Drew Nikonowicz: This World and Others Like It

Drew Nikonowicz: This World and Others Like It

From the earliest geographical survey images of the American West made by William Henry Jackson (1843–1942), to the iconic square-format photographs of the lunar surface produced by the Apollo 11 mission, the medium of photography has long been associated with the discovery and documentation of uncharted territory. In his series, This World and Others Like It, artist Drew Nikonowicz draws upon the language of nineteenth-century survey images to investigate the role of the explorer in present times. 

Seamlessly merging computer-generated images with large format analog photographs, Nikonowicz explores the contemporary landscape without discriminating between images born in virtual reality and those made in a more traditional fashion. The series navigates a monochromatic world that is both vaguely familiar and entirely unknown—vast, mountainous landscapes are presented alongside undecipherable objects and uncanny moments. Nikonowicz renders each image in a consistently straightforward aesthetic regardless of how it came to be—some are extracted as screen shots from online video games, others are modeled in CAD, and others were shot on film in mountainous regions across the United States. Brought together, the images acknowledge the ever-complicated relationship between photography and reality, and draw into focus the disconnect between the physical reality that surrounds us and the one we experience through the lens of technology.

Drew Nikonowicz is an artist and image-maker based in Saint Louis, Missouri. He holds a BFA degree from the University of Missouri. His work has been featured by numerous publications, including FOAM Magazine, Magenta Magazine, Humble Arts Foundation, LensCulture, and Der Greif. Nikonowicz’s photographs have been exhibited globally at venues including the Athens Photo Festival, Aperture Foundation in New York, Unseen Amsterdam, The Armory Show in New York, and the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, among others. He has been the recipient of several prominent awards including the Aperture Portfolio Prize (2015), the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award (2016), and in 2017, he completed a one-year residency at Fabrica Research Centre in Treviso, Italy. Nikonowicz owns and operates Standard Cameras, a startup company specializing in the production of 3D printed large format cameras.

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