Photography Favorite: Horizons by Sze Tsung

Horizons is an ongoing series of photographs, begun in 2001, that depict expansive but detailed views of a broad spectrum of environments throughout the world. The locations of the images may be distant in geography (including Mexico City, Cairo, Banaras, Lisbon, Isle of Skye, Tokyo, and Inner Mongolia, for example), and diverse in subject matter (ranging from pastoral landscapes, to monuments, to everyday spaces, to rivers, to industrial zones, to cityscapes), yet the photographs are linked by a horizon which continues in the same position from image to image. When placed side by side, the images form an extended landscape composed of an accumulation of varied continents, cities, terrains, situations, textures, and colors.

Viewed in a continuous line, the images suggest an unfurled view of the surface of the globe. This view, however, does not necessarily correlate with conventional perceptions of proximity and distance, as places in these images that are seemingly unrelated or unconnected may find themselves adjoined. According to Leong, “the distances separating near from far, familiar from foreign, inside from outside, iconic from quotidian, extraordinary from mundane, picturesque from unsettling, are never constant.” The relationships and gradations between these opposites that are suggested by the photographs—and the fact that the images can be rearranged to form different landscapes and visual sequences—are meant to reflect the complex and perpetually transforming relationships between regions, cultures, and nations that give form to the contemporary world and that shape the experiences of each individual viewer.

Visit Sze Tsung Leong’s website here

Horizons (Color Photography) available at Yossi Milo Gallery in NYC