Vistas is a series of hand-painted photographs featuring disembodied human shadows, all within U.S. national parks, that I discovered in Google Maps. These views are extracted from user-generated interactive images uploaded to Maps, which utilizes artificial intelligence technology to automatically remove physical bodies from uploaded photos. The resulting human shadows, shaped by both natural sunlight and algorithmic interventions, are presented exactly as encountered. By capturing only distorted shadows of the photographers etched onto the landscape, I document these digital remnants. The series poses a plurality of questions centering on how our relationship to nature has evolved and how the chasm between lived and virtual experience is affecting human behavior. It offers insight into how AI perceives and tracks images autonomously, operating independently of human intervention.

The images are hand-painted in reference to early twentieth-century picture postcards of landscapes. Hand-painting was once considered a way of infusing a photograph with life, and was often performed anonymously by women. 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 the natural world will survive our occupation of it. As modern living continually draws us further from our origins, Vistas explores what the landscape means to us now.