Adam Ryder – Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey

Artist: Adam Ryder
Title: Selections from the Joint Photographic Survey
Publisher: Self Published
Year: 2013
BUY

Part historical sleight-of-hand, part archival fantasy, Adam Ryder’s new book imagines a fictive colonial survey of Palestine and Holy Lands in the 1920s. Reconstructed from early 20th century survey photography projects, the photographs seamlessly merge barren desert and mountain, ancient monuments, solitary towers and temples to create imagined Middle Eastern landscapes. While the work contains documents and artifacts, the heart of the work is the landscape/architecture photographs. Empty, save a few solitary figures, Ryder’s fictive images suggest that the colonial eye of photography still has the power to mystify, seduce and confound our gaze of far away places – both real and imagined.