Odyssey

The Odyssey images are a small selection from the thousands of photographs I have taken during my travels across North America over the past 30 years. My interest in photographing American landscapes, its people and urban spaces, began in 1981 during my first trip to the USA:
As I approached the spectacle that is the Manhattan skyline for the first time, I was unaware that it was what lay at the feet of those great monoliths that would captivate me: I became intrigued by this endlessly photographed America with its transient, dislocated, throwaway culture, and its many contradictions; the excesses of wealth juxtaposed with abject poverty and deprivation.
At ground level I found the sidewalks strewn with garbage, graffiti on every available surface, razor wire and burnt-out buildings. Streets populated with the homeless and the mentally ill; every doorway somebody’s home: The cracks in the American dream ran deep.
As I travelled West I found a terrain scattered with the detritus of domestic and industrial disorder, a legacy to the ebb and flow of human intervention in the landscape.
I photographed the world I found, often in minute detail, and from all angles, endeavouring to capture both the discarded old America and the excesses of an emerging new America. At times it became a precarious balancing act between disturbing content and seductive beauty. I was accumulating the evidence of a decaying and vanishing America, documenting an ever-changing country and landscape.

Derek Mossop


‘ ….a society whose consciousness is built, ad hoc, out of scraps and junk. America, that surreal country, is full of found objects. Our junk has become art, our junk has become history.’

Susan Sontag