Multiple Images of a Complex Nature

There was a time when I was very frustrated with my approach to landscape photography. I thought that I had to present an idea within one frame, and that landscapes could only be viewed as a single fragment and seen from a single point. Italian Renaissance artists demonstrated that if you change your point of view, you would see the same scene differently. In painting, this led to the rise of one-point and then three-point perspective in the early 1400s, as artists sought to achieve the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Their goal was to seek a certain reality or a certain naturalistic truth in their work, to define a trompe l'oeil. Cubist artists such as Picasso carried this idea further in the early 1900s, which fragmented his painted images to include a constantly shifting point of view. I began to work with these concepts to reconstruct landscapes using fragments of different viewpoints in order to better show my personal, internal vision of the landscape. I put three photographs together, so that at first glance they look like a panorama but after closer examination are three different viewpoints of the landscape pieced together. Using this technique I expand or condense the landscape, sometimes showing the passage of time or even a more abstract view of the subject. This method allows me to make images that deal with Landscape as fact, as culture and as pure form. Chaddy Dean Smith, Commerce, TX 2019