JESSICA LANGE’S HIGHWAY 61

Long before Jessica Lange cowered in King Kong’s hairy hand, showed us her sinister side in American Horror Stor y and displayed her unhinged comedy in the Netflix series The Politician, she took photography classes at the University of Minnesota. She’s been snapping pictures for decades, and now, at 70, she’s releasing her third book of photography, the haunting Highway 61 (powerHouse Books, $75).

In more than 80 black-and-white photos, Lange leads us along that legendary road, from Wyoming, Minn.—about 100 miles south of her hometown—clear down to New Orleans, 1,400 miles through eight states. “It was the highway of my childhood,” she says. “My entire family was born along that road.”

Lange shows us young love blooming at a country fair, but also weary workers, shuttered stores and empty streets. “The small towns you remember as a kid no longer exist,” she says. What’s left, she writes in the book’s afterword, is a “ghostly beauty.”

She’s right about that, and there’s no mistaking that even with her Oscars (two) and Emmys (three), Lange still has an eye out for struggling small-town America.