These are some images by Richard Heeps. He recently had a show in Wolverhampton titled, Americana. I was really struck by his work because it is very similar to the type of work that I was doing when I was in California. In fact, I have personally photographed in many of the places that he has photographed and we have some remarkably similar images between us. I love his attention to detail; his ability to find something worth looking at in the rather mundane environment; his really strong use of color and the box-like structure of some of his images. This is what the Light House Gallery in Wolverhampton said of his work:

"The Cambridge photographer returns to Light House with a brand new collection of vivid images of America, specially selected from three bodies of work depicting traces of the American dream. Taken in California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona over three years, Heeps observes the various intriguing signs of life. From trailer parks of Arizona to seedy hotels in Las Vegas, a sense of transience is explored and the all-American quest for progress is challenged in favour of preservation. Moving away from the clichéd ghost town image of these places, Heeps celebrates and triumphs their rusting qualities in an attempt to preserve them before they are lost forever.

The colour-saturated photographs featured in this exhibition are from Salton Sea, After the Gold Rush and Dream in Colour. The Salton Sea is a man-made lake in California, created when the flooding Colorado river’s flow was redirected into the formally dry Salton Sink. Heeps was drawn to the strange beauty of the semi-preserved 1950s buildings from its tourist heyday. After the Gold Rush depicts the highs and lows of some of California and Nevada’s gold and silver ex-mining towns and Dream in Colour concentrates on details of lives of people who remain determined to preserve and celebrate American culture at its most eclectic."

I want to make work that has some of the same drama and priority that Heeps work does, but I want to find that Americana in England. Dingy motel rooms and knocked-up diners; plots of land long since abandoned; left-overs of decades past; our tolkens and momentos keeping memories from slipping; color; dust; lights; weekend road-trips; bottled beer and bucking broncos; rodeo; america.










http://www.richardheeps.co.uk/