Wheatisphere, collects an archive of found photographs of wheat and orders them according to their camera pitch. By sequencing images from vertically ‘face-down’ perspectives, through 180°, to vertically ‘face-up’ perspectives, the project explores how different camera pitches are embedded within different knowledge systems. Images from different eras but similar perspectives appear alongside one another, revealing repetition of visual tropes across time and space.

The nature of the images changes from satellite and microscopic images to film sets and documentary photography to pictures of church ceilings and large sculptures. I chose wheat as the subject of these photographs because of its global familiarity and large digital footprint, encouraging the audience to derive more meaning from the gradual change in camera angle and relationships between images than their contents.

The outcome of the project is a book made up of two sections: the first will orders the found photographs according to their camera angle, and the second will record where the image was retrieved from and the assumed pitch it was taken at.

By organising digital media into a physical book format, I seek to invite the reader to engage sequentially and slowly with the images I have selected, refusing the speed at with information is consumed today. The non-chronological, non-geographical organisation of the images is intended to transgress conventional methods of curation, instead foregrounding different perspectives as repeating visual regimes for generating systems of knowledge. The images themselves were selected without bias towards the ‘good image,’ that is to say resolution, institutional, or named images have not been prioritised.