Photographer Dan Burn-Forti's melancholic American road trip

Earlier this year, photographer Dan Burn-Forti found himself in New York with a spare week and a flexible ticket. Realising he had never properly seen the southern part of America he hired a car and headed south on “a somewhat spontaneous and terribly planned, but excellent trip.”

The result of Dan’s impulsive adventure is a collection of snapshots in high contrast, sun-soaked with abnormalities. Dan has captured a mix of tourists and locals so naturally, a difficult task considering the bizarre attractions they appear to be looking at. On his journey through the south, Dan photographed many peculiar locations but one in particular stands out for it’s eccentricity, “the oddest place was probably The Holy Land Experience in Florida. It’s a Christian theme park complete with wall-to-wall piped hymns, endless dodgy statues of Jesus, and some highly suspect relics. And a car park filled with all the animals of the ark.”

The strange attraction of Dan’s photographs is that these tourist attractions often look very empty and therefore very eerie too. “I seemed to be drawn to vacation spots at a time of year when people don’t really go on holiday” explained Dan, “I assumed Daytona Beach in Florida was was going to be some kind of Spring Break madness, but in fact it was a windswept wasteland with miles and miles of bleak empty beaches and accompanying uninhabited hotels.” As a result, despite Dan consistently photographing subjects the trip was a lonely experience: “It was such a whirlwind visit, lasting six days from beginning to end that I hardly talked to a soul and spent the whole time either driving or taking pictures. One of the few people I did talk to was Tom the woodcarver who said: ‘Welcome to America… what’s left of it,’ which kind of set the tone for the whole trip really.”