Postcards from the Past

Publisher's description

Postcards from the Past by Elena Cremona is a powerful series of black and white images documenting the landscape of Joshua Tree, California.

"In relativity to human experience, landscapes are static things – their changes are slow, their ecosystems cyclical, and any given day is likely to unfold within them much the same as the one prior; it is us that moves through landscapes, shapes and colours them with our emotions, and remembers them ‘before’.

The last time Elena Cremona drove through the vast, alluvial plains of the Mojave Desert, her relationship was ending. Elena and her lover were oscillating at the very edges of one another’s orbits by the time these pictures were taken, and their parting was a sort of fracturing in slow motion across months and geographies. In many ways, the photographs here tell us that. Twenty black and white pictures of the creeping splits in the surfaces of rocks, and Joshua trees most often seen alone, their fronds twisting towards the sky; none of them are of him. She called them postcards for the way she was feeling as she took them, wanting to remain in place geographically, but return to another time."