The Raisin at the End of the Hot Dog
(54) 8x10 prints on 308 gsm Hahnemühle Photo Rag Matte paper
(15) 4x5 snapshots
Vellum cover sheets
Custom linen wrapped vessel, handmade in London by Piotr Jarosz of imakebooks
Single edition, 1 of 1 — Not for sale
2023
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
— Susan Sontag, In Plato's Cave (1977)
In early 2023, I went on an 8-day guided tour through Iceland with my mom. I saw some incredible places. But I couldn’t get over what I know most of us encounter when visiting highly trafficked tourist areas like this; a mob of phone screens and their owners pushing, posing, filming, and generally not looking at the thing they purportedly came all this way to see.
I'm not innocent. I couldn’t tell you if I remember the places I've been from the experiences I’ve had or if I'm merely supplanting memories with the photos I've taken. However, the absurdity I was seeing here was on another level, and for some reason I found myself taking pictures of other people taking pictures in front of things. It started off mostly as a joke, but as the trip continued, it expanded into documenting the infrastructure set up to support this scale of tourism for which the Icelandic economy currently depends on.
Together these images form a sort of dark comedy on the state of travel today and show what can happen to a place that has, in large parts, been reduced to a product. This is where I landed. One box of prints. Not “content” and not for sale.
