ALEXIS MARTINO: The Collapsing Panorama

ALEXIS MARTINO: The Collapsing Panorama by Galina KurlatApril 4, 2024

Alexis Martino’s ongoing series, The Collapsing Panorama, compacts the coastal landscape with her human subjects, revealing a fabled tableau, mostly photographed from above. These fictional scenes occur in the small town where she lives, utilizing the inhabitants as subjects. The topographical images distance the viewer, eliminating the drama of everyday emotion and replacing it with a vast voyeuristic panorama. These photographs rely on contemporary technology while illuminating the loneliness unleashed by our reliance on it. Throughout the series there is a pervasive isolation of the subject, either against a vast earth or watery bodies. They float or recline, receding into the landscape. Although these photographs are remarkably clear, there is a loss of human connection. The vast distances make it impossible to read their emotion; they hide in plain sight. The Collapsing Panorama, questions who photographs are made for; what once was a documentation of community and family has now become an oppressive cult of self-presentation, continuous and omnipresent.

The Collapsing Panorama is an ongoing series examining the erasure of community as individuals in the 21st century engage in an obsessive presentation of self. Shot with a drone and utilizing subjects from the small town in which I live, The Collapsing Panorama comprises a set of panoramic stills composed at overhead angles, compressing human and non-human subjects into highly detailed maps. In some instances the subject is almost impossible to see, suggesting that although 21st visual technologies possess incredible clarity they are unable to capture the emotions, desires, and connections that underpin the human experience. Technology is not necessarily the villain in this series, however. In The Collapsing Panorama my human subjects willingly give themselves up to exhibition and surveillance. In photograph after photograph, these individuals engage in violent dramatic roleplay – frozen in kidnapping plots or posing on cemetery altars – gleefully exposed to the heavens. Ultimately, The Collapsing Panorama documents how readily humans lose themselves in easily consumable visual fantasies, skewing and impoverishing their lived experiences.

Alexis Martino earned her BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design before studying Cinematography at the American Film Institute (AFI). From 1999 to the present, she has worked at the Ross School in East Hampton, NY, where she established the campus Photography Department and served as Dean of Media Studies and Technology. She currently serves as Director of Ross School Field Academy, helming a program in which students from grades 7-12 work intensively over multiple weeks as they explore a topic or theme of interest to them. Field Academy courses take place all over the world, from Bali to Iceland, from Alaska to Zimbabwe. In this capacity, Martino has led student photography workshops around the world in locations such as Cuba, Africa, New Zealand, Kenya, and countless others. Her endless search for stories drives her to seek them out wherever they may be. A storyteller and natural leader, Martino embraces the strengths of both new media and old to inspire her work. As a contemporary artist, she believes that having a strong command of all the techniques and technologies available today is essential. Martino’s work explores unity, understanding, and discovery through storytelling in order to erode boundaries and the barriers to knowledge of the self and others.