America

Within contemporary Swiss photography, the work of Cécile Wick, who lives in Zurich, is considered a significant reference point. Following KopfFall, a collection of dreamily dark black-and-white pinhole photographs of heads, islands, and waterfalls, published in 1996 by Edition Patrick Frey, Cécile Wick has focused entirely on the theme of vast elemental landscapes in her latest work, America, but for the first time using digitally edited color photographs. During a study stay at the University of California, she travels by train across the American continent, capturing the passing panoramas from the same unremarkable viewpoint, a perspective that offers a mesmerizing intensity to the spectacle of plains, horizons, and mountain ranges, as well as the sparse signs of human civilization beneath the endless skies.