Interview with First Look 2025 artist Ira Garber: KINETIC LANDSCAPES

We took a moment to dive into the artistic processes behind the artists in First Look 2025 to learn about their process, projects, and what inspires them to create work.

(Panopticon Gallery) Were there any unexpected results that changed the way you think about your own work?

(Garber) My work has been inspired by motion, and separately, inspired by stillness. I had been treating them as two directions, working on both the tranquility of Alpine climbing as well as the momentary weightlessness of skateboarding. With the introduction of multi-image composite strips, I thought I would try and merge the two directions closer to one another, to get past the idea these are contradictory states. I hadn’t seen these as problems to approach at the same time.

I also found I was introducing a perception of motion where there had been very little, through moving the camera angle within each composite. This way of working within a perspective-changing composite has been stronger than a single image, for my work, and it seems to amplify what I could achieve in the single frame.

How does the unpredictability of your process influence your relationship with photography as a medium?

I completely accept the element of chance in the building of these images, not knowing in advance what the overlapping images could create. I am able to draw on my prior work as a direction in approaching the various scenes. Photography can integrate a layering of images of buildings and fields which don’t exist without the camera. I like that the process and the print take me to a place I hadn’t predetermined or defined, and it pushes me to create a visual system with its own language.

Was this series something you planned on creating when shooting, or was it a happy accident turned project?

I did plan this as a project, which began with aerial and Alpine climbing landscapes. The multi-image direction didn’t work at all with the angled summits and glaciers though, but it started to make more sense when I lowered the altitude and worked in Big Sur with its amazing fields and hills. Adding in urban landscapes expanded the project into topography far from the first summits, but which still expresses an emotion about places and our relationship to them. These environments are not of our making, but this is where we exist, and this project influenced me and offered further discovery of our landscapes.