Young Ideas

Young Ideas assembles five years of imagery by the American filmmaker Eddie O'Keefe (stills from his films and music videos alongside photographs of the Southwest) into a numbered artist-book edition that reads as one continuous, uneasy travelogue of the American West.

Compiled over five years, the book interleaves location shots and stills from O'Keefe's short films and music videos with photographs taken around the American Southwest: gun-toting figures, hooded beauty-contest contestants, and blood-soaked ravers alongside laundromats, Disneyland topiary, and bleached-out street scenes. Bywater Bros. Editions published it in 2015 as a numbered edition of 500: 88 pages, softcover, 17.8 × 14 cm, designed by Roger Bywater and O'Keefe.

O'Keefe, born 1988 in Elmhurst, Illinois, is a photographer, writer, and director who studied at Columbia College Chicago and the American Film Institute. Known for music videos for The Orwells and Springtime Carnivore and for the short films Sun Sessions (2008) and The Ghosts (2011), he later directed the feature Shangri-La Suite (2016). Young Ideas was his second book, first in an ongoing investigation of the American psyche continued in Patriotic Pavement.