Gregory Eddi Jones

A visual poetic epic by Philadelphia-based artist Gregory Eddi Jones (born 1986), Promise Land reimagines the function of photography. Using T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land as its point of departure, the book presents a sequence of images, picking up where the poem left off nearly 100 years ago.
Borrowing from Eliot’s strategies of literary allusion and fragmented, collage-like narrative, Jones pulls inspiration from a range of photographic and artistic processes and traditions. Using stock and advertising photographs as his source material, he employs strategies of digital composite and physical ink manipulation to craft a new kind of picture—one untethered from the traditional burdens of photography’s relationships to truth. The resulting sequence forms a visual symphony, composed of nearly 200 images, in harmony with a fracturing, “post-truth” contemporary world.