Alex Schupak - The New Americans
I am a conceptual landscape photographer who is primarily interested in subverting the historical imposition of truth onto the land through the camera. By its nature as first a science and then a means of documentation, photography was used to survey, label, and divide American land and the people that inhabited it; the photo was used as a potently unobjective truth-telling vehicle. In my art, I explore this strange limbo of photography, through a number of techniques that blur the line of its implied visual truth. My earlier work used abstraction to emphasize formal elements—light, color, and shape—over recognizability, imparting a sense of placelessness. Soon, I started using other techniques, incorporating embedded language, image compression, and visual irony to warp the assumed linear translation of the real world to the captured image. The titling of images became an important aspect of my work as well, where I used it to challenge conventional ways of gridding and labeling land. My goal through all these techniques is to interrupt what we believe we are seeing with something different, or even contrary, to initial impressions. I’ve learned that dialogue between images has more power to subvert their collective meaning than any photograph alone. Like a visual wormhole, I use image association and sequencing to compare and contrast vastly different images (separated by time, distance, and visual style), bringing attention to how truth morphs through context. This tension creates space to reexamine the tradition of American landscape photography—culminating in my photobook The New Americans.
