Considering that home ownership is an essential — probably the essential — element of the American Dream, it is curious how much of our culture is devoted to getting away from it. From the adventurous explorers Lewis and Clark to the innocent runaway Huckleberry Finn to the slack drifters in “On the Road,” our popular heroes are likely to be on the move. “Easy Rider: Road Trips Through America,” the summer show at the Yancey Richardson Gallery, draws on the work of over 30 itinerant photographers to show us what’s out there.

The works stretch back in time to photographs taken by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange in the 1930s as they traveled in the South and West to chronicle the displacements of the Great Depression. Lange’s two pictures are especially emblematic: “The Road West” (1938) is a modernist image that captures the vastness of American’s open spaces. The camera is planted on the broken white line running down the middle of a perfectly straight two-lane asphalt highway that only undulates slightly as it recedes into the far, far distance. The horizon is absolutely level, and no trees or bushes rise up to break the monotony of the flat terrain. The road both beckons and intimidates, but in either aspect it is intimately familiar.

The other Lange photograph is “San Joaquin Valley, CA” (1935), and it reminds us that not all trips are taken for fun and adventure. It is a tight shot of the back of a truck, the bed of which has been fitted with a makeshift canvas covering like that on a 19th-century Conestoga wagon. Peering into the dark interior, we can barely discern a mother and child looking out. On the tailgate of the truck is a 1935 Oklahoma license plate, so these must be Okies, farmers driven from their land by drought, searching in the fertile San Joaquin Valley for a place to begin their lives again. But the mother and child look back at where they have been, and not ahead to their uncertain future.

Justine Kurland’s “Baby Pictures (Sleeping in Van)” (2006) is a very different image, a chromogenic print of a young child sweetly snoozing in the plush interior of a curtained van; there is nothing distressing here. Frank Gohlke’s “Car Stopped on the Freeway, Minneapolis” (1974) depicts a Bonneville parked in the breakdown lane next to the steel guardrail in the middle of a multi-lane superhighway, and presumably the two guys checking under the raised hood are not happy. Automobiles are necessarily an important part of any essay on the road.

The junked Chevy Impala in Jeff Brouws’s “Route 248, Four Buttes, Montana” (2004) was described in detail in last week’s review of the “Epilogues” show at the Robert Mann Gallery. There it was titled “Car in Landscape,” a 43-inch-by-51.5-inch archival pigment print. Here it is a 20-inch-by-24-inch print, less than one quarter the size, and I like it better here; it is crisper and more readily comprehended. Digital technology makes it easy to make pictures bigger, but that does not perforce make them better. The partly buried car, though, is still “the Ozymandias of the late, great Automotive Age.”

The high point of the Automotive Age had to be the ’50s, when gas was cheap, cylinders were large, the interstate highway system was expanding, and the flamboyant pressed steel bodies of the cars expressed the fantasies of their drivers. No detail captured that spirit more successfully than the Cadillac tail fin, the creation of General Motors’s legendary design chief, Harley Earl; he was inspired by the design of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, the twin-boomed fighter plane that helped America win World War II. The Cadillac fin served no purpose (automobiles do not need to be stabilized to prevent yaw), but it represented speed, power, glamour, and wealth. The Cadillac tail fin is truly iconic, and Robert Frank nailed it perfectly in his picture “Chicago” (1954).

The background of the picture shows segments of several nondescript center city high-rise office buildings. The right side of the picture is part of a building lost in the late afternoon shadows. The building in the foreground is apparently a garage with the back-end of the one car parked on the roof projecting over the edge into space, and that one car is a Cadillac. The sun glints off the mighty chrome bumper and the decorative chrome on the fins. But it looks silly isolated that way. Without the swank of fashionable passengers or an appropriately upscale setting, it is a tin folly, and somehow pathetic. Mr. Frank, a foreigner, was not taken by the Cadillac’s American cachet.

There are many classic images in “Easy Rider,” including Ernst Haas’s “Route 66, Albuquerque, New Mexico” (1969) in a gorgeous dye transfer print that has great depth and a beautiful shimmer to the rain on the asphalt. “Five Views From the Panhandle” (1962) is as many snapshots of gas stations by Ed Ruscha. Garry Winogrand’s “Apollo 11 Moon Shot, Cape Kennedy, Florida” (1969) shows everyone in the grandstand looking one way to follow the rocket up, and one woman in the foreground unaccountably looking the other. Marion Post Wolcott’s “Winter Visitors Picnic on Running Board of Car on Beach, Sarasota, Florida” (1941) is an idyll for four vacationers who have come all the way from Ohio.

Joel Sternfeld’s “Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodlawn, Washington” (1979) is painfully comic, and Danny Lyon’s “Crossing the Ohio, Louisville” (1966) is a good representative of his motorcycle pictures. Todd Hido’s “#2424-B” (1999), a newly built house at night in the snow, may yet be well-known. Et cetera — the road goes on.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until September 8 (535 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 646-230-9610).