Peter Funch, The Imperfect Atlas, 2020

Peter Funch’s latest project addresses the passage of time and man’s continued and evolving effects on the environment. Appropriately, Funch explores the Anthropocene by employing a photographic technique invented at the height of the Industrial Revolution, that of RGB tri-color separations. Featuring images captured during Funch’s various trips through the Northern Cascade Mountain Range, the book is an imperfect recreation of landscapes and wilderness as depicted in the archive of vintage postcards and ephemera of the region the artist amassed throughout his travels. Using maps and satellite imagery to locate the position where the postcard images were created, Funch recaptures the landscapes across three distinct exposures via red, green, and blue filters, transposed one on top of the other. As time collapses across the recreated landscapes, features and events are revealed or obscured by each successive filter, speaking to what Funch calls “our blindness to the consequences we are creating.”

The Imperfect Atlas brings to light a dialogue on man’s severe and accelerated impact on nature, a solemn and mystifying visual archive of a wilderness the future may not behold.