I was recently interviewed by Lyndal Irons from the Head-On photography festival in Sydney, Australia about my blog; The Altered States of Agoraphobia Flickr group project and it's companion blog ASA(II). Lyndal did a wonderful job turning this interview into a beautifully illustrated article with images from the Flickr group pool, which was then published at the Head-On blog.

I have since been asked by a few people to see the unedited interview, so I have decided to publish it here for the first time with an alternative selection of photographs from the on-going Flickr project, including some new photographs I made on the road from our recent trip to Dodge City and Hutchinson, KS.

The Head On Photo Festival is Sydney’s major innovative showcase for Australian and international photography, reflecting a vibrant, diverse cross-section of new and traditional photographic practices covering all genres. Head On aims to present good photography regardless of the celebrity of either the subject or photographer. Events for 2011 will include indoor and outdoor exhibitions, screenings, workshops, a seminar as well as some special events. Venues include public and commercial galleries, cafes, park-lands and the streets of Sydney itself.

Many thank to Lydal for giving me this oppotunity to talk about the ASA project.

Head-On's website can be found at this link: http://headon.com.au/

When did you start Altered State of Agoraphobia?

I started Altered States of Agoraphobia (ASA) about a year and a half ago.

Under what circumstances?

I’d been in the U.S for about a year and a half and had made quite a bit of work. America came as a great inspiration photographically and I was buzzing with all sorts of ideas. I had taken several long road trips, seen quite a lot of the country and had also kept a few written journals along the way. I was also beginning to develop several photo projects which I was excited about and I was looking for a place to explore them further. I had already been posting images at Flickr and was an active member of its community, but I felt I needed to focus and edit my projects in a more personal space. At that time I was also beginning to have exhibitions locally and I needed a place to let people know when and where they were.

What were you attempting?

I wanted something which showed my work in progress and to also help me think about what it was I was doing. In the introduction to ASA I state that these images could be described as a collection of psychic co-ordinate points I have plotted between the imagined America that I brought with me from England and the real America which I found on my arrival in 08. It was my search for a kind of personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. Ultimately it is a journey which explores the destination. ASA has also been for me, the digital equivalent of laying prints out on the floor to see what I’ve got, and it has helped me think about where I’m going photographically. Starting ASA seemed like the perfect place for this exploration and it has since proved to be a valuable tool in my creative process.

What response did you get from people?

The response to ASA has been fantastic. And I think it gave those who already knew my work (and also those who didn’t) an idea of what I was doing in a broader sense. Showing them something of the framework I was using to build my various projects around and how they were connected. I know, for many people, ASA helped to put my work into a context, which made it easier to access. I’ve had some encouraging and insightful feedback from people right across the world and this has been affirming and a source of continuous inspiration which has contributed to my growth as an artist. What really makes my day though is when I hear that someone has discovered my work for the first time, having stumbled onto it from somewhere else, where I might have had only a single image published.

How big has it grown in readership?

For the purpose of this interview I have just checked my stats and I have had over 7000 visits in all. These visits have come from right across the globe too. It’s exciting to think that my work is being viewed, and I hope enjoyed, by such a widely dispersed audience. When I compare this though, to the stats of Altered States of Agoraphobia (II) which is the blog I set up as a companion to the Flickr group which I started only a few months ago, this number is small. ASA(II) is getting over a 1000 visits a month and growing in popularity all the time.

What motivated you to begin the Flickr pool? How many people now contribute?

The Flickr pool came about at a time when I was unable to get out and make pictures myself after I decided to return to school. At the same time I was seeing all this amazing work posted on Flickr and I wanted to focus it somehow and starting a Flickr group seemed to me the natural thing to do. I was seeing so many wonderful images made by other photographers from every corner of the United States who were photographing places I had not visited myself but wished I could, and were shooting some really interesting and original work. It was then when I decided to invite some of these photographs to join the group as a way of extending the work I’d made with my own projects. My intention was, with the help of other like-minded artists and photographers make an extensive psychological, geographical and cultural investigation into the United States by what I call its ‘Resident Aliens’. In the ASA(II) blog intro I call it a contemporary photographic exploration into both the psyche of the artist and also a document of the world in which he or she inhabits and the forces acting on both. The group has only been running for just a few months and it already has almost 200 members and close to 3000 images in it.

In ASAII (your edited showcase of the best of your Flickr group) what are you looking for when you're curating?

This is my first experience of acting as ‘curator’ and I have mainly felt my way through it and trusted my instincts about which images work and which do not. It’s a really subjective thing and at the end of the day my choices have been made purely on personal taste, but yet anchored firmly in the concept of the group too. There are certain themes I am particularly attracted to, but I am open to consider anything which moves me. When I post a run of images on the blog I always try to sequence them into a loose narrative, unlike the ‘image of the day’ photographs which generally stand alone. There are so many really extraordinary images in the Flickr group pool and refining them for the ASA(II) blog has been sometimes a difficult, but interesting challenge. As a guide I have always very much stuck as closely to the ‘rules’ I set down for the Flickr group and I have mainly chosen images which tell me something not only about the subject which is being photographed, but also says something, I believe, about the photographer who made it. In that respect ASA(II) is a place where 1+1=3.

What are you cutting?

When I first opened the group I allowed every photographer who joined to submit three images a day and it did not take long for the submissions to build up quickly and I was suddenly overwhelmed by images which I had to either accept into the group pool or deny. Most I denied, because the group was not open long and it took a while for people to tune into what I was looking for. There were however, a handful of photographers, who took up the challenge with ease and I immediately included these images into the group pool to set both a standard and example of what I was looking for and I began building the pool from there. I also then cut down the submissions to one image a day in a hope of making members consider their submissions more carefully and this has worked well. In terms of what I am cutting, this has again been a totally subjective thing and difficult to put my finger on.

What's surprised you during the process?

I guess I never expected such a positive response to this project in such a short amount of time. In just a few weeks of the group opening, for example, I was contacted by Brian Formhals who runs the excellent photography website La Pura Vida, inviting me to make ASA a regular feature in the form a monthly selection of images made from the group pool and accompanied by a text. After I put together the first of these features I decided to hand it over to the group members, because it was about their experiences of America after all. I have had a terrific response to this also and seen, so far, some inspired and varied submissions. I regularly post these features on the ASA(II) blog and the 3^rd La Pura Vida feature will appear later this month.

Any thoughts on the future of ASAII?

I have had several ideas. My initial intention for the group was to produce, once the group was up and running, a quarterly magazine of some kind, but recently I have also been thinking perhaps a book too. I also have designs on having an ASA exhibition at some point also. I have not made any steps towards this yet because I have had very little free time recently because of school, but I would love to find a space to show actual prints of some of this incredible work and I think it deserves it. I will see how things pan out when I graduate in May.

Anything else you'd like to add?

In my experience, Flickr has an amazing photographic community and some incredible photographers have accounts there, posting some of the most interesting, cutting edge and original photography I’ve seen anywhere. In many ways I consider Flickr the front line in photography today. Great things happen there all the time and it’s a wonderful place to collaborate, weather it be part of an exhibit, magazine or book ( on-line or in print). The ASA project could never have happened without this talented and passionate network of artists and it's exciting to be part of it. Before I discovered Flickr I felt very much like I was working in a vacuum and the only work I had access to was that of established artists presenting polished bodies of work. I’ve since discovered that communities such as Flickr and also JPG.com are the raw pool from which many talented photographers find focus and direction and emerge with some really inspiring projects. 

To view the individual photograph credits for this post please click the image. Unfortunately I was not able to list the artists names below the images, like I usually do, on this particular post.

Lydal Irons original Head-On article can be found here:

http://headon.com.au/blog/altered-states-agoraphobia

The ASA(II) blog can be found here:

http://alteredstatesofagoraphobia2.blogspot.com/

The ASA Flickr Group Project can be found here:

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

The First La Pura Vida feature can be found here:

http://lapuravidagallery.com/blog/2011/01/altered-states-of-agoraphobia-1-no-drag-like-u-s-drag/

A couple of weekends ago I took a short two day and much needed road trip to western Kansas. Traveling from Overland Park my wife and I drove west on I70 to Salina (Please see a previous post exploring this town) where we then headed south to see Dodge City on the Oklahoma state-line. From Dodge we began our trip back, making Hutchinson and it's Salt Museum our last stop. For me this was largely a photographic expedition to visit several places I have intended to visit, but not yet had the chance.

To be back out on the American road was as wonderful and inspiring as ever and came, as always, with several unexpected and amazing encounters, many of which I made pictures of and will share in future posts, here at this blog.

The Kansas Underground Salt Museum

The Kansas Underground Salt Museum is one of The 8 Wonders of Kansas because it showcases the natural treasure, salt that exists hundreds of feet below the Kansas plains.

Hutchinson seized the unique opportunity to provide a destination attraction for the citizens of Kansas, the United States, and the world to explore an exotic environ carved from salt deposits formed 280 million years ago, 650 feet below the surface. In the United States there are 16 salt mines but Hutchinson is the only one, in fact the only one in the Western Hemisphere, which has an underground museum open to tourists. There are only two other underground salt museums in the world and they are in Poland and Austria. People from throughout the country have clamored for an opportunity to visit the Hutchinson salt mine.

The adventure at the Kansas Underground Salt Museum begins on board a double-decked elevator that takes visitors to the salt deposit 650 feet down. Upon arriving underground, they board a tram that takes them into mined out areas where they will see naturally occurring geologic formations and artifacts left behind by miners over a period of 85 years. They then have the opportunity to wander through exhibits that tell the story of salt mining, the geological history of the area and how these vast salt caverns under Hutchinson have been used to store over seven million documents.

The mine's perpetual 68 degrees and 40 percent humidity make it a great place to for the storage of unique, often secret and very rare or treasured cultural artifacts. A company named Underground Vaults and Storage has been doing that here since the 1940s, founded by ex-GIs who saw a similar operation in Nazi Germany. Visitors aren't allowed into the vaults, but you can tour a small exhibit, which includes movie memorabilia such as James Dean’s shirt from Giant, the costumes from the Batman movies and the Matrix. It also stores the master prints of Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and thousands of other Hollywood films.

The text for this post has come from and been adapted from two websites:

http://kansassampler.org/ Kansas Sampler

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/12232 Roadside America

These photographs were made in Mission, Kansas over the last year. They probably say more about me, than the actual physical place. I do not visit Mission often, except on certain errands I have needed to run. It has been on these errands that these (collected) photographs were made.

Here's some background about Mission from the city's website:

Mission was a stopping point for covered wagons on the way west via the Santa Fe Trail. Because of the clear blue water in free-flowing springs, these pioneer ancestors looked forward to setting up campsites in Mission. The springs, likewise, enticed the first residents of Mission, since the precious water was free. Mission grew as America grew, becoming the first suburb of Kansas City and has emerged as a sophisticated cosmopolitan neighbor on the east.

City Website: http://www.mission-ks.org/index.aspx

I was really excited to find out today that 4 images from my recent trip to the Oz Museum in Wemego, KS have been published in the second issue of the excellent arts magazine Aubade. Many thanks to Christ Turner for selecting these images and showing faith and support for my various on-going projects and also for all his hard work in editing and designing what looks like another wonderful issue. I am truly honored and I am in the company of some fantastic artists there.

"Issue 2 of Aubade Magazine contains photography, writing and art from artists all over the world. Paintings from Japan, poems from Australia, photography from the streets of London, Paris, Stockholm, Washington DC and Antarctica." -(& Kansas of course :-)

Unpublished image from the Oz Museum series

Unpublished image from the Oz Museum series

Follow this link to view more from Wemego, KS Oz Museum (behind the curtain)

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/01/wemego-ks-oz-museum-behind-curtain.html

To order and preview Aubade issue 2 please follow this link:

http://www.magcloud.com/browse/Issue/168848

I found out this morning that part one of my photo series 'States of Grace' has been published at the excellent photography website 'Netherworld Magazine'. Many thanks to Marcin Klimek for doing a terrific job putting it all together. Please follow the link at the bottom of this post to view this feature (which is best viewed as a full screen slideshow) and see more of Netherworld Magazine.

STATES OF GRACE (Part One)

STATE:

1. the condition of a person or thing, as with respect to circumstances or attributes: a state of health.

2. a particular condition of mind or feeling: to be in an excited state.

3. an abnormally tense, nervous, or perturbed condition: He's been in a state since hearing about his brother's death.

4. a politically unified people occupying a definite territory; nation.

GRACE:

1. elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action.

2. favor or good will.

3. mercy; clemency; pardon: an act of grace.

4. favor shown in granting a delay or temporary immunity.

5. an allowance of time after a debt or bill has become payable granted to the debtor before suit can be brought against him or her or a penalty applied: The life insurance premium is due today, but we have 31 days' grace before the policy lapses.

6. the influence or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them.

Worlds of Fun, KS

Immigration Lawyer's Office

Waffle House

Event

This series of photographs was made during, and also in response to my process of immigration into the United States of America from the UK. It is a personal document – a mosaic of images or even (when viewed with part two) a poem of sorts. The immigration process took approximately one year and it was a difficult and deeply uncertain time for my wife and I. We could not make any solid future plans or put down any roots, just in case. While making this work I often felt like my own anxiety and hope was also a kind of an echo of the anxiety and hope of the nation I had arrived in, which was in the grips of recession and in the middle of an election campaign for a new President.

Follow this link to see both this feature and see more of Netherworld Magazine:

http://www.netherworldmagazine.com/

Holbrook, AZ (Wigwam Motel II)

Knob Hill, KY

Conway, TX

Little Rock, AR

This is a selection of images from my on-going series about Motels (The Most Haunted Places in America).

When I'm traveling I like staying in cheap motels. There's something about them which captures my imagination. I love the atmosphere, the dated and crumbling decor, the buzzing neon signs, the musty smell of the rooms and the people that use them. I love to listen to the stories of those that work in the office. I love the plastic dusty flower displays, stale coffee, the old TV's and faded pictures hanging on the walls. I love the cracked cement parking lots, the broken coke machines and the Bible in the bedside draw with the broken back. What I love most of all are the dreams I have in the bumpy uncomfortable beds after a day of driving. Laying in the darkness listening to the trucks thundering past on the road outside I think about all the people who have stayed in the very room I am in. I imagine all the things that could have possibly happened and feel the fleeting ghosts of their presence echo around me. In the darkness I contemplate my own flickering sepia place in it's transitory history. For me they are the most haunting and haunted places in America.

Please follow these links to see more images from this series:

Part One: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2009/12/motels-most-haunted-places-in-america.html

Part Two: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/07/motels-ii-most-haunted-places-in.html

For a while now I have had a fascination with internal and artificial landscapes. It is a theme which has threaded it's way through much of the work I have made so far in the USA and whenever I am lucky enough to see and be in one, I always feel strongly compelled to photograph them.

I am interested in the illusion and the fantasy these places attempt to create and sometimes (in terms of my Cage series) their grim reality too. I love the theatre and suspension of disbelief which goes with standing in a themed museum for example. I always find that these artificial landscapes jar heavily with my own dreams, ideals and experiences and they are always, ultimately, strange, floored and sadly human.

These artificial and internal landscapes often force me to consider my own real life experience of landscapes which I have stood or lived in and questions what I have done with them myself, psychically. I think we are all filled with a lifetime - a history of landscapes, which have themselves, in turn, become a part of who we are as individuals. They become part of our own mental geography, full of archetypes, symbols and markers - integrating themselves inside, with special and personal significance. I always find it interesting and amazing, for example, when a landscape I have recently (or not recently) experienced suddenly becomes the location of a dream I have had. Why has this particular landscape or place been chosen to play out the drama of this dreams events at this time? It is something I find endlessly fascinating..

These photographs were made last weekend in Wemego, Kansas at the excellent and well worth visiting 'Wizard of OZ' museum and marked my three year anniversary since moving to the United States.

Here is what their website says about it:

"What words could be more appropriate when describing the dream of a small community that literally built a museum out of a rainbow's notion? It took the brains of a small group of leaders, the heart for what L. Frank Baum began in 1900 as a simple children's book and the courage to take on the task of constructing a home for over 2,000 artifacts dating from 1900 to today.

The OZ museum was built with a major grant from the State of Kansas and the generosity of the people of this small community, who also provided thousands of hours of volunteer time. The museum houses more than just memorabilia from the famous 1939 MGM musical starring Judy Garland! It encompasses earlier silent films, one of which starred none other than Oliver Hardy (Laurel and Hardy fame) as the Tin Man as well as "The Wiz" starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

The OZ Museum offers everything imaginable from the earliest Baum books and OZ Parker Brothers board games to today's collectibles that can be purchased in Auntie Em's Gift Shop. The OZ Museum is dedicated to ALL things OZ. It is a treasure trove of delight and wonder and thrills visitors young and "young at heart."

http://www.ozmuseum.com/about/default.htm

Of course I did make lots of photographs of the actual exhibits and artifacts on display and I may post some of them here at a later date.