American photographs

Abstract

"Previously unseen black & white photographs taken in the United States by Michael Ormerod (1947-1991) will form this new book. 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." -- Publisher's website.