Bowery Street, Coney Island by Michael Ormerod Estate/Millennium Images/Crane Kalman Brighton
Child with Mask by Michael Ormerod Estate/Millennium Images/Crane Kalman Brighton
Leesa Beauty Supplies Michael Ormerod Estate/Millennium Images/Crane Kalman Brighton
Open Top Drive by Michael Ormerod Estate/Millennium Images/Crane Kalman Brighton
Under Brooklyn Bridge by Michael Ormerod Estate/Millennium Images/Crane Kalman Brighton
Michael Ormerod (1947-1991) was a British photographer with a distinctive and powerful voice, whose career was tragically cut short on August 7th 1991 in a road accident on his last field trip to the USA. He is known for striking and evocative images capturing American landscapes and urban scenes. His work often depicted the raw, gritty reality of life in America, showcasing both its beauty and its challenges.
Born in Hyde in Cheshire in 1947, Ormerod studied economics at Hull University, before going on to study photography at Trent Polytechnic. He ran a freelance photography business in Staffordshire for many years and taught photography at Newcastle College. He spent many of his Summers from the mid-70s to 1991 travelling in a camper van across 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.
The photographs are understated, but show an unseen America, where the industrial heartland is decaying, highways stand empty and towns are deserted. The subjects of Ormerod’s work are the disenfranchised. A teenager cycles through her neighbourhood wearing a Halloween-style hockey mask, a Native American man stands in a graveyard, their expressions are unreadable.
The work subverts traditional American icons. A white picket fence is staved in, a huge billboard for Miss Teen Dakota USA stands next to an empty highway. Inverting the famous Hollywood sign, Ormerod photographs a Texaco sign from the back, dominating the empty, Western landscape. The works also show humour – a giant fake dinosaur looms in the distance of a desert landscape, a stuffed moose head is displayed in the window of a diner. The subjects of the work are unconventional, surreal and sometimes mundane, but create an atmosphere of an eerie backwater America.
His photographs are those of the outsider, constantly travelling through a no-man’s-land. A sense of pessimism pervades, showing how the commercial boom of the 1950s has collapsed, leaving deserted streets, rubbish dumps and alienation. It is a land where the American Dream has turned sour.
After his untimely death in 1991, and with the support of Ormerod’s parents, friends and colleagues, a book, States of America, was published as a lasting testament to his distinctive and compelling vision. An accompanying exhibition was held at the Zelda Cheatle Gallery in London in 1993.
Ormerod’s photography gained recognition for its powerful storytelling and unique perspective on the American experience. His legacy continues to influence contemporary photographers, and his work remains highly regarded in the photography community. Despite this, over the last 33 years, only two major exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Sheffield Graves Art Gallery in 2003, and at the Crane Kalman Brighton Gallery as part of the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2010.
Since his death, Ormerod’s body of work has been held at the Millennium Picture Library in London. At a family event in 2012, celebrating his life and photographic work, his daughter Ali had a conversation with one of Ormerod’s closest friends and fellow photographer Geoff Weston. This conversation led to a shared intention: to go back to the archive and revisit his photographic legacy. There they discovered a trove of previously unseen negatives from Ormerod’s trips to America. Working closely with the help of Alan Thoburn, over the course of a decade, these previously unseen images have been curated into a new collection deserving of public display. At the end of 2024, a new book, American Landscapes, was published by RRB Photobooks featuring over 50 of these never-before-seen works and an exhibition was held in London to coincide with this release.
The work has received much public and critical acclaim and created a surge of renewed interest in this wonderful, overlooked photographer’s work. A reappraisal of his powerful and uncompromising chronicle of America is long overdue.
