A photographic epic by Gregory Eddi Jones, in conversation with The
Waste Land
A visual poetic epic by Philadelphia-based artist Gregory Eddi Jones
(born 1986), Promise Land reimagines the function of photography.
Using T.S. Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land as its point of
departure, the book presents a sequence of images, picking up where the
poem left off nearly 100 years ago.
Borrowing from Eliot's strategies of literary allusion and fragmented,
collage-like narrative, Jones pulls inspiration from a range of
photographic and artistic processes and traditions. Using stock and
advertising photographs as his source material, he employs strategies of
digital composite and physical ink manipulation to craft a new kind of
picture--one untethered from the traditional burdens of photography's
relationships to truth. The resulting sequence forms a visual symphony,
composed of nearly 200 images, in harmony with a fracturing,
"post-truth" contemporary world.