My father, Zbigniew, never visited me in Ireland as he was afraid of flying. He was very familiar with Ireland, however. As a frequent user of Google Street View, he knew the colour of the front door of the house that I had lived in Dublin. 
The idea that technology allows us to see at any time the places that we have never been to before, was the starting point of Let’s Take the Wrong Way Home.

This is a collection of photomontage works that are representations of landscapes that do not exist. Each piece is a combination of photographs from both places that I call home, Poland and Ireland and in combination, each image constitutes an unfulfilled dream for those two places to become one. Using Google Street View, I went to my hometown of Wrocław to document places of great personal significance to me. The photographs shot from the screens were taken using 5x4” black & white sheets of negative film, then hand processed and printed in the darkroom. By tearing and gluing they were then combined with darkroom prints of Irish natural landscapes. Collages that emerged, were photographed again resulting in all of those parts becoming one. Textual errors, caused by the speed of broadband, result in a hybrid of urban and rural, digital and analogue, human and non-human, present moment and moment remembered. Dislocation finds its place in between the images that emerge and the dream of reconciling these realities. In this project I developed a working method where the visual treatment becomes immersive to the representation of the subject matter of her work. This method is an exercise in creation, destruction and testing the limits of what freedom means when engaging with the apparatuses of photography.

The act of photographing the landscapes and realms experienced via Google Street View raises a number of questions: the notion of a photographic proof; the issue of an appropriation; actuality and virtuality; analogue and digital modes of photographing; and of the gesture of representing the land. Landscape is a social product that influences and shapes cultural and political identity. It comes about as a result of human intervention, the articulation of subjective views, the connection between the power to claim land and the matter of spectatorship. Transformed into a surface, the image of the landscape often does not reveal more than its beauty - it is an object, a commodity that welcomes admiration and uninformed contemplation. 
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Izabela Szczutkowska