photographer john goto- fantasy landscapes

John Goto .born 1949 in Stockport, England. A British artist best known for his photo-digital artworks, notably coming to wider attention with the "High Summer" section of his Ukadia series of pictures .He studied Fine Art at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, where an interest in the narrative forms of European cinema and literature led him to the medium of photography.

John Goto began using computers in his work in the early '90s with a series made in Russia entitled "The Commissar of Space" which dealt with the final years of the artist Kasimir Malevich’s life during the early Stalinist era.

His account of the contemporary world continued with "John Goto’s New World Circus", a thinly veiled allegory of the occupation of Iraq set within a travelling circus. His attention turned to the issue of climate change with "Floodscapes" and cultural history in "Dance to the Muzik of Time". Prompted by the invasion of the Gaza Strip by the IDF (27 December 2008 - 21 January 2009), Goto has made "Mosaic", a series of apparently abstract images, which belie their traumatic source.

The development of Augmented Reality technology allowed Goto to extend his practice of photomontage into the actual world. In collaboration with Dr. Matthew Leach, he has produced augmented reality installations of West End Blues, The Invisible Artist and AR Gilt City, using the Layer app.

Goto has had solo London shows at Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery, and The Photographers' Gallery. He has exhibited his photo digital art widely in Europe. He currently works as Professor of Fine Art at the University of Derby, England. Goto is represented by f5.6 Galerie Munich; Gallery On, Seoul and Dominique Fiat Galerie, Paris.

"...

You don't see this immediately. Before that, there's the bucolic beauty of the rural backdrops: peaks of hills, dramatic skies bringing heavy weather, and shimmering expanses of water. Goto - whose works are on show at Edinburgh's Portfolio Gallery - borrows compositional principles from 17th-century French landscape painters Poussin and Lorrain, making these images oddly familiar and readable. His second main source is features lifted from the 18th-century English gardens at Stowe, Rousham and Stourhead, with their fake classical flourishes, their ha-has and their follies. At Stowe, for example, the gardens contain a River Styx and their very own Elysian Fields.
It's the combination of these two influences that gives Goto's photo-tableaux their authority as well as their sumptuous, seductive elegance. But this blending of different versions of the landscape emphasises the fact that our perception of the countryside has always been as much a social and cultural construct as our view of urban life...."

 comparison of my final image against john goto's work