John Mann
Friday, 15 May 2009
Work from Folded in Place.
I would be surprised if you haven’t seen this work yet. Mann’s Folded in Place series has made the rounds of the blogosphere, and if you haven’t seen it, you have been missing out. Mann’s site was update today (or yesterday) with some fantastic new works, check it out.
“The large color photographs in this series are informed by an interest in 19th century landscape photography, in which expeditions made to faraway lands attempted to make those lands more visually accessible. These attempts, however, often resulted in photographs that rendered those foreign sights even more unknowable and abstract, by recording images of forms and people to which the common viewer had no reference.
Folded in Place furthers the abstraction once offered by landscape photography by removing the place itself and replacing it with a mapped construction. This method leads the viewer to re-imagine the spectacle of the foreign lands and explore the abstraction of place offered by photography. The combination of still-life constructions and the maps’ reference to large and distant lands examines the paradox of known and unknown geographies offered by the photographic image. In this manner, Folded in Place turns the abstract representation of the map back into a physical landscape using photography to look at the map as a geography of its own. – All images are 24×30” digital c-prints, editioned to ten.” – courtesy of the artist.