Shot obliquely on a copy-stand from just a few square centimetres of background
imagery in a magazine car advertisement, these apparently 'documentary' or
'evidential' photographic prints are stripped of their original colour and
sepia-toned to mimic the very different photographic genre of nostalgic landscape.
The Autoscapes display half-tone printing screen dots that appear only partially in each
autoscape's intentionally limited range of sharpness. Aside from that small area
of incongruity, the rest of the image appears to conform to the conventional
'truth' of photographic depth-of-field.
[This effect cannot be reproduced at low
resolution on the web.]
about Autoscapes
Once again the landscape image is being used to sublimate human awe before
Nature; a smug and comfortable topography is promised through the windscreen of
the advertised automobile.
Conducting you off-road, unscathed through the wilderness, such a vehicle offers
the soporific horizon of a virtual future - constantly becoming. Only in the
rear-view mirror, at the already-gone vanishing-point of your tire-tracks, is
there evidence of finitude.
The series Autoscapes exploits the sublime view of early landscape photography -
and an associated contemporary nostalgia - to redeem images of the natural
environment from the function most often assigned to it by advertisers - as a
mere backdrop for that supreme commodity, the automobile.
Graham Budgett, 1993
