Motel Pool

Andrew Kuykendall – Motel Pool

In Motel Pool, Andrew Kuykendall turns his lens toward the forgotten oases of the American desert—those roadside stops once alive with travellers, families, and the shimmer of possibility. The image captures not only a pool emptied of water but of purpose, a relic of a time when motels dotted the highways and the journey itself was part of the adventure.

Today, many of these places stand abandoned, bypassed by faster roads and new economies of travel. Once-bustling rest stops are reduced to weathered signs, cracked concrete, and silence. Kuykendall’s photograph preserves this transition, holding on to the ghosts of movement and pause, of laughter once carried across sun-burnt courtyards, of neon lights now dimmed.

His work belongs to the tradition of American road photography: documenting not just landscapes but the cultural archaeology of travel, the way we mark and then abandon our crossings. Motel Pool is at once documentary and elegy—a meditation on what remains when the world keeps driving past.