“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. Using T.S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece The Waste Land (1922) as a starting point, the book creates a sequence of images that picks up where the poem left off nearly 100 years ago. Using archival and advertising photographs as source material, Jones employs strategies of digital composition and physical manipulation of ink to create a new kind of image that is not tied to the traditional burden of photography's relationship to truth and belief. In so doing, he cuts into the hollow cores of empty visual promises and injects them with 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 folk imagery and fairy-tale illustrations to surrealism, mythology, common advertising tropes and photo-historical traditions.The resulting sequence forms a visual symphony, made up of almost 200 images, in harmony with a fractured, “post-truth” contemporary world.“Promise Land” revisits what many consider to be the greatest poem of the 20th century, while reimagining what photography can be and do.
