Brea Souders
“Vistas”
New York, 529 West 20th Street
Vistas is a series of hand-colored photographs that present disembodied shadows of human beings found in national parks throughout the American West. While researching Google Photo Sphere images of the parks, the artist observed that the algorithm removed people from its shared photos, seemingly for privacy reasons, but left behind their distorted and artifacted shadows. The shadows are shown just as the artist found them, the result of the west’s radiant sun and algorithmic interventions. The original photographs were made deep in nature, by individuals who trekked to areas where roads or trails don’t exist.
Referencing early twentieth-century picture postcards of the American West, the hand-colored prints of Vistas recall bygone methods that were used to romanticize interactions with the natural world. Today, most armchair travel is filtered through the internet. We regularly see shadow selfies in landscapes in our social media feeds, echoing previous moments through photographic history. Vistas was made at a time when climate change is already altering the national parks and conservation efforts will need to be modified to adapt to profound change. Commenting in Lensculture, Gregory Eddi Jones said, “Our growing dependence and assimilation into virtual space brings us further from the natural world, turning Vistas into a tug-of-war between what we once were as humans, and what we are now. Photography has changed us, the internet is changing us. And Souders’ work helps to illustrate just how so.”
Brea Souders Untitled #1 (from Vistas), 2019 Unique archival pigment print with watercolor 12 x 17 in.
The viewer’s placement in relation to these scenes suggests a witnessing of their own selves, transmuted into archetypal forms populating the land. Traces of wanderers, cowboys, adventurers and earth goddesses can be imagined in the shadows imprinted in the land. In Vistas, many of the shadows appear to have feminine forms. Though photography of the American West has long been thought to be the domain of men, here we see evidence of women trekking into the wild, documenting and mapping it.
These works enter into the long traditions of American landscape photography. The series poses a plurality of questions centering on how our relationship to nature has evolved and is changing, how our virtually mediated world is affecting human behavior, and the roles that photography plays in ecology, mapping, tourism, sublimity and representation of the self. As we witness accelerating effects of our global climate crisis, and as modern living continually brings us further from our origins, Vistas explores what the landscape means to us now.
