MIKE PERRY CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHER

Mike Perry
Grand Canyon Forest
Text by Tom Morton

The big thing about being a non-American is that you've got to deal with
America. Not only in the economic sense (that's all but inescapable), but
also in the sense of coping with it, of squaring-up to its rough, alien
logic. Non-Americans have no choice in this. In a world in which America has
established embassies in every film theatre and fizzy drinks cabinet,
dealing with it is something all Non-Americans are compelled to do.

Mike Perry's large scale images of America are, it seems to me, in part the product of
this imperative. They speak of a material space, sure, but they also open up
a mental space in which America, for all that we're familiar with it from
its own pervasive self-mediation, may be thought about as truly foreign.
Importantly, Perry, a European, accomplishes this not by shooting man-made
things (motorways, malls, and other signifiers of kamikaze
over-consumption), but by shooting America's 'natural' landscape, in which
the Founding Fathers glimpsed manifest destiny. Looking at his photographs,
it seems Perry glimpses the same, but (unlike the Founding Fathers) he's
aware of its dark side, its accompanying shadows and rot.

America is a place where the horizon sits heavy on the land. We might
imagine it as a great leveller, with all the egalitarianism that implies,
but that doesn't seem right somehow. A more compelling image is of the
horizon as super-compressor, reducing everything beneath it to
Hollywood-like two dimensions. Perry's photographs, however, do not
replicate this two-dimensionality. Instead, they are possessed of a soft,
very un-Hollywood light, a conspicuous pictorial depth, and impose a very
European, very Hegelian verticality onto the American landscape. Looking at
them, it is as though an the Old World is reminding the New World that it
was built on Old World Utopian dreams, and that it's lost its way beneath a
boundless, crushing sky.

Two years ago, Perry took a road trip from Phoenix to LA. Stopping at the
Grand Canyon, he captured the images reproduced on these pages, which show
not the Canyon itself but the trees that grow near its edge. Perry has said
that 'I couldn't take a picture of the Grand Canyon', and it's not hard to
see why he avoided the subject. What might anyone add to that great,
striated scar? A mindless masterpiece, it mocks attempts to represent it,
just as the day-tripping tourists - posing for photographs - mock it with
their presence. The Canyon's too grand to contemplate, but the nearby forest
(with its humble, barely-registered beauty) is a different matter. It is, as
Perry's shots show, a tangled space where one might untangle one's thoughts
about America and all America means. The trees in Grand Canyon Forest 1,
Grand Canyon Silver Birch 1 and Grand Canyon Silver Birch 2 (all works 2002)
resemble passages from abstract paintings, all Barnett Newman zips and
Jackson Pollock drips. Their arrangement's almost gestural, as if a human
had a hand in their higgledy-piggledy layout, and they're the product of
choice rather than pre-destination. They also feel oddly old fashioned
(nowadays, even Nature's occasionally anachronistic), so perhaps it's
appropriate that they cluster on the Canyon's margins. In post-modern
America, Modernism -like ordinary people, like nuanced political discourse -
is a peripheral concern.

Tom Morton

All images are part of the unpublished Astral America Project involving Tom Hunter and Norbet Scheurner, April 2002

C type prints. 1520 mm by 1260mm (April 2002)