The most recent and ongoing project, by the Danish artist, Adam Jeppesen (b. 1978)
Headlines consists of photographs shot during an eighteen-month expedition from the North Pole to the South Pole through the American continents. The journey will result in the production of approximately twenty-five pictures, giving an artistic, scientific and historical account of the complex interrelationship between geographical regions and societal impacts on a large continental scale.
Jeppesen selects specific sites where changes is about to occur because of human impact and larger environmental alterations. With a GPS, the exact geographical point is registered and subsequently photographed. The photographs draw upon the Western landscape tradition, placing a small figure in an overwhelming natural vista. Beneath each photograph, global news stories are written in small letters, giving an account of events from the exact day of the photo shooting. Using small letters, the viewer must choose to either focus on the photograph or read the text.
With Jeppesen’s focus on the locality of the photographs, combined with his global perspective in the news headlines beneath the photograph and the scope of the expedition as such, Headlines becomes a testimony to the abstract experience of existing in a global as well as a local, modern world at the same time. Confronted with his works of art, we, the viewers, are forced to make a choice between text and picture, between the larger or smaller perspective, thus acknowledging the limits of our own understanding.