Patricia Erbelding

Patricia Erbelding is a french painter who travelled to the United States between 2001 and 2005, documenting the landscapes and atmospheres of the american southwest. Her photographs are plain and they seem to be taken in a hurry, almost spontaneously with no real premeditation - they seem to be a product of her drifting across the desert highways and smalltown roads of Arizona, Texas, California, Nevada and New Mexico. In one photograph, she even caught (accidentally) the antenna of her car as she photographed a passing motel. Much like Robbert Flick's work, which I talked about in an earlier post, her set called "Interstate" adheres to a simple aesthetic - bare subjects often captured with a minimalist or objective point of view. A lot can be said about the concepts at play, but the set remains interesting to me simply because it offers a glimpse of the United States I adore so much - the abandonment-prone desert towns and finite traces of human existence that time has managed to dissolve back into the natural landscape. It is the America where things are preserved and human vitality seems so indistinguishable. In her own words, during an interview with Tita Reut: The voyage is linked to dream, as my dream of America and its mythical roads, themselves frontiers, lines, crossing desert landscapes and ghost towns. The photography is a dreamcatcher. On her website, there is a directory of about fifty images which you can freely preview. Not all have been published, but they are available to view. Most are interesting snapshots of Americana and barren landscapes, and the rest are "of the moment" snapshots captured through a car window or by the side of a busy highway. For me, it was a good way to waste a rainy day with the nostalgia of traveling down sunny desert roads.