Impossible Horizon

Photography has accompanied me since childhood. I grew up in a family of photographers; my father has run a small studio and photo lab for several decades; and my brother is a specialist in photo printing. Growing up, I had the opportunity to observe the transformations brought to the photographic craft by the rise of digital photography. My relationship with photographic images was probably quite different from the experience of my peers. Prints were an ordinary part of home furnishings, like newspapers and books. I used photographic waste in plays and analogue photographic samples as drawing backgrounds. Even then, before the digital revolution, I was amazed by the number of images that created a kind of overproduction.

I was thinking about photography not only in the context of technology or as a medium that influences the way we perceive reality but primarily as an object. These reflections have influenced my later work, especially the photographic objects I have been making since 2019. These works express my interest in photography, which increasingly mediates my contact with the natural environment. The unifying theme of all the photographic objects is the disruption of perceptions of landscape and questions about the shifting boundaries between the domains of nature and technology. Looking at the textures of landscapes – both natural and simulated – I emphasize the role of photography in navigating the contemporary world. The photographic objects were created using texture screenshots from computer games, images from my father’s archives, my travel notes, views from travel magazines and Google Street View, and other online sources, which were reassembled into images of landscapes after being printed and cut out.

Ewa Doroszenko

Views from “Impossible Horizon” exhibition, Foto Forum, Bolzano, 2023, photos: Samira Mosca, Foto Forum and Jacek Doroszenko.