Liquor, Sporting Goods and Bait

Andrew Kuykendall – Liquor, Sporting Goods and Bait

Kuykendall’s Liquor, Sporting Goods and Bait stands as both documentation and evocation: a roadside fragment bathed in that magical desert light he renders with the eye of both painter and photographer. The storefront, with its layered promises of necessity and diversion, feels like an echo of an earlier America—one shaped by movement, rest stops, and the culture of the highway.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the road from Los Angeles to Las Vegas became a stage for a uniquely American kind of travel. Families packed cars for desert drives, neon signs lured them off the highway, and motels, diners, and gas stations stitched together a landscape of possibility and escape. What Kuykendall captures here is not simply a place, but the residue of those journeys—the sense that countless travellers once pulled over, stocked up, refuelled, and then disappeared back into the horizon.

The photograph sits firmly in the tradition of American road documentary: a reminder that the mundane can be monumental, and that every roadside sign carries within it a story of movement, memory, and the great expanse of the West.