Texts: 1000 Words, essay by Alessandro Merola / Artforum, review by Donald Kuspit / Frieze, essay by Colin Edginton / LensCulture, essay by Gregory Eddi Jones
Vistas is a series of hand-painted photographs that present disembodied shadows of humans found in U.S. national parks throughout the American West. These images are isolated and extracted from user-generated interactive views in Google Maps, whose AI automatically removes the physical body from uploaded photos, leaving behind only the distorted shadow of the photographer imprinted upon the earth. The visible shadows are the result of the West’s radiant sun and algorithmic interventions, and are shown as they were found. Vistas recovers, documents, shapes, and coheres this digital detritus, remaking the landscape.
Referencing early twentieth-century picture postcards of the national parks, the hand-painted prints of Vistas recall bygone methods that were once used to romanticize people’s interactions with the natural world. Consistent with the form of early colorized postcards, the hand-painting in Vistas ranges from realistic representation to a romantic ideal, the latter sometimes verging on dream-like imaginings. Hand-painting photographs was once considered a way of infusing an image with life; an intimate act of care. The form of these pictures draws influence from a time when humans dreamed of experiencing the landmarks of a beautiful natural world, and are made now in a time when we hope that the natural world will survive our own occupation of it.
Today, most armchair travel is filtered through the internet. We regularly see people’s shadows geo-located in landscapes in our social media feeds. Archetypal forms can be imagined in these shadows – traces of cowboys, adventurers, and earth goddesses outlined on the land.
These works join the long traditions of American landscape photography while updating its conventions for the current day. The series poses a plurality of questions centering on how our relationship to nature has evolved and is changing, how the chasm between lived and virtual experience is affecting human behavior, and the roles that photography plays in ecology, mapping, tourism, sublimity, and representation of the self. As we witness accelerating effects of the global climate crisis, and as modern living continually draws us further from our origins, Vistas explores what the landscape means to us now.
