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RRB 2024
- hardback, 1st edition, 108p
- New
Michael Ormerod was a British photographer whose life was tragically cut short in August 1991 following a road accident on his last field trip to the US. For the past decade the photographer’s daughter, Ali Ormerod, has worked alongside photographers Geoff Weston and Alan Thoburn to search through his archives of unprinted negatives to revisit the work and bring it to a new audience.
Since the late 1970s Ormerod and his partner frequently travelled to and through the US in a VW camper van using William Least Heat-Moon’s autobiographical travel book Blue Highways as an inspiration and guide. They focused on small, forgotten roads connecting rural America, steering clear of cities and interstates. As no notes on Ormerod’s photographs survive, the images have no captions and remain untethered from a particular place and time, or as Geoff Dyer suggests in the book’s text, they are ‘free-standing’. They depict roads to nowhere, unremarkable towns, vanishing points, in-between places—an indeterminate and state-less America.
The book’s title is a nod to Walker Evans’s seminal book American Photographs and to the road trip as a staple of American photographic exploration and style—a tradition followed by Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Joel Sternfeld amongst others. Dyer in his text argues… ‘Ormerod was seeing not just America -- the beautiful, the ugly -- he was also seeing and on the look-out for the history of American photography.’
Within his pictures you see echoes of the photographs which came before—a broken version of Paul Strand’s white picket fence, Winogrand’s haphazard streets and stock photos of rodeos, a man with his arm sticking out of a bus recalls Robert Franks well-known New Orleans trolley photograph from 1955.
Edition of 300 numbered copies, each with a 6"x4" print of Falling Cowboy (see last slide)
