Americana

I guess there are almost as many Americas as you’d care to imagine - the US is a pretty big place, after all, and pretty diverse. There is the American landscape of Ansel Adams, pristine and majestic, and then there is the arid desolation and waste of Robert Adams’ American West; Gordon Parks’s black America, soaked in black experience and black community, with an implied backdrop of systemic racism; the alienated America of Robert Frank, plunged in anomie; the vernacular America of Walker Evans, haunted by the aftermath of the Civil War and the Depression, yet seen with a clear and unsentimental gaze; the lyrical and cinematic Kodachrome America of Ernst Haas and Saul Leiter, William Eggleston’s South and of course many others.

The photographs in this collection were taken, in some cases years apart, on trips through parts of Michigan and Pennsylvania. They are, in a sense, as much reactions to the America I felt and saw as they are representations of it. They tiptoe in the footsteps of the masters, maintaining a respectful distance, without daring to claim them.