Jungle Check
Jungle Check is a collaborative project between Cristina de Middel and Kalev Erickson, published by RM in 2018. It turns a critical eye on the studio-backdrop and postcard conventions long used to picture the tropics in vernacular and commercial photography.
The two photographers work with the recurring device of the painted or printed jungle backdrop, a stock prop of colonial-era and mid-century studio portraiture. They trace how a generic image of dense foliage came to stand in for entire regions and peoples in the popular imagination. The 120-page softcover, with an accompanying text by photo-historian Luce Lebart, sets new photographs alongside appropriated studio and postcard imagery to expose the artifice behind the genre.
De Middel, a Spanish photographer best known for The Afronauts (2012), works consistently at the boundary between documentary and fiction, using staged and appropriated imagery to question photography's authority as evidence. Erickson's practice similarly moves between found and constructed images. Jungle Check extends both photographers' shared interest in the visual tropes that photography inherits and repeats without questioning.
