A Drug Free Land

Thomas Kern lived and worked in America for eight years. During this time, on numerous trips and reportages, he tried to get to grips with a country that has already been documented many times. More than 70 years after the social documentary photography of Walker Evans and 50 years after Robert Frank's The Americans, he succeeds in conveying an authentic, disparate image of the American present with haunting, laconic black-and-white photographs. As a quiet observer, the subject of his work remains the unspectacular everyday life of the country and its people. A visual commentary on the state of the nation in images that are seemingly quick to consume and familiar, yet remain strangely unruly. You can tell everything and nothing about America. America captures everyone between a myth that will never die and a reality that is often overlooked. It is about a country that is always and everywhere clear, but never allows only one interpretation. That we all recognise and yet never fully know. We want to find this land' (Gerhard Waldherr).