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Promise Land, a visual poetic epic by American artist Gregory Eddi Jones, usurps photographic convention to confront what the artist considers a spiritual poverty in common cultural pictures. The book uses T.S. Eliot"s Modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922), as its point of departure, and is positioned as a sequence of pictures that picks up where The Waste Land left off nearly 100 years ago.

Using common stock and advertising photographs as his source material, Jones uses strategies of digital composite and physical ink manipulation to craft a new kind of picture that is untethered from the traditional burdens of photography"s relationships to truth and belief. Borrowing from Eliot"s strategies of literary allusion and fragmented, collage-like narrative, Jones pulls inspiration from a range of influences including folk pictures and fairy-tale illustrations, to surrealism, stories of myth, common advertising tropes, and photo-historical traditions. 

The resulting project sums up to a visual symphony that harmonizes with a fracturing, "post-truth" contemporary world. Promise Land revisits what many consider to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century while simultaneously reimagining what photography can be.

Promise Land was published in Fall 2021 by SPBH Editions: https://selfpublishbehappy.com/