Luke Caspar Pearson, Little Books of Los Santos, 2015

Ed Ruscha’s photo books from the 1960s and 1970s all documented specific typologies of the Californian environment of that time. From gasoline stations to pools to parking lots, most publications analyse the American landscape through an austere use of photography, employed as an almost scientific tool. Often referred to as New Topographics, this school of photographic documentation featured formal, black and white images of the urban landscape. Luke Caspar Pearson was inspired by Ed Ruscha’s artist books to screenshot the game world of GTA V, attempting to reproduce the photographer’s subjects and style. Pearson’s game images are collected and published in little books that are direct reproductions of Ruscha’s original publications, namely Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass.

While other artists have re-enacted the photographic series of Ed Ruscha in GTA V, Pearson does not stop at the copy and playing with the blurry boundaries between photographic documentation and photorealistic simulation. The artist extends the work of Ruscha by imagining two new possible series within the game: Cars on Hills and Many Mission Markers. Here Pearson attempts to employ the same 'deadpan' photographic style to elements that are specific to GTA V and exist within a virtual world, and which would be improbable or impossible outside of the video game screen. Through this approach, the Little Books of Los Santos show the development of a photographic practice in relation to the game object, moving from the replica of the analogue medium to an approach and a mindset that investigates the specificities of the virtual world through image-making.

If the photographers of the New Topographics attempted to capture a man-altered landscape by formally isolating and collecting typologies of structures and architectures that modified the landscapes of the twentieth century, Pearson introduces something that could be seen as a New New Topographics. Screenshotting vehicles on hillsides and up mountains that betray the cartoonish physics that regulate Los Santos, he shows the elements of a different landscape that is created by algorithmic simulations. Trapped between the derivative forms of its source system and the digital properties of game software, the images of Cars on Hills reveal the shift from an industrial society to a post-industrial one, and to a place where gas stations serve vehicles that do not run out of petrol.

More by Luke Caspar Pearson: alephograph.com