Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce a new electronic publication from gallery artist Penelope Umbrico. “Moving Mountains (1850-2012)” is an ebook edition of Umbrico’s response to The Aperture Foundation‘s sixty year anniversary exhibition Aperture Remix. Umbrico uses contemporary photography techniques–specifically iPhone hardware and software–to make new photographs from the images of mountains that appear in the Aperture Masters of Photography books.
“Pointing my iPhone down at these mountains, the hallucinogenic effects of the camera apps’ filters blend with the disorienting effects of the iPhone’s gravity sensor. My mountains are unstable, mobile, changing with each iteration, re-mastered. Here is the biggest distance, the longest range. 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.” – Penelope Umrbico
The Aperture Foundation, created in 1952, did much to alter photography’s reputation at a time when it was not yet considered art. Sixty years later, for the current anniversary exhibition, Aperture Remix, the foundation commissioned ten photographers — Rinko Kawauchi, Vik Muniz, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Martin Parr, Doug Rickard, Viviane Sassen, Alec Soth, Penelope Umbrico, and James Welling — to revisit and respond to one of its publications, an issue of Aperture magazine or a photography book, that inspired their own work.
Penelope Umbrico’s “Moving Mountains,” a magnificent tableau of eighty-seven photographs of mountains responding to those in Aperture’s Masters of Photography series, were taken on her iPhone and manipulated using apps. In an age when anyone can take pictures with her iPhone and, within seconds, upload them to a myriad of virtual galleries, “Moving Mountains” represents a return to nature mediated through technology. Technology’s propagation of nature, however, doesn’t simplify Umbrico’s work; on the contrary, this is what makes it art.
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