George Kimmerling began Fractional Landscape in 2019, a few months before his mother died after her almost 20-year descent into Alzheimer’s. Although he didn’t set out to create images about that time in their lives, the photographs nevertheless spoke to it in a fundamental way.

As an ongoing project, Fractional Landscape attempts to offer an analog to the sense of anxiety, loss, and rootlessness many of us feel as we confront multiple breakage points in the worlds we inhabit and find it impossible to form a coherent vision of ourselves and our experiences. The work also aims to construct an expression of place grounded in Kimmerling’s queer experience and the fracturing and fragmentation that attend it—a sense of dislocation and an ongoing need for psychological and emotional wayfinding.

Here, Kimmerling works against an approach to landscape photography that emphasizes grand vistas; a sense of access, exploration, and visual ownership of sites; and a technical, hyperreal perfection made possible in part by innovations in AI and digital imaging. He shoots the series using the panorama function of an iPhone but in ways that break the smooth, unified, 360-degree images it is designed to produce. The resulting distortions, fault lines, mashups, and fractures are all made in-camera as he moves through and across these sites.

About the artist

George Kimmerling has a BA in philosophy from Stony Brook University, a BFA in photography from the Corcoran College of Art, and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. He attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and was a graduate fellow at the NYU American Photography Institute.

Kimmerling’s work has been exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and numerous other venues across the United States and internationally. He has had residencies in the PS1/MoMA National Studio Program, at the MacDowell Colony, and through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. His work and is represented in both public and private collections, including at the New Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art archives, and West Collection. He has taught/lectured at the University of Chicago, Syracuse University, RISD, Hunter College, Corcoran College of Art, McMaster University, and the Brecht Forum.