The Locations

The Locations sets out for particular places: the images we make of the world. And it is within these images that we now live more than ever. They have become a kind of home — more so, perhaps, than our drab reality itself. And as such, as places, as locations, these images deserve to be travelled, examined, and taken seriously as terrains in their own right.

Yet the topography of the medium has little in common with mountains and valleys, with shorelines or coastal seams. Through the pages of newspapers and magazines, fragments of text push forward, breaking through the transparent surface of the printed image and insisting on their own realities. The thin paper bends and warps, throwing up small waves. The photographer, trying to move closer to the scene, only amplifies the distortion with his macro lens.

Uncertain in this strange terrain, he takes three photographs from three perspectives — an attempted approximation of the objective gaze with which one once set out, wide-eyed, to explore the world. But the longer the attempt lasts, the more clearly a fundamental lack becomes perceptible: one never gets behind the motif, no matter how carefully one circles it. Perhaps there is nothing there after all — nothing but the surface.