States

by Douglas Coupland, Christopher Griffith (Photographer)

Ex-fashion photographer Christopher Griffith had nothing less than a radical reinterpretation of American iconography in mind when he assembled a crew to travel the sideways and byways of a forgotten America to shoot everyday, utilitarian things found dotting our contemporary landscape. Searching out abandoned gas stations, remote industrial plants, budget motels, strip mall car lots, utility fields, roadside ditches, and even materiel graveyards, Griffith and his team constructed huge backdrops around each painstakingly selected specimen, creating stark, decontextualized, and magnificent renderings of the myriad things we see and forget without noticing. An airplane engine cowl. An old pickup truck. A massive earth mover. A sterling fire engine. A weathered traffic sign. An oil rig. A satellite dish. A defunct burger barn. A motel sign, basketball hoop, dock crane, bridge pylon, rocket, cement mixer, dump truck, seesaw . . .

146 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan. His first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages and most countries on earth. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and in 2001 resumed his practice as a visual artist, with exhibitions in spaces in North America, Europe and Asia. 2006 marks the premiere of the feature film Everything's Gone Green, his first story written specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work. A TV series (13 one-hour episodes) based on his novel, jPod premieres on the CBC in January, 2008.

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