#000563
Hammer Down: The Heavy Trucker's Romance with the Open Road
Steve Lesberg and Naomi Goldberg (photographers/editors)
A photographic celebration of the American long-haul trucker at the height of the 1970s CB-radio, open-road mystique. Photographed and edited by Steve Lesberg and Naomi Goldberg, *Hammer Down* — trucker slang for flooring the accelerator — gathers color and black-and-white images of big rigs, drivers, truck stops, and the highways they live on. It captures a very particular cultural moment, when the trucker was a folk hero of songs and movies and the interstate stood for a certain restless American freedom. Part documentary, part romance, the book is less concerned with the industry's economics than with its look and feel: chrome, diesel, neon, and the long ribbon of road at dawn. Now scarce, it survives as a nostalgic period piece, a loving snapshot of trucking culture as it imagined itself in the me-decade.
more…less ▴
The authors
Steve Lesberg and Naomi Goldberg are credited as the photographers and editors of this volume; like many creators of 1970s popular photo books, they are remembered chiefly through the work itself rather than extensive public profiles. Their contribution here is one of documentary eye and editorial shaping.
The book
Hammer Down: The Heavy Trucker's Romance with the Open Road was published around 1977 (Peebles Press), a roughly 170-page illustrated volume in color and black-and-white. It rode the cultural wave that produced the film Convoy, the CB-radio craze, and the trucker as a romantic American archetype.
How it has aged
As social document and nostalgia it has aged into a genuine period piece. The romanticism is unabashed and its portrait of trucking is more mythic than analytical — you will not learn much here about the labor conditions, deregulation battles, or economics of the industry, then or now. But as a vivid image of how 1970s America pictured its truckers, and as an increasingly scarce artifact, it holds a real charm.
For more context
Pair with histories of the CB-radio and trucking booms of the 1970s and with the era's road films and songs.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Steve Lesberg and Naomi Goldberg (photographers/editors)
- Publisher
- Peebles Press
- Year
- 1977
- ISBN
- 9780672523618
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado