On The Road In Tennessee

An exploration of the cultural landscape of Tennessee

A recurrent road trip inspired by the place where I live and whose paths I explore

The road is a fitting theme not only for Jacques Gautreau’s work, but also for his life so far. Since he was a kid, he has followed his instinct to get away and explore. While still in his teens, he inherited his grandfather’s Solex motorcycle - pretty much a bicycle with a tiny engine - left his home in a Loire Valley village near Angers, and took off for Spain. He got part of the way up a mountain in the Pyrenees before the Solex gave out.

With the money he had saved for that trip but didn’t get to use, he bought his first camera. Not knowing if he was really an artist, he expanded his technical interest in how cameras work, to how they helped him interpret the spaces around him. At home or in the countryside, or at the Breton beach where his family spent summers, he roamed on foot and recorded the depth and poignancy of scenes other people viewed as ordinary, if they noticed them at all.

He went on to travel throughout his adulthood, taking his camera along to find those extraordinary elements of quotidian existence in places as disparate as Ecuador and Hong Kong. That drive to keep moving eventually landed him in Knoxville, Tennessee, around a pivotal time in its history.

Downtown Knoxville was changing fast in the mid-2000s, and he was there most mornings, walking through its streets and alleyways as desolate, industrial ruins were being transformed into something clean and prosperous. That change was incidental to something more interesting to his eye: the light, the lines, the textures of remnants left behind. Even as he captured these artifacts, he moved with the times, and it was in Knoxville that he expanded his method from black and white photography to color, and his medium from film to digital.

And he expanded his territory. His “recurrent road trip” is part of his process as an artist to venture out to the parts of Tennessee that people drive past without noticing. There is intimacy, empathy and humor in his embrace of this part of America that he now calls his home. In this collection, you will find the people and places that have been seen and maybe missed, the people and places that give Tennessee its cultural distinction.

Julie Gautreau