- Artist or Maker
- Amir Zaki
United States, active Southern California, born 1974 - Title
- Coastline Cliffside 16
- Date Made
- 2012
- Medium
- Inkjet print (pigment based)
- Dimensions
- Frame: 58 × 97 × 2 in. (147.32 × 246.38 × 5.08 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2013.85
- Collecting Area
- Photography
- Curatorial Notes
Coastline Cliffside 16 is from Amir Zaki’s body of work Time Moves Still, for which he used a GigaPan camera to make large panoramic images of the California coastline. Originally engineered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and Google, to capture Mars via NASA rovers, this digital system stitches together hundreds of singular images. The GigaPan often determines the specifics of focus and depth of field, creating pictures that are eerily exact, yet different from the human eye’s interpretation of the subject. Thus, due in part to our inability to determine what is real and what is digitally constructed, the resultant photographs are often unsettling in their clarity.
In Time Moves Still, the title itself a referent to the temporality of technological and ecological movements, Zaki captures instances in which human intervention marks the landscape. In this photograph, crisscrossing stairs and ladders tenuously punctuate a hillside, remaining in place through creative erosion prevention. The attempt to claim ownership of this perilous cliff and deny others access to the coast is at the heart of Zaki’s narrative. In photographic terms, his work can be aligned with that of nineteenth-century survey photographers of California and the American West as seen in the minutely detailed imagery of Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson.
Eve Schillo
2021