Altered States of Agoraphobia

Friday, December 23, 2011

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM ASA

Happy Holidays from the Altered States of Agoraphobia.

Many thanks for all your enthusiasm and support. Love Simon.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Automobile as Tripod

Shawnee, KS

Dodge City, KS

Junction City, KS

Overland Park, KS

This post came about during an end of year review of some of the work I'd made. It's true that not all of these images were actually shot this year and there are in fact several others which I have not posted as part of this selection, but it has been interesting for me to filter some of my personal favorites out and view them together like this and to acknowledge the Automobile as Tripod as part of my method of working in certain conditions. Although there are several images in this style posted here, it's worth mentioning that sometimes several months, 1000's of miles and 100's of photographs sit between the making of each of them.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

AUBADE Magazine Issue 7

This morning I found out that Issue 7 of Christopher Turner's always wonderful Aubade magazine has been published at Magcloud. With each new issue this magazine gets better and better. Subtitled "Art and the work-a-day sublime" It contains a wide range of photography, writing, poetry and painting from across the globe and as always it is well worth ordering a copy. This issue includes one of my Overland Park photographs on it's cover.

Follow this link to buy or preview: http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/309677

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.