One evening, when I was about five or six, my big brother Sergiu told me that he installed a new Need for Speed game, and that I should come check it out. I sat next to him, and watched him play – those graphics, those sounds, that world, what a spectacle! It all looked so inviting and I couldn’t wait until it was my turn. I think I ended up replaying NFS: Carbon around five times, start to finish. And it wasn’t the only game that I loved: the Grand Theft Autos, the Counter-Strikes, Minecraft, and a whole bunch of other magical and complex worlds that I’ve had the privilege to roam and explore.

…

The contradiction that the screen is both a tool and a trap, a workspace and an addiction is what made me realize I couldn’t ignore it as a subject. The screen is an omnipresent part of our daily realities. Florian Cramer argued that we live in a post-digital world – as in post-apocalyptic, meaning it’s not after the digital, but in a time where the digital has become so pervasive it’s no longer exceptional. The fascination has faded because these technologies have dissolved into the normal. If that’s the case, why wouldn’t I, as an artist photographer, direct my gaze towards the screen? After all, photography does have the power to criticize, to confer importance to what it represents. An early example I admire, in which photography was used to critically examine aspects of society, is the work of Robert Adams. He focused on urban changes in the American West, particularly on the way new suburbs were being built. In other projects, he addressed the deforestation resulting from the consumerist trends of the 1960s. Although his practice was rooted in the material world, it demonstrates how, by pointing the camera at a subject and framing it, we give it significance. Once we exhibit or share that image, we communicate a message. Photography as a practice is based on clear and important decisions. It is a way of speaking directly and visually about the world. In the post-digital context, I choose to turn my camera toward the screen as well. Just as photographing deforestation highlights an ecological problem, photographing a video game challenges what we call reality or social space.

…

The process, as I developed it, concludes when these photographs are printed, when the immaterial virtual worlds become material and present objects. And this is where the conceptual stakes become clearest. Classical photographic theory tells us that the photograph is indexical, that it bears a physical trace of what was presented before the lens. Roland Barthes called it the “that-has-been,” the confirmation that something existed in a specific time and place. Light touched an object, bounced back, and left its mark on the photosensitive surface. But what happens when there is no object? When the light I’m photographing is emitted, not reflected, when it comes from pixels rendering a world that exists only when we experience it?

…

If photographic indexicality says that what it represents has existed, in a time and in a place, then perhaps what I’m doing is asking: what kind of existence are we willing to acknowledge? The virtual world doesn’t exist in physical space, but it does exist in experiential space, in cultural space, in the space where I’ve spent thousands of hours of my life. When I print these photographs, I’m not trying to trick anyone into believing these are physical places. I’m making visible the reality they already have, a reality that lives in the screen, in the code, in the collective imagination of everyone who has navigated these worlds. The print is the final crossing. The virtual becomes tangible and the simulacrum gets a body.