Bryan Dooley

Antelop Island. UT (from "Omaha, Neb to Sacremento, Cal") © Bryan Dooley


Paradise Hill. NV (from "Omaha, Neb to Sacremento, Cal") © Bryan Dooley


Keaney. NE (from "Omaha, Neb to Sacremento, Cal") © Bryan Dooley


Salt Lake City. UT (from "Omaha, Neb to Sacremento, Cal") © Bryan Dooley


Winnemucca. NV (from "Omaha, Neb to Sacremento, Cal") © Bryan Dooley


Laramie. WY (from "Omaha, Neb to Sacremento, Cal") © Bryan Dooley


Bryan Dooley Graduated from University of Wales Newport in 2009 with BA (Hons) Documentary Photography

Omaha, Neb to Sacramento, Cal

“The ‘American Dream‘ has continuously required an advancing Frontier, which ensures the ‘Dreams’ unattainability, allowing the ‘Dream‘ to be continuously reinvented causing an ever desirable idyll, a utopia to continuously aspire to.; Preventing stagnation and creating a society where the belief that it is possible to achieve the ‘Dream’ is central to it’s existence. The Transcontinental Railroad which spanned from Omaha, Neb to Sacramento, Cal and met at Promontory point, Utah, is said to have allowed the idyll of America as a ‘land of plenty’ to exist, as it allowed the wealth of the American West’s resources to be transported back East. Yet whilst the Railroad was being built and new land traversed, the Frontier was progressing daily, so fast that Jars of dirt sent back by Irish workmen (heading west) to the cities on the East coast to be sold as ‘Frontier Soil’ were redundant by the time reached the city, as the railroad Frontier had progressed thirty miles West; Emphasising the unattainability of the ‘Dream’ in it’s most reduced, primitive form; Dirt. The ‘Dream’ as a Frontier was reduced further on the railroads 75th anniversary by the introduction of a commemorative stamp, which was issued across America in 1944, emphasising the continuing reduction of the Dream’s representation by the railroad and how homogenised the ‘American Dream’ had become; Whilst the contemporary representation of America’s Frontier becomes more diverse and complex. Omaha, Neb to Sacramento, Cal focuses on these once frontier lands along the route of the Transcontinental railroad, where the American Dream was once at it’s most pure and corporeal, yet the inhabitants of these lands have now been left clinging to fragments of the ‘Dream’ as the Frontier has moved on.” ”*The studio images of the Soil samples were taken with the San Francisco US customs digital POLAROID camera due to state laws on the transport or sending of soil. I had to photograph some of the 156 soils samples in the customs office, before applying for permission to send the soil samples back to the UK which can take up to 8 months.”

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