Exhibition catalog of Distant Images, Local Positions, curated by Wafaa Bilial, which was on view at the EFA Project Space Gallery from January 24 - March 8, 2014.

Artists: Haseeb Ahmed & Daniel Baird, Hasan Elahi, AnnieLaurie Erickson, Regina Mamou, Mary Mattingly, Trevor Paglen, Travis LeRoy Southworth, and Scott Patrick Wiener

What controls geography? Photographs, ultimately and they do so without neutrality. Our understanding of geography from afar is constructed in a fragmented and subjective way, via photographic imagery. This gives the impression of closeness, but the illusion alienates both the place being seen and the viewer. As a result, we become complacent in the universe of appearances, comforted by the knowledge that what is depicted is now known. But the camera can only show us an apparition, not an actual place. Both the technology and the resulting images are mobile–shot and sent out through various media so that the represented geographies are totally unstable, despite our culture’s desperation to fix them as fact to paper, screens, and the like. Using technological imagery as their point of departure, the artists here proposed unstable positions that question and subvert the photographic construction of visual power.