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Recall the electric 2008 presidential election — it seems so long ago — when the prevailing message that carried Barack Obama into the White House was of hope and change. The celebratory inauguration was a blink of optimism in the face of a terrifying and complex global financial meltdown. That crisis, plus two wars and a host of other problems, makes one wonder why some folks want the job so badly.
The London-based photographer Robert Leslie saw a live projection of the inauguration in Miami. The fervor of the audience and its diverse crowd was a sight to behold, he said. He had photographed the modern versions of some of the world’s ancient empires — China and India among them — and was struck by the thought that he hadn’t seriously addressed the world’s current superpower, the United States.
He had a sister in Los Angeles and some time to kill. American gas prices, to him, were a steal. He rented a car.
The ensuing road trip took him across the Sun Belt, west from Florida till he reached the Pacific Ocean. Taking off with an open mind, Mr. Leslie was eager to see how the narrative would unfurl before him. As he drove through the wasteland of foreclosures of Florida, however, or as he pushed along the impoverished Gulf of Mexico, razed by Hurricane Katrina, it became clear that the trip was a sort of tour of America’s woes.
“I didn’t go out to make this ironic look of America,” said Mr. Leslie, 50. “But it was pretty disheartening to find these things.”
Florida, Highway 98.
Mr. Leslie eventually completed two trips, the one that began on inauguration day and another last year — after the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be added to the list of calamities — that together provided the material for his project, “Stormbelt.” Its book form, available from Blurb, includes essays by the photographer Edward Burtynsky and the TED speaker Cameron Sinclair. (Mr. Leslie himself has been a TED.com collaborator and photographer since 2005.) It is also available on Blurb and on iTunes, as an enhanced multimedia e-book produced with editorial direction from Chris Boot of the Aperture Foundation. Mr. Leslie, originally a musician and sound engineer, incorporates audio from the people he encountered, and one of the videos features a stand-off with a cow. (A different preview, without the cow, is viewable on Vimeo.)
Mr. Leslie was partly spurred by nostalgia — though he was born English and currently living in England, he spent much of his childhood in Ottawa and had vacationed in the United States as a boy. For this project, however, his outsider’s perspective informed his vision. Like many non-Americans, Mr. Leslie was intensely fascinated by many aspects of the United States’ conduct — politically, economically, environmentally, internationally — during the first decade of the new millennium. How was it that this chest-puffing world power could now barely support the people of its vulnerable underbelly? Ironies frequently presented themselves to him, and Mr. Leslie, who has an eye for the wry, rarely missed them.
In Texas, for instance, he found a shop that sold mostly George W. Bush memorabilia. “They had a banner that said, ‘Evil prevails when good men do nothing,’ ” Mr. Leslie recalled. “It was this phrase that was proudly put up with all these symbols of Texas on the crossroads of Crawford. And when I went back last November or December, the banner was still there, but it was only being held up by one nail. It was blowing in the wind.”
In Arizona, a snowstorm ambushed an extravagant plan Mr. Leslie had to drive to the Grand Canyon. The detour to the interstate, which Mr. Leslie knew would be plowed, put him along a river that he learned the Navajo had signed over decades ago to developers. Mined coal was sailed upriver to be transformed into electricity to power Las Vegas and Los Angeles. “At the end of it, the water’s just dumped out, it’s disposed of,” Mr. Leslie said. “The total irony of this is that they only got electricity on their reservation in 2005.”
Drainage from the mine had turned the river red. It was a ripe moment for a photograph — there was fresh snow, and although it was mostly overcast, some sky poked through. Red, white and blue.
