Altered States of Agoraphobia: Postcards from America

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Postcards from America

Overland Park, KS

Last night I was pleased to discover that one of my very recent photographs, from my EMT school in Overland Park, KS had been published on the new Magnum blog as part of the 'Postcards from America' project. It was chosen by photographer Alec Soth, who set up a Flickr group in search of insightful images of America today from outside this prestigious photo agency.

I am always really grateful when my work is posted on a blog and it is something which always comes as a pleasant surprise for me. This particular blog post is an important one to me personally, because this new Magnum project appears to run parallel, in many ways, to my own on-going personal work and also that of ASA(II); my Flickr group and it's companion blog. Many thanks Alec for this small exposure, it means a lot.

Here is the intro to the Flickr group and Postcards project:

"In May 2011, five Magnum photographers will travel from Texas to California in the first of a series of trips documenting post-millennial America. Along with encouraging people to follow the journey on our blog, we're asking you to submit your own images of America.

We're looking for new images and video (made between April 1 and May 25, 2011) that give us insight into what America is like today. We'll be regularly highlighting our favorites on our blog.

At the end of trip, we'll be displaying these selections alongside our own in a special exhibition in Oakland. We look forward to your postcards."

Postcards from America's blog can be viewed here:

http://postcardsfromamerica.tumblr.com/

Alec Soth's Flick group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/postcardsfromamerica/

As an update to this post I have discovered that another of my photographs has been chosen for this project and appeared on the 'postcards' blog this morning (26th April, 2011). this image is from my recent easter weekend trip to St Louis.

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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.