Altered States of Agoraphobia

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Cage (II)

Cages. I have been working on this now finished series for just over a year now. The collected images can be seen at my agency website "Get the Picture' here:

http://getthepicture.fr/Photographes/Kossoff/index_Kossoff.html

Monday, August 9, 2010

Truth Managzine Volume.3

I was really happy to discover today that I have a handful of images from my recent Utah Road Trip published in 'Truth' magazine, Volume three.

Follow the link below to see a preview or buy this excellent photo journal. Many thanks to Richard Payne for his dedication to this magazine - it's wonderful design and layout and brilliant edit. I am in great company there. Truth Vol 3 includes the work of these photographers:

Richard Payne

Michael Cinque

Albert Ruso

Christopher Turner

James Morris

James Guppy

William Rugen

David Blumenkrantz

David Weekes

Jack Hubbell

Jonathan Allen

Paul Russell

Lucia Fische

'Jenny' By Simon Kossoff

Follow this link to preview or order a copy: http://www.magcloud.com/browse/Issue/103623

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

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.