Reframing Generic Images: Landscape Photographs by Nihaal Faizal

Nihaal Faizal’s practice is invested in the idea of the copy. Through minimalist artistic interventions, he reframes the contexts of the images and objects that he appropriates. His subjects include media documents from popular and cultural memory, which he makes sense of in his work through particular gestural interventions. Faizal’s Landscape Photographs, for instance, present a series of seven default desktop backgrounds—featuring landscapes from the Windows XP operating system—as re-photographed images.

Faizal’s conceptual mode of photography responds to the histories of landscape photography, appropriation in art and post-internet art. The latter often subverts ideas of authorship and originality in the contemporary networked image cultures. These images are simultaneously iconic (easily recognised by popular audiences) and generic (they seem to be anonymous and not tied to any one location, time or context). It is interesting to note that photographs of exotic outdoor locations were chosen to be the default view on the personal computer, perhaps suggesting that the computer screen is a “window” into the vast world. Extracted from the operating system, Faizal printed and re-photographed these images using the built-in flash of his camera as the only source of light, thereby emphasising the flatness of these exotic landscapes as they exist on our desktops. The flash—visible as a continuing mark—points to their re-photographed nature and becomes an authorial gesture that the artist imposes on these otherwise ubiquitous images. Outside of the illuminated interface, these images become manifest as photographs—representing a shared global illusion, a digital world built on scenic, empty and idyllic imaginations of the real.

You can read more about Nihaal Faizal’s work here.

All images by Nihaal Faizal.

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