Girl Blowing Bubble Gum, Wall, South Dakota, 1986

Glowing tanned legs contrast intensely with a wet blueness; a rainfall has just occurred. Bubblegum blowing is often a sign of listlessness; with Ormerod's subjects, one never can tell the emotional state.

Ormerod's photographs are understated, but show an unseen America, where the industrial heartland is decaying, highways stand empty and towns are deserted. The subjects of Ormerod’s work are the disenfranchised. A teenager cycles through her neighbourhood wearing a Halloween-style hockey mask, a Native American man stands in a graveyard, their expressions are unreadable.

The work subverts traditional American icons. A white picket fence is staved in, a huge billboard for Miss Teen Dakota USA stands next to an empty highway. Inverting the famous Hollywood sign, Ormerod photographs a Texaco sign from the back, dominating the empty, Western landscape.

The works also show humour – a giant fake dinosaur looms in the distance of a desert landscape, a stuffed moose head is displayed in the window of a diner. The subjects of the work are unconventional, surreal and sometimes mundane, but create an atmosphere of an eerie backwater America.