Gregory Eddi Jones is raising funds to publish his upcoming book Promise Land with Self Publish Be Happy and we think you should support it.

Promise Land is a 200-page, epic visual poem that reinterprets T.S. Eliot’s classic “The Waste Land” through a contemporary lens. Picking up where the poem left off nearly a century ago, Gregory Eddi Jones jacks and manipulates stock images and video stills, into unreal, sometimes cartoonish, sometimes pictorial riffs on the clichéd experiences they represent.

Chirping birds, boring cat photos, clouds, rainbows, and other dentist-office-poster images fade and break apart at varying degrees on the page, often looking like a marriage of classic impressionism and amateur “Microsoft-paint-ism”…. and that’s precisely the point.

For Jones, the cheapness of these photographic conventions and how he treats them reflect what he considers the “spiritual poverty of common cultural pictures.” En masse, they envision photography’s potential to do more than just regurgitate a simulation of these base experiences.

Nearing the end of his Kickstarter campaign (hey readers, you should help fund this!) I caught up with Greg to learn more and wrap my head around his wild work…

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Gregory Eddi Jones

In his recent series, Dwelling, Matthew Cronin scans and warps 1970s JC Penny catalog photographs to create a sense of uneasiness on the construction of domestic scenes.

In 2018, Matthew Cronin came across an archive of large-format 1970s JC Penny catalog transparencies. Like much commercial photography then and now, these slick, elaborately lit commercial interior shots created a stylized illusion of domesticity to sell beds, sofas, and other household items.

Drawn to their peculiar, dated fantasies, Cronin scans, layers and subtly manipulates each image to subvert their narratives. Fake shadows appear where they shouldn’t and don’t where they should. Patterns mysteriously bleed from the fabric into other surfaces and formerly “inviting” interiors now hover in purgatory - somewhere between comfort and terror. Digital specters are clear and constant reminders that we are seeing their strings.

Having spent time with his work when I selected it for PhotNola’s “Currents” exhibition at the Odgen Museum of Southern Art last December, I reached out to Cronin to learn more about the artist and his work.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Matthew Cronin

Help This Wild Contemporary Photographic Interpretation of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" Get Published

Subverting The Cold, Domestic Glow of 1970s JC Penny Catalog Photos