Outdoor World
While documenting Blurb books of landscape photographs I made for an earlier project, I realized I liked the photographs of the printed pages as images in their own right. As I moved the camera closer and started playing around, I liked the move into abstraction from the combination of focused halftone dots and blurry unfocused image elements.
I began shooting extreme closeups of the pages, then—without tearing up the books—manipulating the pages to create new, composite landscapes where things are a little out of kilter and you’re not sure what you’re seeing. Like an acid trip or a fever dream, visual aberrations of familiar scenery invite engagement because it’s pleasurable to see things differently. It heightens our subsequent experience of the everyday.
I think of these works as landscape photographs, but depictions that occupy a space between documented and staged, between original and appropriated, between “taking” and “making.” They aren’t exactly truthful, but they’re not fully fictional either. They probably have more in common with setup photography than traditional landscape photographs. Nevertheless, something that appears to be a landscape photograph also functions as one, existing to satisfy the human desire to gaze upon an appealing natural environment, regardless of its actual existence.
Carol Selter
2014