Artist Statement

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 an unfamiliar space between distress and relief. In this series the car serves as both figurate symbol of American destiny and a literal representation of the personal breakdowns on the road to that promise. The images 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.

I have spent the past 5 plus years driving across American 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.

Artis Bio

Amy Stein (b. 1970) is a photographer and teacher based in New York City. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is featured in many private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the West Collection.

In 2006, Amy was a winner of the Saatchi Gallery/Guardian Prize for her Domesticated series. In 2007, she was named one of the top fifteen emerging photographers in the world by American Photo magazine and she won the Critical Mass Book Award. Amy's first book, Domesticated, was released in fall 2008. It won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival.

Amy was raised in Washington, DC, and Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a BS in Political Science from James Madison University and a MS in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 2006, Amy received her MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Stein teaches photography at Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Amy is represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, ClampArt in New York, and Pool Gallery in Berlin.

For further information please see www.amysteinphoto.com