Martin Newth – Event Horizons: A Return Without Place

In his Event Horizons series, the author works with images of simulated landscapes from game worlds whose composition, use of light, and spatial depth deliberately echo the tradition of landscape photography from the turn of the 20th century. This lineage is, however, compromised by the fact that these are photographs of a constructed landscape within a digital game environment. The use of an analogue large-format camera, hands-on engagement with the material, and self-development of the film further accentuate this ambivalence. When viewing the resulting photographs, it can be difficult to resist a sense of nostalgia, amplified by the context of the COVID-era lockdowns and the associated experience of movement in constrained, often digitally mediated landscapes. 

This nostalgic tone, however, is neither regressive nor sentimental. In keeping with the spirit of photography as a medium, the work underscores the fact that any immediate relationship to reality is inseparable from mediation, and that the image can no longer be understood as an imprint of the world, but rather as a technologically shaped trace of it. The project thus does not articulate an opposition between nature and technology, nor between old and new media, but rather their fundamental inseparability. Analogue photography, with its dust, scratches and home-mixed developers, does not form an antithesis to smooth digital simulation, but instead tempers it with a crucial deceleration and sense of embodiment.

Heyth’s accompanying essay, Event Horizons: Survival, Technology, Photography and Phantom Pain, references the story of a boy who saves up for a video game to reunite with his family in its virtual world. In this instance, the video-game environment does not function as an escape from reality, but as a space in which that which has been irretrievably lost in the real world can return. This motif is reminiscent of the novel Únava materiálu (Material Fatigue) by Czech author Marek Šindelka, in which we follow a refugee boy searching for his brother. His journey has the structure of a game sequence, but unlike in a video game, his body truly wears down, bleeds, and fails. Through these examples, we see that material experience and the fatality of reality are paradoxically only apprehended through their mediated forms.

The landscapes of Event Horizons mark a return of the staged desire for the landscape genre that, in an era mediated by digital (and previously analogue) technology, has long since been lost. This return is not a call to revive landscape photography, but more of an echo burdened by the awareness of its inevitable loss. The work offers a quintessentially photographic expression that recursively demonstrates that the photograph’s search for a place of immediate contact with reality can only be pursued through the image itself.

Text | Barbora Trnková

IMAGES CAPTIONS

1 | Martin Newth, Estuary, SotF 
2 | Martin Newth, Sunset, RDR2
3 | Martin Newth, Mountain, SotF
4 | Martin Newth, Cliff, SotF
5 | Martin Newth, Waterfall, SotF
6 | Martin Newth, Leaf, SotF
7 | Martin Newth, Valley, RDR2
8 | Martin Newth, Nocturn, RDR2