American Photographs gathers the photographs that Michael Ormerod (Cheshire 1947 – USA 1991) made during his many journeys across the United States in the 1980s, until his death in a road accident on his last American field trip. Following in the footsteps of Robert Frank, Ormerod took to the American West and the rest of the country in search of a washed-out dream of capitalism. His images capture a strange juxtaposition of an American beauty tainted by a hidden sense of menace and corruption: the industrial heartland decays, highways stand empty and towns appear deserted; the subjects are often the disenfranchised, with unreadable expressions. The work subverts traditional American icons—a white picket fence is staved in, a billboard for Miss Teen Dakota stands beside an empty highway, a Texaco sign is photographed from the back, dominating the empty landscape. The images also carry deadpan humour—a giant fake dinosaur in a desert landscape, a stuffed moose head in the window of a diner. Surreal, unconventional and at times mundane, they collectively create an atmosphere of an eerie backwater America, photographed from the position of the outsider, constantly travelling through a no-man's-land.