© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

WEST by Anka Gregorczyk is a photographic and narrative project that critically interrogates the imaginary of the American landscape as it has been absorbed and re-produced through decades of pop culture and media industry. Initiated in 2014 and still ongoing, the work unfolds along the symbolic route from the East to the West of the United States—a journey that is not only geographical but profoundly mythological, steeped in ideas of freedom and the so-called “American Dream.” Gregorczyk travels across these territories carrying with her a dense archive of pre-existing images—cinematic, televisual, musical, and commercial icons—that inevitably anticipate and condition the act of looking.

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

The strength of WEST lies precisely in its ability to create friction between what one believes to know and what one actually encounters. Pop culture does not simply represent places: it shapes them, sanctifies them, and turns them into compulsory stops of a shared visual mythology. Films, TV series, music videos, road movies, and historical photographs have built a powerful mental geography in which the American West appears as a mosaic of endless deserts, solitary highways, neon signs, and horizon lines thick with promise. WEST seeks to dismantle these clichés—not to deny them, but to reveal their artificial, selective, and often deceptive nature.

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

A central element of the project is its observation of international mass tourism, which, by chasing the very places consecrated by the media, reinforces an instantaneous and easily pleasing vision of the landscape. What prevails is a swift, superficial consumption of territory: a kind of visual snorkeling that skims the surface, normalizes and flattens diversity, and excludes all that is not immediately friendly, photogenic, or ready for instant consumption. It is within this dynamic that WEST finds one of its sharpest and most critical dimensions.

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

Gregorczyk photographs tourists in the very act of photographing, turning them into unwitting actors within the grand mise-en-scène they perpetuate. Their postures, their mechanical gestures, their almost ritual presence at scenic viewpoints reveal a compulsive tragedy: that of an orthopedized gaze. She documents this fiction through traces, benches, lookouts, playgrounds, walkways—an entire repertoire of dispositifs designed to entertain and support an experience that appears free but is profoundly regulated. It is a world built for seeing, yet one that renders people blind; a theater of observation in which visitors become alien, distant, unknowing participants in a landscape they do not truly explore, but merely tick off.

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

© Anka Gregorczyk from "WEST"

In this way, WEST emerges as a restless inquiry into the relationship between image, territory, and desire—restoring to the gaze the possibility to unlearn, to question, and ultimately, to truly see.

Anka Gregorczyk (website)