes that while gas stations are banal, they are also prime locations for tracking news both local and global, Horn writes. The book is “a forensic look at newspaper photography and retro Americana,” Horn writes, drawn from archival press images of gas stations from 1944 through 1995.
