In her latest endeavour, artist Penelope Umbrico’s focus was set on mountains, an all known symbol of expertise among photographers. Her series Moving Mountains (1850-2012) was created with an iphone with whom she ‘re-photographs’ a series of mountain shots by the likes of Henry Cartier-Bresson, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Edward Weston.
The surprises behind her work system don’t stop here. With the ‘re-photographs’, Umbrico chooses different photograph apps in her iphone, such as Pixl-o-matic, Afterlight, and Plastic Bullet Camera, and modifies the photos applying all the filters she can get her hands on.
She then processes all of the photographs, a total of 6000 images that came out of the 19 originals she used. As she explains, “Pointing my iPhone down at these mountains, the hallucinogenic effects of the camera apps’s filters blend with the disorienting effects of the iPhone’s gravity sensor. My mountains are unstable, mobile, changing with each iteration, re-mastered”.
“I present a dialogue between distance and proximity, limited and unlimited, the singular and the multiple, the fixed and the moving, the master and the copy. I propose an inverse correlation between the number of photographs that exist of mountains at any one time, and the stability of photography at that time.”
The project is available in eBook format for the iphone and ipad for free, and for the print fans, in a lovely limited edition book by ivory press.