Promise Land   Promise Land   

Gregory Eddi Jones is a photographic artist, writer, publisher, and educator based between Philadelphia and New York.

Jones' photographic work interrogates politics of common cultural images through strategies of appropriation and re-authorship. Much of his practice is defined by visual criticism, dark humor, cultural commentary, and the updating of photographic traditions for the current day.

He has exhibited his work internationally and throughout the United States, and his self-published books are held in numerous institutional photobook collections, including libraries at Museum of Modern Art, The Met, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Yale University, among many others. Jones was named a Foam Talent in 2018, was a Paul Huf Award nominee in 2021.

Jones’s work has been published in numerous international publications, including The Guardian, VICE, British Journal of Photography, Foam Magazine, Wallpaper, Blind, Humble Arts Foundation, Creators Project, Fisheye, Revista Balam, and IMA Magazine, among others.  

In addition to his photographic practice, Jones has contributed writing to Foam, Afterimage, Paper Journal, LensCulture, and Unseen Magazine. He is the Founding Editor & Publisher of In the In-Between, an independent platform for 21st century photographic authorship.

American artist Gregory Eddi Jones’ Promise Land is a visual poetic epic that usurps photographic convention to confront what the artist considers the spiritual poverty of common cultural pictures. The book uses T.S. Eliot’s Modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922), as its point of departure, to create a sequence of images that picks up where the poem left off nearly 100 years ago.

Using common stock and advertising photographs as his source material, Jones employs 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. In doing so, he cuts into the hollow cores of empty visual promises and injects a potential for multitudes of associative games. Borrowing from Eliot’s strategies of literary allusion and fragmented, collage-like narrative, Jones pulls a range of inspirations, from folk pictures and fairy-tale illustrations to surrealism, mythology, common advertising tropes, and photo-historical traditions.

The resulting sequence forms a visual symphony, composed of nearly 200 images, in harmony with a fracturing, “post-truth” contemporary world. Promise Land revisits what many consider to be the greatest poem of the 20th century, while simultaneously reimagining what photography can be and do.

Promise Land will be Published in September, 2021 by Self Publish, Be Happy.