Life Force magazine

The magazine of the photo-essay

May/June 2023 issue

“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker

by Jeremy Hammond

In Search of Small-Town America – ‘Fifty States in Fifty Weeks’ by British writer and photographer, Jeremy Hammond – is a year-long exploration, documenting the many factors at work, transforming many of North America’s smaller communities. Although it alludes primarily to the lamentable demise apparent in much of 'Small- Town America', it is also a positive testament to those towns that are surviving the onslaught of mechanisation, technology and 'Big Business'. Published in seventeen volumes, the work is a collection of around 2,400 original photographs, and over 340,000 words. It is in no way intended as an authoritative work, or a ‘Guide-Book’, and although focussed primarily on small-town culture, it is very much a random, and personal view. It includes a variety of incidental observations, societal, media and political comment, and carefully considered insight. Often related with caustically casual humour, it’s an occasionally flippant, but always informed view, of an iconic part of the wide American landscape.