To Step From Shadow Into the Warmth of the Sun

This project navigates between histories, habits, and familiar checkpoints within landscape photography. Taking inspiration from the Icelandic landscape while on residency there in 2016, I nevertheless found myself ambivalent toward photographing it. I have heard here that it is impossible to take a bad photograph of Iceland; this is quite possibly true, but sounds to me like a dare. Photography as a once-specialized medium is struggling to redefine its identity in the midst of its own ubiquity; the 'idea' of Iceland, meanwhile, is also in existential tumult, as tourism explodes and a digitally imaged (read: romanticized, aestheticized, selective) Iceland circulates ever more prominently online.

'To Step From Shadow...' takes cues from the island nation to push us off-road into an interrogation of the mimetic impulse. Its objective is to unearth the ontological consequences of The Travelogue by challenging its bedrock assumptions, namely that presence is representable; that experience is communicable; and that it is possible to quantify of temporal processes that have no locatable beginning or end.

Component works:

'Forecasts [the page is but a mirror]'

'Northern Epic'

'Untitled (The Deluge)'

'What Time Is It on the Sun?'