A to b, left to right, top to bottom
In traveling from point A to point B, the modern traveler achieves the negation of the distance between; it’s not about the road, it’s about getting there. French theorist Paul Virilio has observed that with the immediacy of air travel, the terrain itself—the landscape—is lost, erased. Yet, the traveler by road or rail moves slowly enough to be able to witness this process of erasure visually.
Moved by this, she may turn to her smartphone camera, pointing it out the window to record these “landscapes of erasure.” But the records produced by the smartphone camera represent a second degree of erasure. Because the digital camera records the image’s pixels from left to right and in rows from top to bottom, the resulting image is also directional—bent or inflected toward the traveler’s destination, as though the image itself is in motion, actively seeking to escape its subject matter. We must also admit that the traveler’s recourse to her phone camera represents a third erasure: the smartphone user’s now-iconic avoidance of every idle moment, thus the killing of time. As these technologies strip away time and place, the resulting photographic works explore the aesthetic realm of the non-place and the non-moment. A to B, Left to Right, Top to Bottom Inkjet prints, 18" x 24" or 24" x 18" 2008–15 |
© 2008–2017 by Edwin Janzen. All rights reserved.