The Alternatives, begun in 2014 by American photographer Matthew Swarts, transforms intimate photographs of a new partner into layered digital composites examining perception, intimacy, and screen culture. Developed while Swarts was also revisiting photographs from an earlier relationship, the series shifted his attention toward the uncertainty of new attachment. Love, longing, and attention intersect with questions about objectification, digital identity, and the possible loss of personal data.
That instability structures the act of viewing. From a distance, the pictures retain fragments of bodies and everyday scenes, but dense patterned screens interrupt recognition and narrative continuity. Up close, portraits break into optical illusions, maps, graph-like grids, children's-book motifs, mathematical forms, and data-like pixels. The partner appears partially concealed rather than erased, creating an unsettled tension between figuration and abstraction. Repetition, sharpening, bending, and subtraction ask viewers to move between the overall image and minute detail.
Swarts photographed with devices ranging from an iPhone to a DSLR, then treated the straight digital image as source material. In Photoshop, he built screens from Web artifacts collected over more than a decade, degraded and erased them, and conformed them to masked adjustment layers. Chance and mistakes could redirect the process. The composites were produced as inkjet prints at varying scales.
The project entered public circulation in 2014 and was presented in Swarts's 2015 Los Angeles exhibition PROCESSING at Kopeikin Gallery. Five works from The Alternatives were later included in the George Eastman Museum's 2016–17 exhibition A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age, and the museum acquired two prints in 2017.
