This project juxtaposes photographs from the USA today with images from so-called Western towns in Germany.

Western towns are theme parks or fantasy places that function analogously to an urban community: equipped with mayors, saloons, prisons and churches where you can get married, as well as cemeteries where you can be buried. Among other things, historical battles are reenacted; heroism and cannonballs are part of the recreational fun at the weekend.

What happens when this past, mystified image of the USA, which is acted out in German western towns, meets images of the state of today’s parallel USA? Where do we find differences and friction, and where perhaps surprising parallels?

The photographer Sandra Ratkovic pursued this complex question between 2019 and 2022 in journeys to three different regions of the USA (New York, Miami, Cape Canaveral) and to three German Western towns in Berlin, Brandenburg and Rhineland-Palatinate.

 

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