Only in America
François Le Diascorn
American society is always on the move, always bouncing up and bouncing back, always discovering new frontiers and new challenges. I see it as a society that attaches value to things as they break up, to things exceptional, and ultimately is able to accept a certain form of imbalance as a standard. Seen from Europe, this is American excess, an element of folly both inherent in the modern world and a challenge to that same modern world. American society, even in its most conservative manifestations, embraces different elements - original and fantastic, weird and wonderful.
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Whenever my great friend from the States, Josh Ewing, discovered yet another example of eccentricity in his homeland, he rarely expressed amazement, but would simply say in a bemused or sometimes dismayed tone, “Only in America!” Yes, only in America could you see something like that, and that meant the best of the best or the worst of the worst. This land of pioneers, of discoverers, is a country that likes to try something new, to explore, and to take things to extremes, in a frenzied and sometimes ingenuous quest for happiness, hoping for the “American Dream,” and that can be anything from sports shoes to Rock ’n’ Roll, from air conditioning to the atomic bomb, from information highways via the Internet and Facebook to plain old highways; in other words, progress or even the opposite as anything and everything is possible in the United States of America, including, for example, the Amish community, dressed in black and traveling in horse-drawn buggies, refusing any change since the mid-19th century.
I have traveled the US from North to South, from East to West, taking photographs of festivals and fairs, taking photographs of people. There are the customs and traditions, and the Americans themselves, and there is the beauty of the country. The exhibition is of pictures taken in the US rather than pictures of the US. They are pictures of my America as I feel it, an unusual America which, at one and the same time, can be quite ordinary, totally wacky and ever so sensible. Only in America!!
François Le Diascorn - In memory of my friend, Joshua Ewing
