23/10/09
Jesse Simons
Stage 4 BFA Photography
I began this investigation with a trip to the wild and untouched Fiordland national park, and a simple digital photograph of Mitre Peak. Upon my return home I was looking through images and the one of Mitre Peak caught my attention, I was sure I had seen it before. Searching the Internet I realised I had seen this image many times over. A similar experience was documented by Don Lillo in his novel White Noise when he visited the most photographed barn in America. “No one sees the Barn…..we’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura”[1] I began to explore the distribution and proliferation of images in the digital age, and our desire to capture images of iconic places.
The final body of work is looking at images of iconic places. Places we see in on television, in magazines, websites, movies, and blogs. Places like Times Square, The Eiffel Tower, The Berlin Wall, and places closer to home like Milford Sound, the Moeraki Boulders, the Dunedin Train Station. I have recreated tourist icons, travelling only via the internet and other people's photographs, using search engines and low-resolution thumbnails
I search these iconic places on the Internet, gathering repetitions of each image thumbnail, and layering them on top of one and other and arranging them in such a way that they are still recognizable. Because of the small thumbnails I am using there is a similar effect to Thomas Ruf’s Jpegs series in which he explores the distribution and reception of images in the digital age. He locates online jpegs and enlarges them until the pixels emerge in a chessboard pattern of near abstraction[2]. From a distance you can make out in my work what each image is depicting, but as you get closer to the image it fractures and breaks up into a digital mess of pixels.
The journey of these images is an important part of my questioning the shift in how we experience the world and our ever increasing dependence on technologies and consequent disconnection with things natural. “My view of the world was a photographic view, like I believe it is for everybody, no?’ sculptor Giacometti stated over 40 years ago. ‘One never sees things, one always sees them through a screen”[3] My work explores the distribution and proliferation of images in the digital age and it may disturb our complacent sense of individuality within travelling experiences.
The effect of fragments and constant layering creates a painterly aspect. This work engages in a history of classical landscape painting and the notion of the Sublime, inspiring beauty and awe. Like a writer in the 17th century would take the Grand Tour of the Swiss Alps, or a painter in the 19th century would paint the majestic Mitre Peak, The Sublime is still sought after, but experienced in a different way, flattened in rectangular shape and put through a screen. My work however has come back out of the screen and into the physical world.
[1] Fred Ritchin. After Photography. W.W Norton & Company, Inc. 2009. Page 22
[2] Bennett Simpson. Museum of Contemporary Art. http://www.aperture.org/books/books-featured/jpegs.html. 04/11/09
[3] Fred Ritchin. After Photography. W.W Norton & Company, Inc. 2009. Page 21
