Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

I've been following Alia Malley's incredibly beautiful work since meeting her in 2010. We both share a mutual passion for photographing the landscape and exploring our relationship to it, so I've chosen to highlight a couple of Alia's projects that continue to resonate with me: Southland (2009-2011) and Captains of the Dead Sea (2013-2014). Her photographs have a musical quality to them that remind me of ballads, inviting the viewer on a journey to a distant land, but in this case, places close to her own backyard. Alia lives in Los Angeles where she makes most of her photographs, acknowledging that "living and working in the shadow of Hollywood has made me acutely aware of the cinematic use of landscape as »location.« Alia kindly provided me with some context for these two bodies of work. She writes, »I consider the Captains of the Dead Sea project to follow Southland in a logical trajectory of my broader interests as an artist: investigating the role of story and place, and considering how landscape can be situated between documentary and narrative.« With Southland, she was interested in how historical representations of landscapes could be applied to describe present-day Los Angeles. »I consider these photos revisionist landscapes. They exist in the space between traditional, historical representations of landscape and vehemently realist photographs—they are documents of our time, showing us what this place look liked on a certain day at a certain time. The generic, lack of specificity of these »in-between« sites is equally compelling in the larger conversation; they don’t necessarily read as Los Angeles, or California, or even America. They could be anywhere. Which they may as well be; these remnant landtracts are everywhere.« In her recent project, Captains of the Dead Sea, Alia explores how our common experience is mediated by the way in which the material world has been previously filmed or photographed. »I’m specifically invested in how landscape is used cinematically, and how it can inhabit a role within an implied fictional narrative, albeit non-linear and deliberately unresolved. I go to Death Valley and realize that it »looks like« Mars… or the Moon… or a scene from Star Wars. With the use of newsprint, the Captains project also takes on issues of object-hood and artifact in contemporary photography, which, in the realm of the ubiquitous jpeg, is a deep and vast space that I will continue to work within.« Check out more of Alia's work here: www.aliamalley.com