First published: Spring 2025
Writer and photographer Greg Cook travels the US seeking out and chronicling extraordinary environments made by ordinary people; here, he shares just a few
“For about a decade, I’ve made pilgrimages to photograph visionary art sites, folk art environments, and ‘yard shows’ from Maine to Georgia to Louisiana to Minnesota.
“I think what I'm chasing after is people so moved to somehow improve their world that they obsessively work to change the bit of it that they can control – their house, their yard, a garden, a vacant lot, the grassy corner at a highway off-ramp.
“There’s a term in science fiction – ‘world building’ – which describes how authors and other creators fully imagine fantasy worlds.
2024, Tim Willis built monster trucks for the mud races that he competed in across the US before he began creating giant robots. He says that his aim is to showcase all his robots on the Cleveland street where he grew up; courtesy: Greg Cook
2019, When Eddie “St EOM” Owens Martin’s mother died in 1956, he transformed the family’s seven-acre farm in Buena Vista, Georgia, into Pasaquan, an environment of temples, pagodas and shrines embellished with the monumental heads, nude figures, snakes and mandalas of Pasaquoyanism, a new religion he had created emphasising a connection to the natural world; courtesy: Greg Cook
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #122.
