Altered States of Agoraphobia: Overland Park, KS (III)

Monday, May 3, 2010

Overland Park, KS (III)

Here is a selection of new images from my continuing series about Overland Park, Kansas, where I live.

Overland Park has been consistently ranked in the top 10 best cities to live in the United States, by CNN/Money magazine. Additionally, the city was ranked one of the ‘best places to raise your kids’ and also ranked 3rd for ‘America’s 10 best places to grow up’. As a photographer this news comes as an inspiration and something of a shock to me and I have decided to explore what it is that gives Overland Park this status.

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Welcome

About the photographs: These images are a search for a personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. They can be described as a collection of psychic coordinate points which I have plotted between the imagined America I brought with me from England and the real America I found on my arrival in 2008. These images are half truth and half fiction. They are a psychogeography, filled with personal symbolism and tangled with influences so old they were already part of me long before this journey ever began.

A note about the title:  The compulsion to travel, to move from one place to another, has been with me my whole life. Whether it be local, national or international, I have always found myself either in motion or, if not, I have been dreaming about it. Paradoxically, it has been in the periods of dreaming that Agoraphobia, (which Google defines as “Extreme or irrational fear of entering open or crowded places, of leaving one's own home, or of being in places from which escape is difficult”) has gripped me and, at times, crippled me. These photographs are my continued (once secret) revolt against it in the United States of America today, despite recent quarantines.