Simon Kossoff: The States Project: Kansas

Simon Kossoff: The States Project: Kansas by Daniel W. CoburnOctober 25, 2016

©Simon Kossoff, Sheirdan, WY

Simon Kossoff is my neighbor. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas: a quaint but progressive college town situated at the base of Mount Oread, home to the University of Kansas. Kossoff lives in the Sunflower state but finds his inspiration on the road. I discovered his work two years ago and was immediately stricken by its severity. His photographs often conjure an uncomfortable laugh, a sense of disgust, feelings of wonderment, an admiration of the absurd, and a curious sense of empathy. His images are clever. They simultaneously deliver humor and anxiety, providing an uncanny glimpse of a world where truth is ultimately stranger than fiction.

Simon Kossoff is a British photographer now living in Lawrence, Kansas. He has studied with the Royal Photographic Society and has an honors degree in Editorial Photography from the University of Brighton. He is also a member of the photographic collectives, Burn My Eye and Get the Picture.

When Kossoff moved to Kansas City in 2008, he immediately embarked on a series of photographic road trips in an attempt to plot what he has described, as a collection of psychic coordinate points, between the American that he brought with him from England and the America which he was discovering on his explorations. His photographs are the search for a kind of personal orientation, between the dream or idea of a place and his actual experience of it in reality. Tangled with personal symbolism, Kossoff’s photographs are a psychogeography, a journey which explores the destination.

Dog Story

Dog Story is the working title for a new series of photographs made over a one year period and seen here for the first time.

“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us, the labyrinth is fully known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world”. Joseph Campbell