Four American Places – Four Book Set

Description

Four American Places is a four monograph set, with each book featuring a different photographers large scale documentary project on a specific location in the United States. Originally Volume 6 of our Obscura Land publishing project, Four American Places includes Benjamin Hoste’s Good Earth, Noah Waldeck’s Blue Water, Anna Brody’s Edging, GA, and Amanda Driggers’s Belongs To, each a 42 page perfect bound monograph measuring 10.5×8.5″ and featuring 40 plates and an artist statement. The set also includes a 5.5×17.5″ accordion fold postcard featuring an image from each of the Four American Places artists.

Benjamin Hoste’s Good Earth

A project documenting Missouri’s Old Lead Belt – a rural area about an hour south of St. Louis where a century of lead mining took place. Missouri has the largest known lead deposits in the world and mining has operated uninterrupted in Southeast Missouri for over 300 years. The Old Lead Belt and its mines were shuttered in the early 1970s, and Good Earth examines and the communities that were established and defined by the lead industry, 40 years after its disappearance there.

Noah Waldeck’s Blue Water

A project documenting the Port Huron, Michigan area. Literally the end of the road, it’s the terminus of six major highways, and the site of an international border crossing between Michigan and Canada. Situated at the intersection of Lake Huron and the St. Clair River (the worlds third-largest freshwater lake and a major Great Lakes shipping lane), the Port Huron area seems full of potential, waiting unrealized. Blue Water is a portrait of a place both beautiful and sad, singularly unique, and yet an archetype of the American Rust Belt.

Anna Brody’s Edging, GA

A project simultaneously creating and documenting a place that doesn’t really exist, except for in the artist’s imagination. Time passes slowly there, at a speed that allows for close examinations of bugs and bones and openings, and it exists only at sunrise and sunset. Challenges are presented, obstacles overcome, hearts ache, things and people get old and die. Though Edging, GA is not a real place, it’s very close one – more mirage than fantasy.

Amanda Driggers’s Belongs To

A project documenting the people and places Lufkin and Spring, Texas where the artist spend her childhood summer vacations visiting family. After years away, a family reunion in Texas that brought those summers past to light. Focusing on the people and locations that make up a part of who she is, Belongs To is a visual representation of lost and found memories, the realization of belonging to something greater.