WEST :: Anka Gregorczyk
-
Dates2014 - Ongoing
-
Author
- Topics Contemporary Issues, Documentary, Landscape, Nature & Environment
- Location United States
WEST is a documentary project - a slightly melancholic and subjective narrative but also harsh in observation, on the landscape changed by man and the space colonized by the idea of freedom and so called “American dream".
WEST
Anka Gregorczyk
Documentary photographic project WEST is a slightly melancholic and subjective narrative but also harsh in observation, focusing on the landscape changed by man and the space colonized by the idea of freedom and so called “American dream”.
Traveling several times through the United States of America in the footsteps of images produced by pop culture and pictures taken by artists I value, I try to understand and rediscover places known from these iconic images.
The route from east to west gave me a chance to confront my own ideas and observations with popular visual clichés of “Americanness”.
The WEST project is about reworking and reinterpreting these clichés, as well as observing a space dominated by an excess of human needs, which are often contradictory.
"After traveling over 11,000 km through the States in 2014, when I was there for the first time, I came to the conclusion that I was looking at all this space composed by a multigenerational "American dream." It was hard for me to turn off the lens of pop culture projection known from films and photographs, on which I had raised my visual perception. A few years later, after gaining more awareness and dispassionate mindfulness while exploring the western part of the USA and a few weeks in Florida, I was able to look at this world without unnecessary emotions, raw and without sugarcoating. In my project, I present not only landscapes but also certain elements created by the needs of the manufactured world, which hides behind the facade and impression of freedom. But freedom in “America” has its price”.
