• Art Features
  • How-To
  • Culture
  • Interviews
  • Best Of
  • On View
  • Cosmic Calling
  • Fresh Take
  • Sex Advice from an Artist
  • Art Living
  • Retrospect
  • This Artwork Changed My Life
  • Elephant 100

OUT NOW ISSUE #48

OUT NOW ISSUE #48

  • Art Features
  • How-To
  • Culture
  • Interviews
  • Best Of
  • On View
  • Cosmic Calling
  • Fresh Take
  • Sex Advice from an Artist
  • Art Living
  • Retrospect
  • This Artwork Changed My Life
  • Elephant 100
12 Sep 2021
Art Living / Sunday Read

A Dizzying Journey Through the Technicolour Wasteland of Stock Photos

Advertising images and clichéd commercial shots are reworked and reinvented in US artist Gregory Eddi Jones’s playful new book. Words by Alex Merola

Gregory Eddi Jones, Naturae Generica

You’ve seen the “Open Arms Woman” before. She appears on travel brochures, yoga adverts and supplement bottles. She stands on the beach at sunset or on a mountaintop at dusk. She might be rocking a bob, plaits or glasses. No matter her form or location, she’s always living the dream. And we want in.

This exultant everywoman is one of the most popular tropes in stock photography. With advertisers their primary targets, these images are designed as blank slates with universal appeal. But don’t be fooled. A search of “doctor” on internet databases such as Shutterstock or iStock brings up not only consecutive stethoscopes, but endless pages of white men.

For his new book Promise Land, American appropriation artist Gregory Eddi Jones has scoured these “utopian” inventories and culled their most clichéd offerings. Through a painstaking process of digital stitching, printing, wet ink rendering, scanning and Photoshopping, Jones dismantles them from the inside, discovering a bunch of empty promises.

Gregory Eddi Jones, The Swimmer

As its tongue-in-cheek title suggests, Promise Land riffs off and updates TS Eliot’s apocalyptic poem The Waste Land, the bulk of which was written in 1918 as Eliot was recovering from the Spanish Flu. Fragments of French, Latin, Wagner, Dante, Cockney slang, popular songs and newspaper clippings all tumbled into one bewildering mélange of misery. It held up a mirror to a world wounded and turned upside down, by war and by a pandemic.

Tweet this

“Appropriation artist Jones has scoured these ‘utopian’ inventories and culled their most clichéd offerings”

One century on, we may not be emerging from a hellish world war, but Coronavirus has given us a similar dose of reality. Jones picks up from where Eliot left off, spewing out an equally puzzling “heap of broken images”.

However, following the foggy, corpse-haunted landscapes that pervade Chapter I (it has five in total, as does Eliot’s epic), we’re confronted with a cornucopia of cartoonish pictures which reflect the detached, Disneyland bubbles Western societies live in today: rainbows, cutesy cats, cleaning products, white picket fences, couples holding hands and men euphorically shampooing in the shower.

 

Gregory Eddi Jones, A Good Crowd IIGregory Eddi Jones, Donut HeavenGregory Eddi Jones, Janus Horse in Motion

 

 

These commercial displays colonise our social lives as a way of displacing fears of mortality. But by fusing strategies of appropriation and collage, Jones transforms these ubiquitous fantasies into uncanny confusion. Images recur, but off-kilter: they are overlaid, inverted, flipped and occasionally duplicated.

Tweet this

“We’re confronted with a cornucopia of cartoonish pictures which reflect the detached, Disneyland bubbles western societies live in today”

Most manic is Chapter IV, with sets of small, black-and-white images rhyming across each spread like refrains. Playing between readability and nonsense, Jones’s quasi-narrative points to the media’s tactical use of constant repetition, and the ways we respond to its cues in disjointed, distracted and visceral ways.

Gregory Eddi Jones, The Bather

Yet even more jarring than the lack of plot is perhaps the inconsistency of Jones’s Photoshopping. Sometimes skin renderings are refined like Renoirs. At others, they resemble the blotchiness of Microsoft Paint. Sporadically, flesh is erased entirely, leaving disembodied eyes and lips floating over seascapes.

Tweet this

“Images recur, but off-kilter: they are overlaid, inverted, flipped and occasionally duplicated”

These twists of deadpan absurdity represent Jones’s attempts to rip up the age-old collusion between photography and truth (he calls it “un-photographing”). Operating beyond the mere regurgitation of spiritually-vacuous, simulated experiences, Jones’s language is one of “a hundred visions and revisions”, to use a line from another Eliot poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Gregory Eddi Jones, Helen Going Home

He taps into the contemporary desire for authenticity in the post-truth era, pursuing playful and acerbic associations from the yawning pit of banality that is advertising imagery.

Consumerism’s vapid face meets its reckoning in the final chapter, as the pages joltingly switch from white to black, signalling the spine-chilling finale to Jones’s symphony: a faceless crowd applauds a wand-waggling composer, whose head is warped in the shape of a banana. In fact, this composer appears at the beginning of the book too. Have we come full circle? Maybe this is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a re-boot.

Alex Merola is assistant editor at 1000 Words

All images courtesy Gregory Eddi Jones and SPBH Editions

 

Promise Land by Gregory Eddi Jones

Published by SPBH Editions, 30 September 2021

VISIT WEBSITE

Liked this post? Share it on social!

MORE TO READ

Read Next:

America’s Crumbling Rust Belt Lives on in Stephen Shore’s Images

Culture

America’s Crumbling Rust Belt Lives on in Stephen Shore’s Images

The photographer poignantly captures the collapse of US heavy industry in the dying days of the 1970s.
Read More
The Index

Bringing Painting Back from the Dead

Have rumours of painting’s demise been greatly exaggerated? An expansive new group show, curated by the artist Peter Fischli in Venice, suggests so.
Read More
The Index

Glitter and Ghosts in the Paintings of Arcmanoro Niles

The US painter brings shine and shimmer to brilliantly coloured images of life’s harsh realities.
Read More
Art Living

Behind the Mask: Face to Face with Rashid Johnson’s The Hikers

Images and essays explore the dark and disturbing world of the US artist’s multiform, multi-city, multimedia project.
Read More

Keep in the loop

Get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox

HUNGRY FOR MORE?

All Editorials
Best Of

Art Crush: All the Things We Want This Month

Sunday Read

Dawoud Bey’s Up-Close Snapshots of a Changing Generation

Observations

Could Art Duo Shanzhai Lyric Fake It Till They Made It in New York?

Essential Art Books

Explore Jail Cells, Gardens and Dance Floors in May’s Unmissable Books

Observations

Will Purple Bedroom Walls Wreck Your Relationship?

Opinion

Is Colourising Archive Images Ever OK?

Profile

Hetain Patel: “I Want to Make the South Asian Black Panther”

Artists to Watch

Elephant’s Pick of the Essential Artists to Watch in May

Observations

Why Is It So Hard to Talk About Fertility?

Article

A Snapshot Guide to the Bristol Photo Festival

Artists to Watch

Elephant’s Pick of June’s Essential Artists

Cooking Sections, Climavore: On Tidal Zones, Food Arts Project, Portree, Isle of Skye, Scotland, 2017. Photo: Colin Hattersley
Investigation

Is Scotland Now the Artistic Heart of Britain?

Showtime

Vive La Différence: Variety Adds Spice to This Bold Group Exhibition

Picture Gallery

Shifting the Focus: The Photography Award Reframing Global Upheaval

Picture Gallery

Unseen Amsterdam Showcases Photography Worldwide

5 Minutes With

Yto Barrada: “I Hate the Large Photographs of Artists in the Entrance of Exhibitions”

  • About Us
  • Write for Us
  • Stockists
  • Privacy Policy
Follow Us
Instagram Facebook Twitter