VISTA

Colin Snapp's VISTA is a photographic study of the American scenic overlook, the roadside platform built and framed for tourists to take in a view.

Rather than photographing landscape directly, Snapp turns his camera on the apparatus of looking itself: guardrails, viewing platforms, hands holding cameras and phones, and the vistas beyond them, already composed and captioned for consumption before the visitor arrives. The book, published as No. 5 in the Etudes Books series by Editions Bessard, is bound in cloth with the title, artist and ISBN printed directly on the cover rather than a dust jacket, in keeping with the series' spare, essayistic format. Sequenced without extended text, it builds a quiet argument about the American landscape as something mediated and pre-framed long before it is photographed.

Snapp is an American artist working across photography, film and sculpture whose work frequently returns to landscape, tourism and the built structures that shape how nature is seen. VISTA sits alongside his other photographic projects as a compact study within that larger, sustained interest in mediated land.