Sourced from an online photo management and sharing application, Josh Cho surveys the impulse to document our encounters with the sublime in the urban landscape. 

Unfaithful represents a series of images that depict geyser-like bursts of water produced by broken fire hydrants converted to black and white, vertically recomposed, and digitally edited to discard all humans from the original found photographs. Through this process, Unfaithful uncannily resembles the Western Survey photographs of the Old Faithful geyser by William Henry Jackson and the romanticized iteration by Ansel Adams. This reference serves as point of departure for Cho—proposing a movement of modernist photographers traveling into the future (present) discovering and pointing their cameras to a man-made accidental phenomenon instead of the pristine natural world—in order to overlap time and space. The title of the project is meant to infer both the reference to historical photographic depictions of Old Faithful and to recognize the unfaithful act of appropriation, the unfaithful prediction of accidents, the unfaithful built environment, and the unfaithful record of the photograph.

Josh Cho has exhibited at UCI, UCLA, CSULB, Foundation for Art Resources, S1F Gallery, Ann 330 Gallery, and La Cienegas Projects. He received his MFA from UC Irvine and his BFA from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.