Get your kicks elsewhere

Photo exhibition examines iconic roadway’s gritty underbelly

A couple of years ago, photographer Western Doughty holed up in a seedy motel room along Route 66 for three weeks, hoping to catch a glimpse of a wholly unique and rarely explored corner of the world.

Glimpse that world he did. Doughty came away from his self-imposed furlough with thousands of photographs — some featuring the motel’s colorful coterie of temporary residents, some inspired by their stories and personalities.

“We always see the exterior of these seedy kinds of places,” Doughty said. “But we rarely see inside — see the stories, the people, the struggles. Race issues. Class issues. That’s what I was trying to get at with these photos.”

Doughty drew from his early artistic influences in the conception and execution of the project.

“My dad was an artist,” Doughty said. “He kept some explicit books around the house — usually on the top shelf — that I would get into as a kid. One was (photographer) Larry Clark’s ‘Tulsa.’ I remember zoning in on the grain of the photos. It had this realism — even violence — that I’d never seen portrayed before. Larry Clark made me want to be a photographer.”

Enchanted by the gritty, visceral nature of Clark’s work, as well as influences from the world of film such as David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah and, especially, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Doughty said the look and feel of the series had been fully-formed in his mind for some time.

“I had the whole vision for the project before I ever even started shooting anything,” Doughty said. “When I saw this room, it just fit that vision perfectly.”

A selection of Doughty’s photographs will be featured in a special exhibition, “Route 66: Room #116,” this month at Living Arts of Tulsa. An opening reception will be held at 6 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 3, during the Brady Arts District’s First Friday Arts Crawl, and the exhibition will run until Jan. 23. Also opening at Living Arts on Jan. 3 is “Value,” an installation by Glenn Herbert Davis.