Beginning with the government’s failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, the American people suffered through a series of devastating corruptions of their traditional structures of support. Stranded is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche, as this collapse of certainty left the country stuck in an unfamiliar space between distress and relief. In this series, I drove across America for weeks at a time photographing stranded motorists. Finding subjects is a matter of chance, and every encounter is tense because of the unusual circumstances of our interaction and the inherent danger of the roadside environment. Most of the photographs from this series can be found on a Google Map that documents my travels across the U.S.

Amy Stein (b. 1970) is a photographer and teacher based in New York City. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is featured in many private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Nevada Museum of Art, SMoCA, and the West Collection. In 2007, she was named one of the top fifteen emerging photographers in the world by American Photo magazine and she won the Critical Mass Book Award. Amy’s first book, Domesticated, was released in fall 2008. It won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival.