THE VISUAL GRAMMAR OF WILDERNESS

In today’s Western languages, “wilderness“ is understood as an untamed and remote landscape with pristine nature. This idea goes back to the US national park movement of the 19th century. With the intention of protecting nature, areas in the west of the USA that had long been inhabited by indigenous communities were declared to be deserted wilderness. To this day, the Western concept of wilderness is based on the myth of untouched nature and the dualism of humans and nature: wild nature worthy of protection can only be found where humans are absent. 

The project started with artistic research on visual representations and media stereotypes of wilderness. I used photographs found in search engines and social media as well as image descriptions written by artificial intelligence in order to reconstruct the visual grammar of wilderness photography: the motif structures, color schemes, and compositions used by photographers to create images of wild nature. 

All works are experimental arrangements to track down the essence of photographic representations of “wilderness“ and human-wilderness relations.