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POLIS AMERIKANOS
(American City / American Polity

The image above is a digital "collage" of several hundred individual pictures and picture fragments--most taken with a Nikon digital camera. I spent about three months constructing the image in Photoshop. The original image file is almost 300 megs--28,312 pixels wide, by 3600 pixels in height. Printed at 300 dpi, the printed picture, which hangs in my office, is about 95" by 12".

I first starting making these "surreallegories" in imaging software then available in the early '90s, and my first website in 1995 included several that I had constructed a few pixels at a time. Today's imaging software and storage capacities make working with much larger images feasible.

I intend this picture to be a snapshot of American life in this infuriating decade. I chose four buildings in my Portland, ME neighborhood to define four satirical targets--a hotel (sex and tourism), a bank (the power of commerce and money), City Hall (the confluence of religion and politics), and an antiques store (the commodification of art and history). There are scores of "jokes and secrets" built into the image, some "R-rated". If you have the patience to look for them, you'll find a large number of public figures and celebrities, public buildings, swatches of paintings and movies, a variety of erotic recreations, and other items of dubious relevance and provenance. Each building is pasted together from a jumble of disparate images. Each figure, shadow, and almost every reflection in every window was pasted in--indeed, the reflections in the bank windows are actually 30 sequenced photos of the actual construction of the building upon which they appear. The main difficulty in such work is to learn how to manipulate, resize, color, distort, and shadow each image to make a simulacrum sufficiently convincing in perspective to let a viewer imagine that it could be one panoramic photographic image. When all else failed, I simply drew in needed details.

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