Deltiologies

Deltiologies is a series of handmade topographic collages, created as a photographic inquiry into the end of landscape as a stable visual field.

The collages are created from prints of scanned photocrom postcards. The original postcards circulated widely at the turn of the twentieth century, as part of the first wave of mass production and replication of photographs. They opened up views of Alpine Europe to a new consumer market around the world.

These early photographic views inherited from landscape painting a singular model of vision, based on the supremacy of the fixed central viewer standing on solid ground.   This tradition of perspective, once central to our understanding of images, is slowly being undone by new visual technologies. Established ways of perceiving space are being disturbed – are fragmenting and multiplying. Assumptions about landscape as an ordered, unfolding field of vision are giving way to new formations and possibilities.

In Deltiologies, the views have been categorized, cut and re-assembled by the artist to form new geometric topographies. The ground is diminished, and established viewing positions and outcomes are disrupted. Landscape is reconfigured, between then and now, between partiality and excess, creating new unfamiliar abstractions. The centre, once the stable ground, appears empty, as a void.

Deltiologies gestures towards the end of an era of the fixed photographic horizon. Taking up ideas from the philosopher Maleuve, it plays with the notion of horizon as a temporary artifice, as a consequence of a misalignment between the mind and the world.

These postcards were purchased online by the artist, as digital files, separated from any original print or author.

The works are hand-made from printed c-types. They are framed in white. 55cm x 55cm.