06/10/2024
Exciting new photographer debuts her first solo photographic exhibition, ‘Portrait of America’, on September 26th to January 25th at the Observatory Portrait Gallery, London.
This incredible series of unique images comes from Edwards travelling nearly 10,000 miles aboard America’s Amtrak trains, using the train’s corridor window as her camera’s frame.
“Edwards taped a large bag to the opposite window to reduce the glare - though the train conductor was not so happy. “( )
“Due to the darkness in the carriage, the windows are lit up in contrast, and the lens captures the moving scenes wrapped in a beautiful frame”. ()
Katie captured 20,000 images of America’s vast and diverse landscapes, in 180 hours, fighting fatigue and the mental challenge of not missing a photo opportunity. To help, her father John acted as a spotter, radioing her from a front carriage, facing his own unique challenge in a wheelchair, navigating small carriages.
“Its constant frame helped me to distill the vastness of a nation into something more comprehensible. I thought of the train as a sort of mobile chronotape, providing a continuous thread through which diverse places and moments were interconnected.” ( )
“As the train cuts a line through space and time, Edwards captures a portrait of America.” ( ) “..astonishing landscapes, enduring industry, vast cities, terrible poverty and the still irresistible white picket fenced suburban dream.” ( )
Photo captions:
1) A line of school buses and picture-perfect mountains behind, lit by the 5am sun.
2) I snapped the orange flame of a steel factory and a tiny smiley face on a rusty train.
3) The train headed inland and began to climb high, bringing views of nodding donkeys, a pump used to extract oil from an inland well.
4) Captured at around 100 feet per second, the rungs of the ladder make me feel as if I could climb the mountain in just a few steps.
-
-
