John Margolies (1940–2016) was an American photographer, architectural historian, and preservation advocate whose work focused on roadside architecture and commercial vernacular design in the United States. Educated at Brown University, he began documenting roadside structures in the late 1960s, concentrating on motels, drive-in restaurants, service stations, miniature golf courses, amusement parks, neon signs, and novelty buildings created for the automobile age. His work emerged from a concern that many examples of twentieth-century commercial architecture were being demolished before they had been recognised as historically significant.
Working primarily with large-format colour photography, Margolies travelled extensively throughout the United States for more than four decades, systematically recording buildings and roadside environments from the 1920s through the 1960s. His photographs employed direct frontal viewpoints and descriptive detail, producing a visual inventory of structures often overlooked by traditional architectural history. Beginning in the 1980s, he collaborated with the Library of Congress through the Historic American Buildings Survey, contributing thousands of photographs that documented endangered roadside sites and commercial architecture across the country.
Margolies published numerous books that combined historical research with photographic documentation. These include The End of the Road (1971), Home Away from Home (1981), Roadside America (1983), Pump and Circumstance: Glory Days of the Gas Station (1993), Miniature Golf (1995), Ticket to Paradise: American Roadside Amusement Parks (1996), Fun Along the Road (1998), John Margolies' Roadside America (2010), and Roadside America Revisited (2015). Together, these publications form one of the most extensive photographic and historical records of American roadside culture and automobile-oriented architecture.
John Margolies
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Margolies
National Archives: https://www.loc.gov/
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