The pandemic may have halted a whole lot of trips and projects for photographers, but that didn’t stop Italian-Swiss photographer Pascal Greco from pursuing alternative creative avenues.
At the cancellation of his March 2020 Iceland trip where he was slated to shoot the continuation of his previous project No Cliché, Greco discovered the Playstation 4 game Death Stranding during lockdown. Finding the landscapes in the video game reminiscent of Iceland, a new project quickly took shape: If he couldn’t physically travel and take photos of Iceland, he’d do it virtually instead.
Taking the constraints of a video game and using them as a playground for experimentation, Greco’s series Place(s) are shot through the lens of the game’s popular Photo-Mode. The evocative, mysterious landscapes Greco carefully frames into Polaroid-sized digital images — the same format as the series he was supposed to shoot before lockdown — challenge the concept of both in-game and traditional photography by setting a point where the two cross paths. “Place(s) embraces its codes and plays with the ambiguity of an anonymous landscape made familiar,” the photographer says of his work. Yet another astounding pandemic project, Greco’s series is escapism at its best.
Pascal Greco is a Geneva-based Italian-Swiss photographer whose work has been featured in The Guardian, Vice, Monocle, Fast Company and Fisheye, among others. Follow his work on Instagram.
Place(s) has been published in book form by Chambre Noire, and will be available in bookshops across Europe from October 18, 2021. Preorder here.
Images © Pascal Greco