America
is Dead

The immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not a simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal “death trip,” of a society determined to commit suicide.

- James Howard Kunstler, 1993 The Geography of Nowhere, 1993

Much ink has been spilled over the endemic ugliness and indifference of the American landscape. But, is it all “amputation by expressway and slaughter by suburban sprawl” or is it, rather, the locus of some rough and quiet, overlooked beauty? In any case, it remains something to be learned from, in the spirit of Venturi and Scott Brown. America is Dead is continued re-examination of America’s quintessential spatial typologies: the motel, the diner, the shopping mall, and the motorized roadside itself.

These non-places filled with mass-market things are not merely the built detritus of capitalism, constantly swept up in cycles of vogue and obsolescence, they’re also the definitive American photographic tropes, with endless legions of image makers chasing vague notions of Shore, Ruscha, Adams, Baltz and others with Instagram feeds full of facile nostalgia. These are the evocative backdrops in period films, signifiers of hardship and failure, and are often symbols wielded by critics as prime evidence of our moral failure. For better and worse, they are foundational to the texture of American life, to be considered thoughtfully – and neither romanticized nor glossed over.

America is Dead is an ongoing project. Work from these series have appeared in several publications, and individual photographs have been shown in several group shows. Two are included the permanent collections at the Haifa Museum of Art in Israel and one at the Fondazione Sozzani in Italy