Promise Land, a visual poetic epic by American artist Gregory Eddi Jones, usurps photographic convention to confront what the artist considers a spiritual poverty in common cultural pictures. The book uses T.S. Eliot’s Modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922), as its point of departure, and is positioned as a sequence of pictures that picks up where The Waste Land left off nearly 100 years ago.
Using common stock and advertising photographs as his source material, Jones uses strategies of digital composite and physical ink manipulation to craft a new kind of picture that is untethered from the traditional burdens of photography’s relationships to truth and belief. In doing so, he cuts into the hollow cores of empty visual promises and injects potential for multitudes of associative games to be played. Borrowing from Eliot’s strategies of literary allusion and fragmented, collage-like narrative, Jones pulls inspiration from a range of influences including folk pictures and fairy-tale illustrations, to surrealism, stories of myth, common advertising tropes, and photo-historical traditions.
The resulting sequence of images sum up to a visual symphony, composed of nearly 200 images, that harmonizes with a fracturing, “post-truth” contemporary world. Promise Land revisits what many consider to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century while simultaneously reimagining what photography can be.