The New Road
I-26 and the Footprints of Progress in Appalachia

Rob Amberg

An interstate's effects on rural North Carolina

Reviews

"Madison County, in the deep mountains of western North Carolina, has been one of those 'pockets' whose poverty the federal government tried to eliminate. One means of elimination was to build through it Interstate 26, connecting this remote culture to the rest of the contemporary world. But at what cost? The New Road, Rob Amberg’s powerful oral history and photographic document, does not answer this question but displays it in an ambiguous and dramatic light."
—Fred Chappell, Poet Laureate of North Carolina, 1997–2002

"The road may be our most shared place and being on the road our most common experience. In The New Road, Rob Amberg not only chronicles the history, symbolism, and impact of a new interstate highway in the North Carolina mountains, but also offers us a way to understand what lies beneath and beside the pavement on which we so frequently travel. With his profound photographs, insightful writing, and wide-range of oral history interviews, Amberg presents a full and complex picture of the I-26 corridor. Like the road it chronicles, this book cuts a fresh, new path in documentary literature. It is a work of great imagination, detail, and insight."
—Tom Rankin, Director of the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University


"[A]n enduring tale of a traditional community's understanding of its own cultural evolution and the meaning of progress."
—The Laurel of Asheville

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Description
Rob Amberg’s examination of the construction of a nine-mile section of Interstate 26 is a moving study of the effect of road building on landscape and culture. In 1994, Amberg began documenting the progress of the largest earth moving project in state history through the most rural and rugged reaches of Madison County, North Carolina. Using oral histories, narrative writing, and photographs, The New Road explores the inherent tensions and contradictions faced by an Appalachian community trying to balance progress and preservation.


Series/imprint:
Center Books on the American South

Distributed for the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago

Cloth
List price: $39.95
Your price: 978-1-930066-67-0
12/10/2009
  

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Rob Amberg is a photographer from Madison County, North Carolina. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Center for Documentary Studies, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His first book, Sodom Laurel Album, received the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award of the Western North Carolina Historical Association. Find out more about Amberg and his work at www.robamberg.com.