Colin Kopp

As long as I have been photographing, I’ve been drawn to an austere beauty and sensibility of "home"--specifically, the imagery of midwest blue-collar America. The scenes are typically of a paradoxical nature; pictures of contemporary life that seem trapped in a dreamlike memory. It is a decaying vision of the past and an uncertain view of the future. My ongoing series, Phantom Homeland, attempts to make sense of these ideas by exploring the process of constructing nostalgia: That complicated mix of an emotion that exists in the spaces between joy, regret, memory and fantasy.