HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM ASA

Happy Holidays from the Altered States of Agoraphobia. 

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

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. 

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

‘WAS HERE’ (The story of an abandoned series)

A few weeks ago I was invited to write a piece for the excellent photo-website fototazo.com about one of my images (which can be seen above). Below is the article which has now just been published there. My many thanks go to Tom Griggs fototazo's creator and curator. Follow the link at the end of this post to explore fototazo  further.

‘WAS HERE’.  (The story of an abandoned series) 

It was the end of the first week after Bin Laden was killed by Navy Seals and this issue of Time Magazine was out on the news-stands everywhere and I found it both unsettling and powerfully symbolic to see his face juxtaposed openly against a backdrop of everyday American vernacular. Since moving to America in 08 I have discovered that the fear of Terrorism and Bin Laden seems to have become so much part of the American psyche, that over the years following the tragedy of 9/11, weather we would like to admit it or not, Bin Laden has become part of the group consciousness of the nation as a whole - standing as the ultimate universal archetype of evil and the biggest, most insidious threat to national and personal security. Now seeing this face crossed out in blood red ink on the cover of this latest edition of Time Magazine, this private and individual terror that so many people carried around within them every day had suddenly been externalized and it could be now seen almost everywhere I turned, mirroring in the same way that his presence was felt internally before hand. It was like a great national exorcism had taken place.

It was after seeing this issue of Time Magazine that I then had the idea that I wanted to photograph its cover whenever I encountered it, naming the series ‘Was Here’. The project would be an attempt to explore and acknowledge this dark power (and the diffusion of it) had over so many individual’s outlook and ideals. Unfortunately though, my work and school schedule was so busy at that particular time that I just did not have the chance to get out to record this image in the exhaustive manner I intended and the week the magazine was out sadly passed me by without me making a single photograph.

Luckily I did have a long road trip planned at the end of the following week which I envisioned would give me a second chance to work on it. My Mother and Brother would be coming to the USA from England to visit me and my wife and we were going to meet them in New York City where we would then rent a car and drive back to Kansas, where we live and I decided it would be here I would be given this second opportunity, but this time I would be able to explore it on a much wider geographical scale. The Magazine was no longer on the news-stands, but I had bought myself a copy and my idea was to photograph it in as many places as I possibly could both in NYC and on the long drive back to Kansas.

This particular photograph is one of the first images I made for this series and which ended up being the most successful photograph, I think, that came from. It was made on the plane somewhere between Kansas and New York City.

This project, which was actually abandoned later on the trip for various reasons, was a departure from the usual way that I work and it was partly because of this that the project ultimately failed. Usually I am not one to externally alter or set up any of my photographs, preferring to record images as I find them - to instead walk around, stand back or get close to whatever my subject may be in order to get the viewpoint which resonates as true to my personal vision as possible, always in search of a balance or harmony between self and subject with the end of hopefully transcending both. This photographs stands in contradiction to this usual way that I work and I found as time went on, that it became increasingly more difficult for me to make pictures in this way without them looking horribly contrived.

The project was also abandoned of other reasons too. I discovered, whilst shooting, that it was perhaps - after 10 years, just still too soon to be dealing with this as a subject matter somehow and I became more and more uncomfortable taking the magazine out of my satchel to set up photographs with this face in it, in spite of the presence of its big red cross and I began to draw some unwanted attention, disapproving looks and unwanted questions and also some knee jerk reactions which were at times aggressively charged. In these situations explaining what it was I was doing did not seem to help in any way either. I found this especially while I was at Ground Zero itself and also outside NYC in some of the small towns. This image above now remains as the only image from the project which I feel has truly worked.  

The original article and Fototazo.com can be found here: 

http://www.fototazo.com/2011/12/image-simon-kossoff.html

American Idol (part one of an on-going project)

Since arriving in the USA I have been working separately on three on-going photo projects which explore the notion of the American Idol. Until recently these individual bodies of work have been very much independent from one another, yet over time all of them have grown and developed very much in parallel and my method of working on them has been very similar in nature. Recently, whilst editing these series for possible publication at Get The Picture, the photo/collective I am a member of, I realized that these three photo series could actually sit well together as three separate chapters of the same long term project. This idea is not entirely a new one for me either as it was first touched upon last year in my interview with Sam Dickey at Amerikana Magazine, but it has taken till now to fully realize it's union and possible potential. Below is an extract from that interview:

"One project you’ve been working on has to do with images of US presidents. Can you discuss this project and what, if anything, you’ve learned about the American Presidency in the course of it?

Well, I terms of passing an exam, I’m afraid I have not learned that much. In fact a lot of what I have learnt about the Presidency has come through listening to the people I’ve met here – an oral history. This project, which is still in its early stages, is really an extension of two other series I am also working on about Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ and comes from a similar place. This project has felt a bit like I am photographing a kind of sediment – a history that has filtered down through time and settled here in the present - all these powerful leaders who at one time stood for so much have now washed up on the shores of the here and now, so to speak - their images have anyway, and then these images become culturally recycled in one form or another, whether it is in advertising, a T-shirt design, a record sleeve, a public monument, or just surface in the clutter of a thrift store. The presidents have become symbols - powerful historical markers and it has been interesting to see how and where they reappear. Right now I am keeping my eyes open and simply recording these appearances and trying to be aware of the context I discover them in, in a hope it will inform me somehow of who they were and what they stood for. It’s really a psychic history lesson I’m giving myself. This is why I like thrift stores so much. It is where all these great once new ideas, fads and fashions, heroes, villains and icons eventually all seem to end up. Walking around American thrift stores is like viewing a kaleidoscope of American culture past all under one roof - It gives me a strange kind of perspective which I understand, but find difficult to put into words."

The photographs in this post come from part one this series, under the working title of  "The King of Kings & I". later I will discuss this project further with images from part two.

The full Amerikana interview can be viewed here: 

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/09/resident-alien-photography-of-simon.html

Internal Landscapes (II)

Hutchinson, KS

Jefferson, MO

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 in the USA and whenever I am lucky enough to see, or be in one, I always feel strongly compelled to photograph them. These images are a continuation of this occasional series. 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, but what I have always found is these artificial landscapes seem to jar heavily with my own dreams, ideals and experiences and they are always, ultimately, strange, floored and sadly human. 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.. Text adapted from a previous post.

 

St Louis, MO 

  

Jefferson City, MO Part one of this post can be found here: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/01/wemego-ks-oz-museum-behind-curtain.html A Flickr slideshow of my Cage series can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonpaulkossoff/sets/72157624733834338/show/

CZE Magazine 9 (American Flag)

Issue 9 of the always excellent CZE Magazine has just been published (in time for Veterans Day) and it can be viewed in full at issuu above. George Nabieridze; it's creator, curator and editor has once again done an incredible job putting it together. This latest issue titled 'American Flag' also contains two of my own images (on pages 72-73).

 

Pleasant Mount, KS

 

'The Pink Lady', Overland Park, KS 

Insurance Agent, KC,MO

The photographs posted here are a small selection from my own American Flag collection. It is impossible to photograph America without photographing its flag. It appears everywhere and whether it was my intention or not, it has invariably found its way into my work. Sometimes I have photographed it as a bold statement, or sometimes I have just wanted to record its presence in a certain unexpected place, like I were somehow collecting some form of private evidence - cold and artless. Other times it has made for me an interesting juxtaposition, often at odds with the main subject. Occasionally I have not even been aware that it was there at all until after the picture was made, giving a sometimes quite ordinary image a silent and surprising power of its own. The American flag is such a powerful symbol that its presence in a photograph can often move us to consider and question the true land where the photograph was made. Robert Frank in his incredibly beautiful book 'The Americans' was a master of using this ultimate juxtaposition and the images he made in the 1950's are still, I consider, some of the finest photographs that have been made in America of America. This text has been edited from a photo-story I posted at JPG.com a couple of years ago. A theme which was first brought to my attention by my friend and fellow photographer Jim Hart. Jim's wonderful on-going work can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jim-hart/

 

TV Area, Indoor Market, KC,MO

Postcards From Lawrence, KS (I)

States of Grace (Part Two) at Netherworld Magazine

Part two of my photo series 'States of Grace' has been published at the excellent '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 Two)

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.

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 one) a poem of sorts. The immigration process took approximately one year and it was a difficult and uncertain time for my wife and I. We could not make any solid future plans or put down any roots. 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/presentation/simon-kossoff-2/
Both part to this series can also be viewed here at Get the Picture:
http://getthepicture.fr/En/Photographes/Kossoff/Sog.html

Remains To Be Seen (at issuu)

Open publication - Free publishing - More photobook

My first photo-book Remains to be Seen is now sold out. For those interested in viewing the books layout and contents, but were unable to order a copy, it can now be viewed in full, here in issuu. Many thanks to everyone who bought a copy and showed their support for my work.

Remains to be Seen has also been featured at these websites/magazines:

La Pura Vida:
http://lpvmagazine.com/2011/10/simon-kossoff-remains-to-be-seen/#1
Landscape Stories:
http://www.landscapestories.net/issue-04/022-simon-kossoff?lang=en#1
Holy Ghost Zine:
http://www.holyghostzine.com/2011/10/simon-kossoff.html#more
Trend Hunter:
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/simon-kossoff-remains-to-be-seen
Get the Picture:
http://getthepicture.fr/En/Photographes/Kossoff/RTBS.html

Bass Pro & Cabelas (III)

These photographs continue an occasional series which somehow documents my visits to the bizarre and baffling, always surprising, sometimes strange and often sad Bass Pro and Cabelas outdoor hunting and fishing superstores. To see more images from previous visits follow the links below.

Part One: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/04/bass-pro-cabelas-i.html

Part Two: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/04/bass-pro-cabelas-ii.html

Venustreet Book

I am proud to have one of my photographs published in Charalampos Kydonakis new photo-book venture ‘Venustreet’, which contains a wide collection of photography by some of the most interesting street photographers working today (in my opinion). It’s a fabulous and excellently edited book and well worth tracking down and ordering a copy. The images which make up this book were selected from his Flickr group of the same name.

Here is Charalampos’s introduction and description of his Flickr group which also gives a flavor of the book itelf:

"This group is dedicated to the beauty of women and all those who admire it. Its subject is the feminine beauty, also the interaction between women and man (or woman and woman, who knows?) and the interaction between woman and the photographer. All this through the eyes of the street photographer. Is it enough that a beautiful lady can create just by her presence in an image a beautiful photo of the street aesthetic? This group was made to try and answer this question. Our only matter is the photographer’s way of thinking and his/her guts to go close and to create street beauty from the beauty that one way or the other exists in reality. After the ‘click’ this beauty exists only in the unique moment caught by a photo and not in front of our eyes in real time."

Charalampos also hosts a wonderful and exciting blog which is well worth exploring.

The link below is to a recent feature he made about my own work:

http://dirtyharrry.blogspot.com/2011/05/simon-kossoff.html

Venustreet book can be previewed and ordered here at this link to Blurb.com

http://www.blurb.com/books/2560879

Charalampos is himself a wonderful photographer. His Flickr photo-stream can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirtyharrry/

Kansas City Zombie Walk For Hunger

On Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the Kansas City Zombie Walk. The Kansas City Zombie Walk for Hunger is in its forth year and has helped many people in the Kansas City Metropolitan Community who suffer from hunger or homelessness. I did not 'go zombie' myself, but I showed my support and made several photographs which they are more than welcome use to publicize their events.

These are some of the photographs I made that day. Eventually they will be edited then used as a kind of punctuation for a series I am working on with Pogo Books, a publisher and gallery based in Berlin, who have kindly invited me to make a book of my American pictures with them which is presently being slowly edited under the title 'Resident Alien'.

POGO BOOKS:

http://www.pogobooks.de/

More images from Zombie Walks past can be found here at 'Get the Picture':

http://getthepicture.fr/En/Photographes/Kossoff/zombiewalk.html

Remains to be Seen. Book now available.

For the last 2 months I have been working on producing a book based on my photo-series 'Remains to be Seen'. After several hitches the book is now published and I finally picked it up from the printers on Friday. It was a huge learning experience for me and it was my first venture into self publishing a portfolio of my photographic work. It contains two poems and 60 photographs over 70 pages and printed in a limited edition of 100 copies which are all signed and numbered. This book is now available to order via the link below using Paypal:

To order a copy please follow this link, thank you:

http://www.jp127.com/Remains/Remainstobeseen.html

‘Remains to be Seen’ is a personal work which explores grief, loss and memory and the emotional impact these experiences have had on the way I have come to perceive the world here in the present. It’s a book of clues, keys, symbols, echoes and traces. Like latent fingerprints lifted from the psyche - made thousands of miles away from the graves of which it speaks of and recorded several years ‘after the facts’. Because of a lack of direct access to perhaps more concrete ‘evidence’ which still remains stored in a barn in England, a basement in Norway and a spare bedroom in Wales, this book has become very much a history of the present. Because of this, my only resources for making this work have been internal in nature - accompanied by a certain awareness, like a frequency that was tuned into and the series as a whole has been, to some extent, something of a ghost hunt. The sad events which have silently surrounded this project have consequently altered who I am today in ways which I am still discovering and has been part of the secret drive behind the books creation. It is not an exorcism because the possession (if this is what it is to be called) is permanent - dissolved into the self and is present more as an evolution in progress. There are seven stages of grief and this book, I believe, marks for me its final stage; Acceptance.

Follow this link to view a slideshow to the complete series:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonpaulkossoff/sets/72157624605701906/show/

ST ALBANS & WEST VIRGINIA. SOME PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHICAL FIELD NOTES (II)

We pull over into the first Motel we see in St Albans. It was dark and the scattered streetlights had flickered on with a low sodium glow. In the office I was met by a friendly but slightly suspicious desk clerk of faded beauty and the first question she asks was if we were local or from out of town. This question stuck me as odd and when I asked her about it she picked her words carefully telling me she always liked to keep the locals and visitors separated and it was with this information she would use to choose our room. She was obviously hiding something and though she was genuinely glad to see us, her smile was nervous. Outside I began to understand why the clerk asked us this question as I started to see a few of these locals shuffling around in the darkness just beyond the streetlights dim illumination, half shrouded in the shadow, with wild unkempt beards, wearing dirty disheveled clothes and flashing their dark but fearful eyes in our direction “like Zombies” my brother whispered as we got back into the car.

Our rooms were located on the far side of the motel, detached from the main block and were comfortable clean and ordinary and we were happy to find them this way. After unpacking my brother and I left in search of food leaving my wife and mother in the room to settle in. Instead of backtracking on the Charleston road we decided to dive on further into the darkness of St Albans on route 60 and on a five mile drive found nothing open, but a long scattered line of neon-lit ‘Gentleman’s Clubs’, Adult Video stores and a biker bar which advertised it’s latest act on the roadside verge outside, simply as ‘Toothless Ruth’. All these dubious establishments had beat up cars and trucks parked untidily outside, all with their front wheels turned tightly inwards, as though they had swung in off the main road and parked in a hurry. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere. After driving some distance deeper into the dense forest darkness we rounded a corner and slowed down to take a closer look at what was called the ‘Playboy Motel’ which was a clap trap two story place, lit with buzzing neon, with a balcony which ran it’s length between the floors where bulging MILF’s in lingerie leaned over languidly blowing smoke into the insect infected night. On the ground floor the main entrance was guarded by a heavy man in a dark suit sitting in a chair, who surveyed the road like a machine and clocked us as we passed with hooded eyebrows. The place looked busy and I was instantly put in mind of ‘Ben’s Place’ from the David Lynch movie classic Blue Velvet. My brother and I looked at one another smiling in disbelief. “Where in god’s name are we?” he said.

After another stretch of darkness we eventually saw that unmistakable sign for McDonalds ahead of us, high up on a long pole above the tree line, ‘The Golden Arches’ as I have heard them referred to here with hideous affection. As we turned left into the shadowy strip mall where the ‘restaurant’ was located, I noticed that to our right, sitting on the river bank was some kind of military monument in the form a great cruse missile on a large stone plinth. It stood against the clear star filled night sky like some great erect penis, with its swollen bulbous war-head. This was a grotesquely fitting sight to behold after the drive we had just taken and the sights we had seen along the way.

Pulling into McDonald's, scantly dressed toothless teens chased each other around parked cars hissing at each other and cackling and inside we were met by a friendly waitress with a soft southern accent, who, recognizing our own accents, asked us lots of questions about where we were from and where it was we were heading, welcoming us to St Albans West Virginia with an almost poker face, which afterwards broke into a smile of long yellow teeth. We told her about our journey from the motel in search of food, this time with our own questions, and she began to tell us of the altogether more sinister town of Nitro which was located close by in what she referred to as ‘Chemical Valley’ and that Nitro was the true local den of iniquity which made St Albans look like nothing at all in comparison. Nitro was named after the nitro-glycerin powder and other explosives which it was the leading producer of during both world wars. Nitro, I later discovered, was also, strangely, the location of several sightings of the infamous and mysterious ‘Mothman’, a West Virginian legend who was said to be a tall and metallic looking supernatural or alien creature with shining red eyes and a giant 10 foot wingspan. The origin of this creature still remains obscure for me, but over the years has become the subject and inspiration for at least two Hollywood movies and the city is said to boast an impressive monument to it, based on its few eye witness accounts.

Part one of this account can be found here: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/08/st-albans-west-virginia-some-psycho.html

ST ALBANS & WEST VIRGINIA. SOME PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHICAL FIELD NOTES (I)

St Albans West Virginia is a small town about 8 miles south of Charleston and is in many ways connected by a continuous line of roadside homes, strip malls and other local business’s which did not appear to separate the two towns in any discernible way and which made our eventual arrival there an accident. Thinking we were still in Charleston, our intention was to search for a cheap motel on its outskirts, but with each mile driven beyond Charleston’s invisible city limits, we became uneasy as the settlements became noticeably more ramshackle in appearance.

On our approach the atmosphere of St Alban’s began to assert its own distinctive and grubby fingerprint with a long string of ominous billboards advertising Quick Credit Debt Relief, Narcotics Anonymous, Religious Fire and Brimstone, Military Recruitment and the dangers of Crystal Meth.

Arriving at sundown in long shadow I had the strangest feeling we were entering a forgotten place, isolated and carved out of the thick forest which surrounded it and in many ways, the forest was indeed in the process of reclaiming it, as dripping vines threaded across the power lines above the road and were slowly beginning to suffocate any structure that had been left unattended for more than a few months. With the wide green and slow moving murk of the Amazon-like Kanawha River on one side and the ever closing forest on the other, it seemed like St Albans didn’t have a chance and the road which passed between both was the only thing which kept an open pathway, holding nature at bay.

Our arrival in St Albans came after a days driving south from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania on interstate 79 which at the West Virginia State line seemed to slice it’s way through this same dense landscape of thick forest on either side of the roadside. A forest which was dark, beautiful, oppressive and seemingly endless - layering away like a giant green steaming ocean to every horizon in every direction, rising up into the distant Appalachian mountains to the east and disappearing into a hazy almost tropical heat, obscured by low cloud and singing with a vast chorus of insects which never stopped. Apart from the beautiful empty asphalt ribbon of the road, the whole West Virginia landscape appeared empty of any visible human footprint and I was stunned again by the unspoiled vastness and beauty of the America beyond the city. It was only on our regular detours from the interstate that we came into contact with the existence of humans where narrow meandering roads wound through peeks and valleys which were littered with homesteads, farms, mills and sometimes coal mines which were all connected by the rail road; the main lifeline for these remote business’s and it’s mournful call could be heard like some huge prehistoric animal deep in the seemingly impenetrable forest.

Part (II) of these notes will be posted shortly.

Related posts from this road trip can be found here:

5 Postcards from Pittsburgh

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/07/pittsburgh-pa-5-photographs.html

Niagara Falls, NY

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/07/niagara-falls-ny.html

New York City (ASA Postcards)

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/06/new-york-city.html

Preparations for the journey

http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2011/05/road-trip-nyc-niagara-falls-west.html