Sam Elkind - Photography

Why confine photography to rectangles? We don’t see in rectangles, and our world is not rectangular. When we survey landscapes that interest us, certain features – landforms, clouds, manufactured components, textures, contrasts – excite us, and these same features activate landscape images. Why not stress these elements and diminish or omit less active components of a landscape? This body of work seeks to exploit the visual habit of landing on certain points of particular interest in a landscape, as it abandons the rectangle (or the square) container for the image. It blends changes in perspective as different parts of a scene come into view, assembling a survey from smaller segments. The resulting images challenge our assumptions about photographs, while building a sense of space out of the irregular boundaries. These images echo our own habits of vision, becoming as much psychological representations as visual depictions.