Always East by Andrew Phelps (October 28, 2009) 
(5 votes, average: 3.60 out of 5)
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Introduction
This week Jörg M Colberg is exploring cultural perspectives by presenting a week of photographers who were born in one country and emigrated to another at some point in their life. Today's presentation: Andrew Phelps. Colberg: Andrew's "Higley" struck me as a quintessential Western expat project. When you're an expat, after a while you don't have a home any longer; you're almost stuck between two worlds, one that you don't fully know (and that you will never fully know) and another one that you knew well, but that has changed enough for you to be a stranger in it.
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Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
Distance to a place, both geographically and especially time-wise, always creates a filter, usually one tinted with a bit of a nostalgic haze. I left the East Valley, as this part of Phoenix is collectively called, sixteen years ago with no intention of ever turning back.
The Higley that has played such a pivotal role in my work over the last three years is a place I would never have dreamed of photographing twenty years ago.
My return to Higley was marked by the simple fact that my sisters both bought track homes on converted Higley farmland, land my grandparents came to settle, farm and call home in the fifties.
In Higley I found a sort of metaphor for the phenomenon that seems to be happening everywhere. Globalization is the catch-phrase you use, but that always seemed too big for me to take on in a photographic project. I decided that Higley would become my little microcosm.
I could conceal my interests in issues of ”progress” and the ”homogenization” of the American West in a little collection of family photographs.
Obviously not everyone photographed is part of my family, but it is closeness to my family, and yes even a nostalgic tint, that made me want to do a work about the place I am from.
Andrew Phelps (1967) lives and works in Salzburg, Austria.
Click weblink andrew-phelps.com or browse our archives
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Thanks for this view into an expat’s small-town origins in the American West. Just as we expats can bring to literature a particular inside-view-from-the-outside (and in this case bring to photography an outside-view-from-the-inside) our artwork is affected by our place(s) in the world, and the unique perspective that lends us.
This resonates with me having come from small town America now living abroad. There’s a part of me very visually attached to my origins, in fact maybe more so now because of distance, as Andrew Phelps suggests. Reminds me of Mark Klett’s desert photos, and even Richard Misrach’s eerie photos of Utah and Nevada.