The big picture: the hollowing out of the American dream

In 1986, the British photographer Michael Ormerod, then 39, travelled to South Dakota to cover an annual motorbike rally. He became more interested, however, in another of the state’s tourist attractions: Wall Drug, a roadside complex of cowboy-themed stores and restaurants in a one-horse settlement near to the Badlands national park. The development had grown out of a local drugstore that offered visitors to Mount Rushmore free iced water. By the time Ormerod visited, it was attracting a million people a year, and was advertised all along the 650-mile stretch of Interstate 90 that ran from Minnesota to Billings, Montana. Ormerod took this picture of one of those visitors to Wall Drug at dusk; he shot a few frames before he caught her with bubble gum inflated.
Ormerod’s picture became the cover of his 1993 book, States of America. The images inside captured the hollowing out of the American dream in those years; the gap between the optimistic glamour of the Hollywood films and magazines that Ormerod had grown up with in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the bleaker reality of life in the midwest in the later Reagan years. Writing about that book, Jan Morris suggested of Ormerod’s “surpassingly brilliant pictures” that “even the Greyhound bus, [once] seen as an engine of enterprise and enjoyment, looks dispirited here, as it labours all alone from one nowhere to another. Even the lovers beside the Golden Gate seem lovers of despair…”
That book was published posthumously. Michael Ormerod was tragically killed in a road accident in Arizona in 1991. In recent years there has been growing interest in his work, which feels increasingly prophetic. An exhibition (with accompanying book), Vanishing Point, including many unseen images from his archive, opens later this month in London.