Altered States of Agoraphobia: Southwest Blvd, Kansas City, KS/MO

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Southwest Blvd, Kansas City, KS/MO

Here is a selection of some of the horizontal photographs I have made along Southwest Blvd in Kansas City (I will post the vertical images another time). Southwest Blvd is a location I have kept returning to, over and over again and I am attracted somehow by it's open urban spaces, concrete, cars, chain-link fences, railroad tracks and scattered business's, making it extremely photogenic and iconic of the America within me, evoking childhood memories of a place never visited. Whilst walking around Southwest Blvd I am often filled with an eerie sense of de'ja' vu, an experience which is both strange, familiar and compelling.

On the north end Southwest Boulevard starts as 19th Street at Baltimore Avenue in Kansas City, MO, and travels southwest crossing the state line into Kansas City, KS at 31st Street and continues until crossing 39th Avenue at which point it continues as Merriam Lane. Southwest Boulevard passes through the Crossroads Arts District and the West Side Neighborhood in Missouri and also the Rosedale Neighborhood in Kansas.

2 comments:

Harry SnowdenJuly 21, 2011 at 9:05 PM
Awesome work Simon
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Simon KossoffJuly 22, 2011 at 7:14 AM
Thank you, Harry.
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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.