Unfaithful by Josh Cho
Unfaithful is a series of images that are collected from the internet that depict a geyser-like burst of water produced by broken fire hydrants in the urban landscape. The images are then converted to black and white, vertically recomposed, and digitally edited to discard any humans from the original photograph. Resembling the western survey photographs of the Old Faithful geyser by William Henry Jackson and the romanticized iteration by Ansel Adams, the reference used is not merely to revisit that history, but rather to use it as a point of departure—quite literally, from a position of modernist photographers traveling into the future (present) discovering and pointing their cameras to a man-made accidental phenomenon instead of the pristine natural world—in order to overlap time and space. The title of the project is meant to infer both the reference to historical photographic depictions of Old Faithful and to recognize the unfaithful act of appropriation, the unfaithful prediction of accidents, the unfaithful built environment and the unfaithful record of the photograph. Josh Cho (www.joshcho.net) is a Los Angeles-based artist originally from Los Angeles. His work has been shown at Commonwealth & Council, La Cienegas Projects, Autonomie Gallery, Ann 330 Gallery, Foundation for Art Resources, UCLA, UC Irvine and CSU Long Beach. |