At age 18, Mike Brodie took his Polaroid camera and began exploring the US by train. On his three year voyage he saw a part of America that can hardly be further away from what normally inflates our collective memory of US pop culture or tourist hearsay. It’s the world of vagabonds, hobos and freighthoppers. Brodie calls it “travel culture” and he came home with hundreds of amazing Polaroid pictures of an alternative American way of life between track beds and freight depots. He became known as the Polaroid Kidd, and his photographs can be seen at exhibitions all over the world.
Keith Davis Young is a young designer and photographer from Austin, TX, and I just finished clicking through his flickr set bearing the rather inconspicous title 35mm. I had starry eyes. He captured a fantastic set of impressions and fragments of daily life. RVs, parking lots, diners and restaurants, people, furniture, all kinds of moods. Go take a look!
Check out D.I.Y. America, a documentary webseries on US subcultures from the creators of the film Beautiful Losers covering two decades of skateboarding, graffiti, punk and the hip hop movement. Interviewees include Ian MacKaye, Shepard Fairey, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Glen Friedman oder Tony Hawk.
Claire Martin‘s portfolio offers a set of amazing pictures of people living in Slab City (Link to Wikipedia), a community of campers and snow birds in the Colorado Desert, southeastern California.
Right there, on the fringes of Slab City, you will also find Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain that we visited during our research trip last fall. Check out these pictures wie took.
We’ve just added new pictures from rainy Michigan and Ohio to the AMERICAN BACKROOM Flickr photostream. All pictures were shot during our research trip last fall. Go check ‘em out. And don’t forget to leave a comment
The Berlin Film Festival “Berlinale” draws to a close and the hustle and bustle of the European Film Market is already gone… and we found time again to upload a bit of new content from our research trip last fall: Head on over to the American Backroom Flickr-Stream to catch a couple new pictures from South Dakota, Wisconsin and Michigan. There are more to come soon – we are far from finished exploiting all the photos we took during our trip.
Visual History at its best. A must-read: Los Angeles, Portrait of a City (Amazon Affiliate Link). Kevin Starr, Jim Heimann and David Ulin take more than 600 photographs on 570 pages to tell the history of greater Los Angeles. As can be expected from Taschen they did a marvelous job picking the pictures and putting them together. The whole book manages to convey (at least some of) the spirit of living in L.A. throughout the “ages” and to show even lesser-known aspects of the city as well as a couple of its rough edges. Flipping through it you’ll soon realize that there’s a lot more to the city of angels than what can be seen at the movies.
Over at Skyscrapercity.com they have collected many many great pictures from the Los Angeles before time, at least before my time… from the fifties, fourties, thirties, twenties, heck, some of them are even older, yet. Great stuff indeed!
We’re lost. Somewhere between Santa Fe and… well, practically nothing (apart from the border of Utah maybe). We took one wrong turn and rolled on and on for about an hour and a half before we even knew we were no longer on our route. There’s shrubbery everywhere. As far as the eye can see. At least as far as the snow-covered mountains we can make out on the horizon. Shrubbery anyway. There’s no better way to express it. For half an eternity we feel we’re driving along shrubbery. There’s not much forest in the Carson National Forest, as far as we can tell.
We end up in El Rito. Long before we see the first buildings we can see the single white letter “E” painted on a mountain side in the distance. At first glance El Rito has not much to offer than a long winding main street with traditional adobe buildings lined up to the right and left. We make a stop at El Llano Bar. There are two vintage gas pumps in front of it that are – let’s say – in an advanced state of decay. The sign above the door is a little too big and the rivets that keep it in place are amazingly irregularly placed on the wall. It is crooked. At first glance one might take the rivets for bullet holes. They are not. Just rivets.
(Amazon Affiliate Link). Kevin Starr, Jim Heimann and David Ulin take more than 600 photographs on 570 pages to tell the history of greater Los Angeles. As can be expected from Taschen they did a marvelous job picking the pictures and putting them together. The whole book manages to convey (at least some of) the spirit of living in L.A. throughout the “ages” and to show even lesser-known aspects of the city as well as a couple of its rough edges. Flipping through it you’ll soon realize that there’s a lot more to the city of angels than what can be seen at the movies.
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