Willem Volkersz came to the United States from Holland, after the devastation of World War II, and brought with him a rich history that is reflected in everything he does. Volkersz has often said that he has an immigrant’s fascination with America and as a teenager he began hitchhiking and driving throughout the American West, camera in hand. What he discovered was a vibrantly rambling and foreign culture, made up of billboards, vernacular architecture and decorated yards. Only in the American West of that time could one encounter a huge billboard as the only landmark in a vast rural landscape, stay in a motel shaped like a giant teepee and be beckoned by a colossal fiberglass Paul Bunyan to visit California’s Trees of Mystery and have the narrative lit by American neon.
