Mark Swope

Mark Swope is a photographer. He lives near Los Angeles, California, a land where American myths are deeply rooted, and where they have slowly turned to dust under the watchful eye of many photographers. An America of rampant urbanization, of “non-places”, extensively portrayed by American photography in the 1970s. Mark Swope’s work, although dating from the 1990’s and 2000’s, is very much in line with the investigations of photographers displayed together at the now-famous New Topographics exhibition, hosted in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, featuring artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, Nicholas Nixon, Robert Adams… The exhibition was a turning point in the history of photography in that it witnessed, in a deliberately documentary style, changes in the contemporary landscape. All of Swope’s work reflects the same interest in places dominated by artefact. Nature, when it does appear in the image frame, has been geometrically “pruned”. The artefact itself - whether work of architecture or billboard - is depicted as an obsolete relic of a bygone age, where all that remains intact is the palm-tree lining of the city’s broad avenues.