Mario Wezel

Do You Sometimes Dream of America?

[ EPF 2017 – FINALIST ]

 

“The cinema and TV are America’s reality.” – Jean Baudrillard

Growing up as a european in the 90’s, America was like a big brother that had already moved out of the house. His heroic stories had surpassed his absence, his emotional presence was still physically sensible. Big brother America. No matter if it was my first NBA Jersey or the McDonalds burger, that I would only be allowed to have once a year returning from a family vacation, America was always there. My view on this country has been shaped and influenced by the pop cultural exports. Movies were just as defining as books or music. The net of media imperialism has been spun for decades and is by today finely woven and impenetrable.

 

 

For this project I have travelled 20.000 miles by plane, train, car and bus within the the last two years and have visited 25 States. I had set out to portray a country who’s fiction has long exceeded its reality. I was looking for the shiny facade but couldn’t stop noticing the cracks in it.

 

 

Long before a potential candidacy of now President Trump I walked the streets that once promised great opportunities and equality but encountered nothing but an indescribable vastness, an ubiquitous amount of capitalism and a deep feeling of loneliness. Still I kept going only to realize that those cracks had even become deep ditches and that they would change the American myth forever.

 

 

Short Bio

Mario Wezel (b.1988) is a documentary photographer based in Hannover, Germany. He studied photojournalism in Germany and Denmark and has since published and exhibited several personal projects worldwide. His work has been recognized by the Ian Parry Scholarship, Sony WPA and he was named the 2014 College Photographer of the Year and one of Magnum 30 under 30. He is a co-founder of MINT Collective.

His projects are tightly connected to questions arousing from his everyday life as an average European male. He examined the idea of home and family between 2012 and 2015, in his project “1in800.” During a three month internship at National Geographic Magazine in 2015 Wezel’s love-hate to the United States resurfaced. “Do you Sometimes Dream of America?” has been on show at the GAF as well as the GoetheExil, Hannover, as a single show at the Copenhagen Photo festival and in his hometown Nürtingen as well as in a joint exhibition at Museum Hilversum, the Netherlands.

 

Related Links

 

mariowezel.com

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The Emerging Photographer Fund is supported by generous donors to the Magnum Foundation

Magnum Foundation