Many European photographers went to the United States with readings, not always accurate but mostly nostalgic, of Robert Frank’s Americans in mind. There are countless subjective and even sentimental road movies, notebooks fascinated by wide open spaces, small towns, motels lost at the ends of the world, and wooden houses from another century.
Francesco Jodice’s approach is the opposite of this. He does not consider photography as a vector for memories of an intimate experience, but as a tool for analysis. The latter follows a meticulously established path based on historical data and makes it possible to grasp the evolution and decline of the greatest world power over a period of 160 years

This is the time span between the beginning of the gold rush in 1848 and the spectacular collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank in 2008, which affected the entire US banking system, and beyond.
Francesco Jodice photographs and highlights one of the forgotten elements that made the United States powerful: an iconography, or more precisely a combination of iconographies that not only associate and combine the natural landscape and Hollywood with the conquest of space, among others, but also found mythologies and power. But today the American landscape is going bankrupt and is littered with ruins, while we are still in the land of big bucks.

Christian Caujolle, Curator