Lost highways: an offbeat road trip through forgotten America – in pictures

Before his untimely death, British photographer Michael Ormerod travelled the US in a VW camper van, taking thought-provoking photographs of unnamed places

A new exhibition and book feature previously unseen photographs taken in the US by Michael Ormerod (1947-1991). Ormerod was a British photographer whose life was tragically cut short in August 1991 by a road accident on his last field trip to the US. Vanishing Point is hosted by Crane Kalman Brighton at The Soho Black Boutique, London until 9 October. The book American Photographs is published by RRB Photobooks. All photographs: Michael Ormerod

Inspired by photographers such as Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and Tony Ray-Jones, Ormerod turned his focus to the US

For the past decade Ormerod’s daughter, Ali, has worked alongside photographers Geoff Weston and Alan Thoburn to search through his archives of unprinted negatives to revisit the work and bring it to a new audience

Ali says: ‘Promoting his work has sparked some lovely conversations and stories from those who knew him. It turns out he was not just a great photographer, but also a really nice guy. I’ve gotten to know my dad through the photos he took and also the people he knew’

‘After taking my own road trip across the States this year, I look at my dad’s photos with a deep sense of curiosity. The anonymity of the places he captured really intrigues me, and I find myself hunting for subtle clues in each picture, which adds an extra layer of discovery to the experience’

‘While in Texas, I got talking to a detective in a bar. We were discussing my dad’s photographs and he was helping me to look for clues as to where they might have been taken. He was sure that this photo was taken when the Space Shuttle Columbia made an unplanned landing in April 1982’

From the late 1970s, Ormerod and his partner frequently travelled to and through the US in a VW camper van using William Least Heat-Moon’s autobiographical travel book Blue Highways as an inspiration and guide

They focused on small, forgotten roads connecting rural America, steering clear of cities and interstate highways

As no notes on Ormerod’s photographs survive, the images have no captions and remain untethered to a particular place and time. As the author Geoff Dyer suggests in the book’s text, they are ‘free-standing’. They depict roads to nowhere, unremarkable towns, vanishing points, in-between places – an indeterminate and state-less America

The book’s title is a nod to Walker Evans’s seminal book American Photographs and to the road trip as a staple of American photographic exploration and style (a tradition followed by Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Joel Sternfeld among others). Dyer in his text argues: ‘Ormerod was seeing not just America – the beautiful, the ugly – he was also on the look-out for the history of American photography’

Since 1991 Ormerod’s archives have been held at the Millennium picture library in London. In 1993, the book States of America was posthumously published, including both colour and black and white work

As Ormerod’s second photobook, American Photographs, is published, 31 years since States of America, it’s the perfect time to celebrate his legacy, ensuring that his contributions to photography continue to resonate and influence future generations

Geoff Weston: ‘These images describe a different time. No rose tinted spectacles have been used, just a wonderful eye and a sharp intelligence. I’m not sure how much Michael fully understood where he was going with his photography. Or what he had. As a photographer myself I know insight often comes later. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, especially given his untimely death. What does matter are the pictures in this book’

‘Within his pictures you see echoes of the photographs which came before: a broken version of Paul Strand’s white picket fence; Winogrand’s haphazard streets and stock photos of rodeos; a man with his arm sticking out of a bus, which recalls Robert Frank’s well-known New Orleans trolley photograph from 1955,’ says Weston

‘The visual quotations, allusions and echoes do not exist for their own sake.’ Weston says. ‘These American photographs have sufficient internal power to support themselves but their circuitry – simultaneously hidden and there for anyone to see – has a history’