Images without Worlds

Sacha Dufils: “In my current visual practice I approach the landscape in two different ways. While traveling, I make photographs of the grand and majestic landscapes. From the moment covid-19 came around, I started building landscapes in miniature. These huge differences in scale of a landscape affect how we experience them. Simulated or real, the imagination is always part of this experience, and the image of it. I research the role of the lens in this context and I make use of modern day digital techniques as well as analogue photography. From a self-made panoramic camera to 3D printing. Photography, traditionally, caries the burden of proof but is also a tool for preserving things. This element of preservation also occurs in printing 3D models; models which can only be made by using lens-based media. So what happens when you capture this world with a lens, to then make a 3D print out of it, to then make another photograph of the 3D print? These photographs depict a world that’s not there and thus become images without worlds. In the context of the Anthropocene, the human epoch, the mountain becomes a monument and the lens has the ability to preserve it. What was previously grand, godlike or sublime, can now only ever be an image.”