American Photographs

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. 

"Occasionally one comes upon a series of pictures that undoubtably are both accurate and authentic. 

This is a set that makes you feel if you followed in the steps of the photographer one would also get a strong feeling of space, shadows and maybe hats. Michael Ormerod has a voice of his own – very rare in photography.”
David Hurn

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. 

‘The visual quotations, allusion and echoes do not exist for their own sake. These American photographs have sufficient internal power to support themselves but their circuitry—simultaneously hidden and there for anyone to see -- has a history.’ 
Geoff Dyer

Since 1991 Ormerod’s archives have been held at the Millennium Picture Library in London. In 1993, the book States of America was posthumously published, including both colour and black and white work to coincide with an exhibition at Zelda Cheatle Gallery. A second exhibition followed in 2003 at Sheffield Graves Art Gallery and in 2010, the Crane Kalman Gallery Brighton exhibited the work once more. Following a family event in 2012, Ali Ormerod and her late father’s friend, Geoff Weston, embarked on a shared intention: to go back to the archive and revisit her father’s photographic legacy. After discovering a trove of previously unseen negatives they worked with Alan Thoburn over the course of a decade to edit and curate a new collection of this work. 

The book American Photographs consists of fifty previously unpublished images. The exhibition Vanishing Point, will show these photographs alongside some of Ormerod’s best-known colour work. 

‘These images describe a different time. No rose tinted spectacles have been used, just a wonderful eye and a sharp intelligence. I’m not sure how much Michael fully understood where he was ultimately going with his photography. Or what he had. As a photographer myself I know insight often comes later. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, especially given his untimely death. What does matter are the pictures in this book. Geoff Weston