FotoFreo PO Box 681, Fremantle Western 6959 Australie
Perth Centre for Photography 91 Brisbane Street . NORTHBRIDGE WA 6003 Australie
Beginning with the United States government's failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, the American people suffered through a series of devastating corruptions of their traditional structures of support. Stranded is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche as this collapse of certainty left the country stuck in an unfamiliar space between distress and relief. In this series the car serves as both figurate symbol of American destiny and a literal representation of the personal breakdowns on the road to that promise. The images live in the road photography tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, but where they sought to capture the American experience through "the journey," Amy Stein’s photographs seek to tell the story of this time through the journey interrupted. For this series Stein drove across America for weeks at a time photographing stranded motorists. Finding subjects was a matter of chance and every encounter tense because of the unusual circumstances of the interaction and the inherent danger of the roadside environment.