| DESCRIPTION: | Photographers Michael Christopher Brown, Carolyn Drake, Ross McDermott, and Andrew Owen look at what happens when we Americans come together, whether within the welcome routine of our daily communities—urban and suburban—or in the strange exuberance of American festivals that celebrate anything and everything.
Broadway
When Michael Christopher Brown began to photograph Broadway, the iconic avenue that runs the length of Manhattan and beyond, he expected the assignment to be easy, the street more visually exotic. But as a New Yorker, he found it difficult to interpret a street he’d seen so often, yet had deliberately avoided. Ultimately, he simply responded to what he found most revealing about a street he describes as a frenetic river of activity. Michael, now living in Beijing and New York, photographed this story for GEO France in 2008.
New Suburbia
As suburban sprawl spread north of Miami, the western territory of Palm Beach County—once rural farmland in the Everglades—became one of America's fastest-growing residential districts. As real estate values skyrocketed, Carolyn Drake focused on a new gated community called Olympia, exploring the lifestyle that made this region such a hot commodity. Carolyn, now based in Istanbul, began this project in 2005 while a photographer at the Palm Beach Post.
American Festivals
The American Festivals Project unearths the hidden, and at times bizarre, festivals and competitions of America's small towns. Over the course of 13 months in 2008 and 2009, Charlottesville photographers Ross McDermott and Andrew Owen crisscrossed the country to attend events like the Machine Gun Shootout in Kentucky, the International Water Tasting Championships in West Virginia, the Rainbow Gathering in New Mexico, and the Middle of Nowhere Festival in Nebraska. They traveled more than 40,000 miles, often riding in a diesel truck powered by waste vegetable oil, and sleeping in a 1960s camper. The American Festivals Project was funded partially through a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant. |
