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Title: States of America by Michael Ormerod, Jan Morris, John Roberts ISBN: 0-948797-67-3 Publisher: Distributed Art Publishers Pub. Date: February, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Erotic photographs (almost) without people
Comment: To find this book of photographs by Ormerod - already several years old - at a bargain price was a happy event. The book is roughly evenly divided between colour and black and white work. The hair-sharp colour prints, like most colour photos, you feel you've seen before (Ormerod is somewhere between Eggleston and Misrach), but a handful of the black and whites stand out for their quiet interest in a world that is clearly foreign to the English-born photographer. Here is the photographer I would like to be - direct but unobtrusive. However, both critical essays included with the works in the book feel compelled to explain its relative lack of human figures (the cover image is uncharacteristic of most in this collection), as though this is an embarrassing oversight of the photographer: a weakness about which one must be exceedingly respectful and polite. One of the two writers actually atones for the missing persons by talking about 'the implied presence' of human beings in the pictures. Why can't people bear to contemplate photos in which some fragment of their own compulsive sociality is not reflected? There is a superb floating quality in these Ormerods that is completely deferential to the need of the viewer to travel into the picture and experience parts unknown without interference. Despite the tendency of all photographers to minimise distances and to destroy exoticism because they are always in reality debt and must go, like Muhammad, to the mountain, Ormerod's pictures tell me something exquisite about the largeness of the world, like graffiti on a public statue whose authors are utterly removed from oneself. Whole country towns seen from a hilly rise: you will never know them, never see them except through him. An intense, dreamy abstract romanticism operates here that neither critic seems to see at all; no, he is just a social commentator like the rest, that dull worthy animal. Whereas Ormerod tells his viewers clearly that people as such, people as characters, are of no interest to him at all, the critics respond in an absurdly tenacious way that Ormerod must be making oblique 'allusions' to political contingency, poverty, social unrest, a nation's failed dreams, and so on - idiotically personalising his lonely, lovely car wrecks with a broken radiator-grimace. You may of course agree with the critics that this collection is depressingly devoid of signs of human life. What is the basic difference between the critics and me? Why do we see Ormerod's collection so differently? Desire and isolation, exception, endless roaming are all the one thing to me. The 'implied presence' is always erotic to me. To others, eroticism inheres in people, in overflowing gatherings and exchanged glances; to me it inheres in people's deliciously frustrating absence, their reticence and refusals. If you have always viewed photographs as opportunities to travel while imagining the forms of human life that go on elsewhere, this collection will hold great appeal. Photographic representations of absence will make the average critic think there is something polemical in the artist's intentions (rusting ploughshares in superannuated fields lead to pieties of the 'throwaway society' sort). Lonely places make them think of the great, dry political themes - hardly a turn-on. They judge accordingly. I urge you to see for yourself whether these rather restricted criteria do Michael Ormerod justice.