39th St, Kansas City

Here are a selection of image made on Kansas City's 39th St.

The 39th Street West business district and its surrounding neighborhoods offer some of Kansas City 's richest history. Once a vineyard supporting a winery, 39th Street West rapidly became home to some of Kansas City 's most stately, stone and brick homes, destination restaurants and boutique retail.

One of the earliest suburban neighborhoods to flourish in Kansas City's turn of the century expansion, 39th Street West was served by two light rail lines: a single-track streetcar line running to Rosedale, and the "Strang Line" providing a direct connect to areas further south, like Olathe.

"39th Street is a colorful neighborhood district offering a fun mix of fine dining, casual & ethnic specialties. An eclectic mix of shops, bookstores & coffee houses." ~ AOL Cityguide

The King And I at Get the Picture

Lawrence, KS

Liberty, MO

This is another selection of images from my series 'King and I'.

On my travels in the USA Elvis began appearing to me like some religious/cultural vision in a wide range of places and in the strangest of circumstances. From New York City to rural Kentucky and Virginia to the desert towns of Arizona. He has appeared in Shopping Malls and Thrift Stores and everywhere in between. Elvis has become one of the many ‘psychic coordinate points’ which I mention in the introduction to this blog and I have often orientated myself culturally around his scattered presence.

This series has naturally come to a conclusion, or perhaps the end of a chapter, after the inclusion of my recent portraits of Tarry Westley which were entered into Alec Soth's Flickr group From Here To There: Assignment #2. For chapter two and three of this series I intend to make portraits of Elvis impersonators and to also eventually travel to Graceland.

The complete series, including the portrait of Tarry Westley has now been published at my agency website 'Get the Picture' which can be found here:

http://getthepicture.fr/En/Photographes/Kossoff/King&I_1.html

Damaged Goods (II)

This is another selection of images from my on-going series 'Damaged Goods'. More images from this series can be found in an earlier post to this blog or by visiting the website Aamora where I was a guest contributor in March of this year.

Aamora's excellent website can be found here: http://www.aamora.com/?p=1889

Overland Park project featured at Urbanautica

Urbanautica is a research platform centered on photography and the human landscape. A navigation by sight, a trip around the ideas, people and what makes them part of nature and the world. Established through a website with the aim of promoting a critical reflection on the planet Earth, the site has already received significant recognition among photographers, magazines, blogs and websites from all over the world.

SIMON KOSSOFF: “OVERLAND PARK”

Overland Park, Kansas, 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’.

"For some time we have observed with curiosity the patient work of Simon Kossoff. We like it because it is a determined slap in the face of reality or perhaps it is best to call it personality. Without melancholy, Kossoff creates with a lyrical precision that has become more refined over time, a mature vision with a narrative tension that is also soaked with poetic ambition. A subjectivity that is made up of silent traces isolated through intuition. The human landscape that he approaches through photography consists of colorful individualities and a macrorealism that pierces our sensibilities. Using razor-sharp details that scrape the surface of the banal. Kossoff makes skilled incisions into reality, finding essential spaces, briefly shooting, embedding the image with what feeds his own story. A fluent and fast paced vision, relentlessly alternating between a sob that first exposes your feelings and then defines them. What we see in this work on Overland Park is the intention of the photographer becoming stronger and gaining weight around curious, occasional and fragmented shots. Kossoff’s speech is never casual, it is a discontinuous process yet well-disciplined and that rarely stalls. Kossoff does not make fleeting statements but questions the viewer instantly and insistently. It is easy to be caught by surprise, a little unprepared, but that’s part of the game, the dialogue that expands the perception and reveals new possibilities."

This article with the images can be found here at Urbanautica’s website.

http://www.urbanautica.com/post/1312841707/kossoff-overlandkansas?ref=nf

Many thanks to the Editor Steve Bisson