Wonderland.

Photographs by David Robinson. Text by Andrew Gellatly.

Generation Yacht, London, 2003. 72 pp., Numerous color illustrations, x".

During the past 4 years, David Robinson has documented a diverse selection of some of the world's most popular tourist destinations such as Florida's Holy Land experience, Legoland in Windsor and the Costa del Sol. Each destination is deliberately chosen for its unique western character - a choice which magnifies the man-made structures and parks dominating over the surrounding natural landscape.

Robinson is also inspired by global tourism where tourists are steered towards taking pictures of set-up picture sites and places or what he calls 'microcultures'. Robinson reveals a more exaggerated scenery assisted by his intense use of saturated colour panoramic film - giving the illusion of a surreal and dream like landscape.

Robinson's familiarity and perception of most popular locations has been shaped only by what we are programmed to expect through the media such as magazines, television and the movies. The resulting photographs, act as testament to the shrinking planet and global culture like trophies and proof of their existence.

David Robinson has long been interested in the landscape of simulation and has articulated its metaphorical dimension before. His 1999/2000 series of golfers posed at the tees as full-length renaissance portraits swapped out the roman campagna for an implausibly green northern Irish hillside. Wonderland with its scarcely populated landscapes of entertainment goes further in asking the question: what kind of construct am I in the middle of a nature that I continually mediate?

Robinson’s landscapes are pleasure-provoking vistas in an era of mind-numbing labour; our worldview pressed through a sieve of tourism, where leisure has squeezed out all the space in the imagination that nature once held.

From the foreword by Andrew Gellatly .
Moving through the landscape of the modern world, the periphery is full of momentary oddities and visual situations which challenge the routine—the “weird America” of roadside attractions, the kitsch of British seaside tourist traps and the universal human tendency to aesthetically overachieve in search of entertainment. Most of us store these encounters with spectacle as brief memories or passing exclamations: “How odd!” or “I can’t believe anyone would wear that/find that fun/live there.” David Robinson, however, works and photographs in this rich underworld of awkward attempts at peace and luxury. His book Wonderland— compellingly constructed to house the thin, horizontal crops his images are presented in—catalogs a series of “destinations,” from Biosphere II to Legoland and the Tokyo Ski Dome, each image reflecting the melancholy of an ideal unattained or, more ironically, achieved. It’s a kind of image-based anthropology Robinson explores even more explicitly in Lee Valley Leisure, a tour among the people and places of London’s Lee Valley, the epicenter of that city’s redevelopment for the 2012 Olympics and the inevitable dynamics of gentrification and a neighborhood’s displacement through the commercial behemoth of international sport. ZANE FISCHER

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