Focusing on the wide subject of America but not yet sure what I wanted to do or how i wanted to realise the project, I decided to build perhaps upon some of the pictures that I took out in the states. It seemed like an obvious starting point as I had already done some work I was pretty pleased with. Therefore (as they were mostly landscape photographs) I decided to to look into photographers who had created series of works studying and exploring America. There is something particularly potent about the photographs which Kelly takes. They are usually void of human life and rely mostly on a very formal and calculated structure of composition and frame. His skills of capturing natural lighting gives the images this fairly voyeuristic attitude of documenting a space in its raw entirety. Not as the lens sees it but as one would view the scene if stumbling out from behind a rock. There's not a sense of manipulation or trickery but raw documentation and total atmospheric presence. The overwhelming degree of spacial awareness created in the pictures directly translates to the feeling of spaciousness that you get from the continent as a whole. Its vastness in scape from the desert to the suburban nightmare, designs this tentative uneasiness that you could be the only person in the world. However chocking this might appear at first glance there is a reassurance which I found comes as the second wave of emotion from the series, the nature of total peace and contentment. This is the city that never sleeps, the land of opportunity and the nation founded upon freedom of speech and a constitution of ideals. However many flaws and contradictions there may be, no matter how much ignorance or evil motives lie there this series manages to capture and propel the great positive spirit that is America.
