Decisions, decisions. The stage sets for Oli Kellett’s book, Cross Road Blues, are the pedestrian crossings on American city streets. His pictures feature people held at “Don’t Walk” signs for a few seconds, as here, wondering exactly which way to turn.
The idea for the work came to Kellett, who is British and based in Hastings, on a visit to the US before the 2016 elections. He was staying on Hope Street in Los Angeles, and there seemed an uneasy resonance in that name at the end of the Obama years. One late afternoon, Kellett saw, from high up, a woman standing at the roadside waiting for a green light to cross a large intersection. The grid pattern of the street, the softening afternoon sun which cast the woman in a natural spotlight all seemed to dramatise something of that uncertain political mood. Over the next couple of years, Kellett returned to the US several times, to different cities, always looking for new versions of that scene.
This picture was taken in San Francisco in 2017, and like all of the series it gestures to an existential moment in the flow of the everyday. On average, Kellett has suggested in talking about the book, “we will spend about five years ‘waiting’ during our lifetime”. Enforced pauses on city streets return people to their thoughts. There is a careful, painterly quality to the pictures, which are printed at scale, as if these suspended seconds have a momentous import beyond the comprehension of people portrayed. Collectively they convey a powerful sense of anxiety and possibility. “At this time of uncertainty in America’s history,” Kellett has said, “I’m looking for a moment where individuals are dwarfed by what surrounds them, appearing lost but searching for something. They then go on their way, whichever direction that may be.”
Cross Road Blues will be published by Nazraeli Press in January
Oli Kellett’s solo exhibition, Waiting for a Sign, is at HackelBury Fine Art until 2 March
