Altered States of Agoraphobia

Friday, July 9, 2010

Motels (II): The Most Haunted Places in America

Conway, MO

Moab, UT

Guyman, KS

Santa Fe, NM

Denver, CO

Part Two of my continuing story about Motels.

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.

Part one of this series can be found here: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2009/12/motels-most-haunted-places-in-america.html

Friday, June 18, 2010

La Pura Vida Feature

A few weeks ago Bryan Formhals asked me if he could do a feature about my work at his really excellent photography website La Pura Vida.

This is what he said:

"When I stumble upon photographs like Simon’s I’m energized. This is when the constant looking pays off. He was teaching in Brighton and decided to come to the US, but instead of going to the magnets of NYC, SF or LA, he went to Kansas City. The photographs he produced might be what you’d expect, if they weren’t slightly different. There’s a heavy dose of Americana contained within but he translates his impressions authentically, and with verve. He’s a photographer completely enamored with the landscape in front of his eyes. After years of ignoring photography, middle America has fueled an obsession that we have the privilege of witnessing."

You can view more of Simon’s work on Flickr and through Get the picture agency.

View Slideshow

Founded in 2007, La Pura Vida is an online photography magazine and gallery that features monthly group shows edited by various photographers, as well as a daily blog with regular features, photography news and commentary. Thank you Bryan.

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.