13 photographs 12 de 40 x 50 cm; 1 de 60 x 50 cm. Courtesy: la artista y Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco

Beginning with the government’s failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, the American people suffered through a series of devastating corruptions of their traditional structures of support. Stranded is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche as this collapse of certainty left the country stuck in the tense space between distress and relief. The images in this series live in the road photography tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, but where they sought to capture the American experience through “the journey”, my photographs seek to tell the story of this time through the journey interrupted.

For this series I drive across America for weeks at a time photographing stranded motorists. Finding subjects is a matter of chance and every encounter is tense because of the unusual circumstances of our interaction and the inherent danger of the roadside environment.

– AMY STEIN