Epitome of the late 19th century American West

This is an In-Game photography project which was submitted to the University of Sussex as my final project for my MA degree in photography. The project was photographed in the video game, Red Dead Redemption 2, as a silhouette of the Westward Movement-era America. The shots mainly include western American landscapes, contemporary architecture and things with period characteristics. The general landscapes photos were inspired by the grand American landscape photographs by Ansel Adams. For which I just use the colours of black and white in the landscape and used the minimum aperture for maximum clarity, based on Adams’s experience in the Group f/64; The work is also inspired by Ernst Haas with his photos of the Monument Valley, which is an iconic landscape of the American West. Furthermore, the game includes some historic buildings that exist in reality, which I chose to photograph and show with comparisons to the real buildings， as a way to further remove the border between virtual and real. Finally, the absence of Native Americans will be demonstrated by showing those foreign objects.