Event Horizons a body of large-scale photographic works, first exhibited in Boundaries: Doppelgänger at the Ladislav Sutnar Gallery, Pilsen, Czechia, in 2025. Comprising 30 photographs, 18 of which formed the large-scale installation in Pilsen, the project brings together analogue photographic traditions and contemporary digital environments.
Martin Newth’s black-and-white photographs are paradoxically rooted in both history and the digital age. Although visually resonant with “hard-won” landscape images associated with figures such as Ansel Adams, produced through physical effort in remote terrains, these works are made without leaving home. Each landscape is sourced from the artificially constructed worlds of contemporary computer and video-console games. Using an antique 10×8 camera aimed directly at a television screen, the project shifts the locus of authorship from the roaming photographer to the teams of game designers whose AI-generated terrains emulate the “almost real”.
Conceived during the Covid lockdowns, the series extends a homemade, materially experimental approach to both process and chemistry. Drawing on online sustainable photography communities, Newth uses household materials and garden plants, including rosemary, coffee and vitamin C, to produce the developer chemistry for his negatives. Long exposures, ranging from two to thirty minutes and made on partially fogged, out-of-date photographic paper, deliberately slow the frenetic speed of gameplay and embed fingerprints, dust and light leaks into the final prints. These artefacts foreground the physical act of making and create a layered dialogue between the real and the invented, the analogue and the digital.
Alongside the monochrome landscapes are tightly focused colour images depicting the domestic ingredients used in the DIY chemistry. These micro-studies provide a vivid counterpoint to the enigmatic game worlds and draw attention to the site of production: the home. Taken together, the works explore materiality, time and place, inviting viewers not to connect with a distant landscape but to reflect on processes of construction, technological, chemical and imaginative, and on how images mediate our understanding of environment and place.
