In this body of photographic work titled Take a Picture made in collaboration with my mother, we took the Covid-19 lockdown as an opportunity to simulate travel to my mother’s dream destinations, which in turn took me down a rabbit hole of musings. The images are a response to the present environment and technology, and an exploration of the architecture of the internet today.

Travel (and its twin, Tourism) have been a large part of my life, because of my own nature & profession and also because of my mother’s profession as a travel agent. When I think of tourism, the hyperreal, HD backgrounds is the kind of images that immediately come to mind, mainly because of the fact that we are being bombarded by them all the time through advertising and social media. Industry, connectivity and media have turned places into these hyperreal objects of desire - into ‘destinations’. This is the same industry that turns experience into commodities, and portraits into performances to be communicated via social media. Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra & Simulation speaks of simulation and the hyperreal , saying that where reality was once the model or reference for creating simulations, now it’s the simulations that influence the way reality is shaped. It is becoming increasingly harder to tell apart reality from simulation, or if there is a difference at all. For example, we would now perhaps pick our travel destinations to have the opportunity to take a posed selfie with our cocktail and the beach because we would have seen this image and desired it as an ideal reality, and this ideal would have been originally constructed by the tourism industry.

This particular image is made by loading a google street view image as Zoom's virtual background on a Microsoft SurfacePro laptop . I was documenting my mother's routine around the house while merging it live into the street view images through a Zoom call, the screenshot command acting as the shutter and the computer's camera as the lens.

In Take a Picture the broken simulations & distorted satellite images create a tear in the fabric, facilitating collisions in time and deterritorialized experience. It is on one level a performance and on another level a documentation, both of our predicament and of our present stage of technology.