The New Heartland: Looking for the American Dream

Photographs offer a fresh, razor-sharp view of contemporary American culture. In many ways, Ohio has become for America the quintessential heartland state, for what happens in Ohio happens over all of the United States. It’s where fastfood companies test-market new products and where chewing gum, Teflon, the first cash register, first vacuum cleaner, first airplane, first traffic signal, and first gaspowered automobile were invented. This landmark book of photography offers a fresh view of contemporary American culture in Ohio and the rest of America. AUTHOR: Andrew Borowiec was named Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art. He has also worked as a photojournalist, as the staff photographer for the International Center of Photography, and as Director of the University of Akron Press. He has received fellowships in photography from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Ohio Arts Council. In 2006, he was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize. His photographs of America’s changing social, industrial, and post-industrial landscapes have been exhibited around the world and are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Nelson Adkins Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among others. His previous books include Along the Ohio (2000), Industrial Perspective: Photographs of the Gulf Coast (2005), and Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills (2008). 67 colour photographs