As so many of us confront multiple breakage points in the worlds we inhabit, our ability to form a coherent collective or individual vision of these sites and experiences feels impossible. The photographs in Fractional Landscape attempt to give viewers an analog for the resulting sense of anxiety, loss, and rootlessness.

 Kimmerling began the project in 2019, the year his mother died after her almost 20-year descent into Alzheimer’s. Although he knew that the notion of a unified world or self was mythical, watching that truth reveal itself inexorably in his mother brought it home with lasting emotional and psychological force. This ongoing project 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 rapid 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 in real time as he moves through and across these sites.

About the artist

George Kimmerling has exhibited his work at the Cooper Hewitt, the New Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, as well as numerous galleries and nonprofit spaces in the United States and internationally. His work is also represented in collections at the New Museum, Corcoran Gallery, West Collection, and Artists Space. Kimmerling has had residencies at PS1/MoMA, the MacDowell Colony, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and has taught/lectured at the University of Chicago, Corcoran School of Art, RISD, Hunter College, Syracuse University, McMaster University, and the Brecht Forum. 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 RISD. He also completed the Whitney Independent Study Program and was a graduate fellow at the NYU American Photography Institute.