Los Angeles based artist J. Frede is currently working on a very interesting project: he buys old photographs at flea markets, rearranges them almost like puzzle pieces so that they form fictional landscapes, and then he frames them with specially designed picture frames. He calls this unusual style of a photo collage, which at least to me is completely new, “Fiction Landscapes“.
© J. Frede
© J. Frede
The special thing about these photo collages is the fact that the single photographs forming the fictional landscapes were mostly taken in totally different locations and often they date back to different decades in the 20th century.
With this project the artist seeks to analyze two phenomena. On the one hand, the individual meaning of an image and its function as an “anchor” in our memory. For example, you can’t remember the landscape in a photo even though you know that this particular photo was taken during the honeymoon, from which you can recall many memories, even seemingly unimportant details, only by looking at the picture. For anyone else such a photo has no meaning at all because it won’t fulfill the anchor function. On the other hand, Frede wants to illustrate how similarly people can behave and perceive the world around them, even if they live or have lived neither at the same place nor in the same time period.
