| Description |
Designed by Melinda Stone and Igor Vamos for the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Suggested Photo Spots is a multisited project engaging with the intersection between tourism and anthropic, or human-altered, landscapes. The project consists primarily of photographs of sites in which "Suggested Photo Spot" signs have been installed; a short film and, in a sense, the individual sites themselves are also components. Most significantly, a Suggested Photo Spots guidebook, filled with photographs of and directions to each site, forms the final and most intricate part of an already complex project. The question to ask of these pages is whether or not they are worth being seen. Evocative of Conceptual photography in their banality of form and content, their coupling of text and image begs to be seen as dialectical. For their form alone, the photographs themselves call for discussions of the picturesque and the landscape genre and the ways in which these categories have changed. Moreover, the suggestion that these images are not disinterested, that they perform a critical function, is also an aspect of the project that cannot be disregarded. To address the project, I begin each of three chapters with a comparison between an image from the guidebook and a work from another American artist. Each comparison frames a significant vein of inquiry that reveals the complexities of Suggested Photo Spots: the project's debt to donceptualism, its demonstration of the picturesque, and its place among other landscapes. Each chapter is freestanding, just as each page of the guidebook is independent, though in both cases each unit operates most effectively as part of a series. The thesis concludes with an open discussion of the project's social value, which is structured around a comparison between a final Suggested Photo Spot and other recent works. Although no definitive conclusions on the project's social meaning are reached, the result of this and the preceding chapters is ultimately one of authentication. This thesis legitimates Suggested Photo Spots not primarily for the project's documentary or even ideological value but for its value as a series of discursive, yet authentic, images to be seen. |
