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17th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest The American Experience
Summer evening at the New Jersey State Fair

From 'Pastoral'. Weekly summer travels between New York City and the Poconos revealed various fascinating landscapes as I tried to avoid traffic and explored alternate routes via back roads of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I’m consciously collecting images. Each image tends to tell a different story, yet they are all connected by being fragments of a larger picture that I am trying to form. A picture of rural North America that I’m discovering at lower speeds and off the beaten paths. I’m acquiring a memory I never had. I arrived in New York City at the age of 24 and spent the next twenty some years in it, developing a nostalgia not for the country I left, but for the America I have never experienced. And now, armed with a Hasselblad 500CM that requires a tripod, I am slowing down to match the images that somehow were stuck in my head all this time. Probably all the movies I have seen, possibly some books and of course photographs of others, all that visual information requiring a proof, a validation, not to match it exactly, but rather to form a new trace of a memory of a place that I have never experienced before...

Photo Detail
Date Taken: 08.2018
Date Uploaded: 10.2019
Photo Location: Augusta, New Jersey, United States of America
Camera: Perfection V800/V850
Copyright: © Anton Kisselgoff