The following is guest post by Micah Messenheimer, Assistant Curator of Photography, Prints and Photographs Division.
Over the span of nearly forty years, John Margolies took more than eleven thousand color slide photographs of vernacular structures across America’s highways, byways, and main streets. Traversing the country, he was drawn to the architecture that came to define travel by car, like motels, diners, and gas stations, but also to quintessentially American oddities: buildings in the shape of dinosaurs, the sculpted concrete and plaster obstacles of miniature golf courses, and parks featuring attractions from parrots to petrified rocks.