Jun 1

Jun 1 Photo Journal Monday: Louis Heilbronn

Raised in the U.S. by French parents, I came to identify with America through imagery I later recognized as being Californian in its construction. First from sentimental Hollywood films, and later the novels of John Steinbeck, I viewed California as a place of renewal and escape through its connection to the soil and the land.

When I began making photographs on the West Coast in 2016, I used this romanticized idea of America to illustrate a placeless and timeless illusion of life through images. Juxtaposing picturesque scenes of figures in the landscape with romantic symbols of rural life, these photographs question both the exhibition of the ideal in photography and the boundaries that exist within them.

With a subject centered in the frame, many of these images are spatially constructed through an in-camera grid to keep them rigid and formulaic. I found it important to push the images as close to formal perfection as possible in order to give them an impressionistic and mechanical feel. Having pursued sites where day travelers typically gather to experience the outdoors, I found myself searching for a specific axis point, where overlapping visual histories could be collapsed and layered within a shared observation of daily life.

These images are the outcome of that pursuit as they show both the repetitive nature of the photographic act, as well as that of human behavior. With the figures reduced to a small scale, the dramatic surroundings de-fine their existence, questioning the uniqueness of the individual experience all while enveloped in the natural landscape that we understand to be in peril.