American born in New Jersey in 1992, Lindsay Godin approaches photography at the age of 13 working at the local photography studio, and she never stopped. From her teenage years through undergraduate education she’s used photography therapeutically, everything to her, places, emotions, or social issues, always started from observation. The initial personal application where taking images was “a way to explore my feelings to better understand myself” shifted to the external world when she got accepted into the graduated school at the University of Iowa in 2015. She was documenting social issues related to the American heritage and strong sense of nationalism, photographing lots of exterior and interior spaces “which contained a lot of cultural subtitles revolving around capitalistic and public power”. In her project History is written by the winners she shows what is called the ‘Americanism’ taught and continuously inculcated since primary school.
Afterward she started moving from a personal vision towards a wider exploration of the world around, and even more. After the MFA in photography in 2018 Lindsay started her career as a professor at Nevada University where she got completely captured by the western American landscape. Her projects became more a documentation of the land and the human relationship with nature, where the boundaries among men, technology and planet earth are always pushed towards the limit, or know no limitations.
Futurisms is a black and white research started in 2019 and still ongoing. At the beginning she was using colours but the monochrome atmosphere suddenly makes the ambient with no connection with the present. The black and white increases the ambiguity of images and landscapes don’t closely resemble planet earth. Those are deserted and uncanny where some sort of passage is perceptible but impossible to understand where it comes from.
The first images of the series captured in the summer 2019 are Unidentified objects and Land markings where she found a sense “human imprinting in an untouched place”. In expanses of bare land there are only random objects and rock formations that seem so primitive and also so connected to a future yet to be seen and discovered. The imaginary created by the photographer is suspended between a premonition of the future and memories from the past, in fact some influences come from the archeological and pre civilisation pictures of the 19th century’s Western Frontier.
She discovers signs of futurism everywhere during her explorations, picturing and counting them: a group of enthusiast home-makers of rockets launched one in the middle of the land, the image is Rocket and “shed light on mankind’s propensity to explore new terrains, like (again) the American Western Frontier, but with the use of powerful aerospace technology”. Human intervention on nature is something inevitable, as it was for the American capitalism, the winner upon planet earth has to be a man, because he’s the only one easily defeating even territories where life is tough to support and sustain. Even extra territories, “seeing this technology gives me the assumption that humankind will have total access to explore and imprint extraterrestrial land in a near-distant future”.
Lindsay’s observations of Utah and Nevada’s territories become not so distant from the images created by rovers landed on the Moon and Mars. Human gaze has reached long distant territories since the invention of the telescope, signs and signals of previous lives and potential for new ones have been found thanks to technology. In Fututrisms some signals depicted are, for example, the targets on specific points of the desert where humans will explore and dominate, but also destroy: there is some sort of fascination together with horror facing how destructive humankind is on this planet. From inserting targets and tonality inversion layers the American photographer starts a new way of building images, using new digital possibilities where pictures are not only findings but they can be generated from scratch. Planet X is a 3-dimensional rendering produced from one of the photographs in the project, where the white planet-moon on a black background could be like any other moon or planet collected by machines observations of the universe. Machines that are coded by software developed by people so that “the machine’s gaze is essentially our gaze, but through different lens”.
Lindsay Godin produced a universal and suspended system, a new planet connected with what man will be able to create and calculate in the future but still incontaminate and full of possibilities. Futurisims now contains 30 images, but there will be more: renderings and astrophotography captured by local observatories, to be turned, at the end, into a photo book, a map of this future outer space system.
