There’s not much point in counting the number of books published about Route 66; The likelihood that the count would increase before you were done is just too great. An Amazon search simply says “over 2,000”. So why review this one? What sets it apart from the others? The most obvious reason for reviewing it is a simple one: I know one of the people whose name is on the cover. The things that set it apart are not as obvious (or benignly biased). In fact, I’ve only found one thing about the book that I think is actually unique, and I’m not really sure about that. The book has no author; It has a narrator.

Nick Gerlich’s role choice is significant. This is a photobook. Its reason for being lies in Ellen Klinkel’s photographs. They could exist without any accompanying words at all and still tell a story. That certainly doesn’t mean that Gerlich’s words aren’t welcome and useful. It’s simply an observation that the words are narrating a story — really just one of many — present in the pictures. Gerlich, whose day job is as a college marketing professor, is extremely knowledgable on Route 66. In the past, he has filled the role of narrator, in the more traditional sense, for KC Keefer’s series of Unoccupied Route 66 videos. Regardless of whether he is narrating on screen or in print, he writes and researches his own scripts.

The photos are black and white, which is unusual but not unique. What may be unique is how they came to be at all. Klinkel tells that story in the book’s preface. It begins in 2013. She lives in Germany and was in the western U.S. with her husband for a four-week vacation which she describes as “the first time I ever had a serious camera in my hands”. Planned visits to several national parks fell victim to the sixteen-day government shutdown in October of that year and driving a portion of Route 66 was substituted. Klinkel credits this very first time on the historic highway coupled with the “serious camera” as having “instantly sparked my passion for photography”.

No pictures from that 2013 trip made it into A Matter of Time. All photos in the book were taken between 2015 and 2017. Klinkel refers to the images as “fine art photography”. It is a phrase I tend to associate with wall mounted prints or coffee-table-sized books with extra thick pages, but that’s wrong. A piece of the definition of fine art photography is something “in line with the vision of the photographer as artist”, and that fits the images in A Matter of Time very well. They are not artsy in an abstract pattern of shadows way, but in a way that works to capture a “vision of the photographer” and encourages the viewer to mentally reproduce that vision.

Most, but far from all, of the photos are of places I recognize from my own travels on Sixty-Six, and some of those nearly reproduce visions I’ve had myself. There are plenty of pictures of places I do not recognize. Sometimes that’s because they are from a location where I’ve never stopped or maybe even passed, but sometimes it’s because Klinkel sees and shares a vision that never occurred to me even though I’ve stood at or near the very spot she did. I don’t mean to imply that I expected anything else. It’s great to be shown something you’ve never seen, but it can be even better to be shown something known in a new way. Although it is a place I instantly recognized, a favorite example of being shown something in a new way is the early morning shot of the Bagdad Cafe with the coming sun just a tiny but significant twinkle. Another is the low-level shot of a protective wall of tires at a long-abandoned gas station at Texas Exit 0 of I-40.

I confess to initially not understanding the meaning of the word “time” in the title. I guess my first thought was of the elapsed time covered by the popular technique of using old and new images in “then and now” pairings. There is none of that here where no photo is more than five years old. Despite having read Klinkel’s preface, I early on settled on the time element being Gerlich’s words that placed the images in their proper time in history. Those words are certainly important. The often detailed and always accurate telling of how the subject of a picture came to be and where it is located provides both education and mooring.

However, something clicked on a rereading of that preface that hadn’t quite registered on the first pass. Klinkel explains the title quite clearly:

It is a matter of time in a historic and photographic sense; a mattter of being in time before a location fades away; a matter of being in time to capture the sunrise or sunset; a matter of having enough time and patience to wait for the right light and moment.

The historic sense is fairly common. Capturing things fading but not yet completely faded is something that many photographs do. The photographic sense is less so. Being in time and having enough time is not unique but it’s not all that common and it sure is refreshing. And it explains the impressive percentage and variety of truly interesting skies in A Matter of Time.

A Matter of Time: Route 66 through the Lens of Change, Ellen Klinkel and Nick Gerlich, University of Oklahoma Press, October 10, 2019, 10 x 8 inches, 272 pages, ISBN 978-0806164007
Available through Amazon.