Promise Land - Promise Land by American artist Gregory Eddi Jones is a visual poetic epic that usurps photographic conventions to confront what the artist sees as the spiritual poverty of common cultural images. The book uses TS Eliot's modernist masterpiece The Waste Land (1922) as a starting point, creating a sequence of images that picks up where the poem left off nearly 100 years ago.
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\nUsing archival and advertising photographs as his source material, Jones employs strategies of digital composition and physical manipulation of ink to create a new kind of image that is unbound by the traditional burden of photography’s relationships to truth and belief. In doing so, he cuts into the hollow cores of empty visual promises and injects them with the potential for a multitude of associative games. Borrowing from Eliot’s strategies of literary allusion and fragmented, collage-like narrative, Jones draws on a range of inspirations, from folkloric imagery and fairy tale illustrations to surrealism, mythology, common advertising tropes, and photo-historical traditions.
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\nThe resulting sequence forms a visual symphony, composed of nearly 200 images, attuned to a fractured, "post-truth" contemporary world. Promise Land revisits what many consider the greatest poem of the 20th century, while reimagining what photography can be and do.
