Jack Latham‘s photographs from A Pink Flamingo take us on a journey along the Oregon Trail – a route that in both physical and metaphorical terms has become part of American history and embedded itself into the dreams of those looking for something better on the horizon of somewhere else.

American journeys are part of our global culture, a universal folklore, and the stories interwoven into songs, novels and paintings. The Oregon Trail is the first. A 2,200-mile emigrant trail that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon, its eastern part spanning part of the future state of Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming while in the West it traversed the future states of Idaho and Oregon. Since the beginning of the 19th Century people in wagons took to the trail looking for a better life, some of them stopping along the way and making a patch of land their own. This is the route that Latham travelled, his photographs capturing a bleak landscape in which people continue to work on, in the hope of a better life, their forefathers’ part of the great American migration.