Simon Kossoff
On the Ground
Simon Kossoff
From Brighton, England now living in Kansas City.
I arrived in America when the recession was beginning to bite. It was an election year and both discontent and a need for change was in the air. Gas prices were rising steeply, the housing market was in crisis, business’s were on the brink of closing and the future for many people was looking uncertain.
These images were made on several road trips I made during this time (and still making) and could be described as a collection of psychic co-ordinate points that I have plotted between the imagined America that I brought with me from England and the real America which I found on my arrival in 08.
They are the search for a kind of personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. Half truth and half fiction, these photographs are a ‘mental geography’ filled with personal symbolism and tangled with influences I often did not know were there until I started photographing them.
It is a journey which explores the destination.