Michael Ormerod

Giant Women Signs - Color Print on Hahnemuhle Paper

c. 1989

Michael Ormerod was born in Cheshire in 1947. He lived in Newcastle but spent many years traveling to America. Fascinated by the American image, and following in the footsteps of Robert Frank, Ormerod took to the American West to find 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. Inverting the famous Hollywood sign, Ormerod photographs a Texaco sign from the back, dominating the empty, Western landscape. His photographs are those of the outsider, constantly traveling through a no-man’s-land. Ormerod’s book, States of America, was published shortly after he died to mark an exhibition held at the Zelda & Cheatle Gallery, London. Since then, only one major exhibition of his work has taken place in Sheffield in 2003. A reappraisal of his powerful and uncompromising chronicle of America is long overdue.