This series explores the tension between the natural and the artificial, challenging preconceptions of reality in an increasingly digital age, while also paying homage to my analog photographic roots.

Starting as an artist, I was very much a student of the New Topographics photographic movement, a style based on the photographer's neutral eye, famous for documenting the mundane structures of post-war America.

About 10 years ago, I started to become interested in employing various forms of manipulation and digital reconstruction in the work I was making. As a result, the works were able to become more expressive and introspective; a bridge between my subconscious and conscious.

Each image in the Synthetica series started as a medium format film photograph, then, through a process of addition, subtraction, collage, and endless reevaluation, a completed image is born. The foundation of a lot of the images in this series were taken over the last few years during road trips I took around the United States. From Daytona Beach to Death Valley, to Yellowstone National Park, these were both natural and man-made landscapes - places I’d never been to.

Embedded in this series are references to magical realism, Theosophy, artificial intelligence, the New Topographics, abstract expressionism & modernism.

(George Byrne, 2024)