These large scale posters show the end of the world according to the currently prevailing sentiments. It is the climax of a film, the moment when all the special effects and explosions are used. It is violence but it is unreal to us. They show the extremity of what we believe in but they stay completely unrealistic and fake. They are entertainment and refere in no way to a part of our sensory reality. The main characters in them are detached from the chaos that is happening around them. Like many of us they have become completely numb to images of violence and terror.
They have been made in a way that references classical painting but also blockbuster action films. Even though they are still images their language immediately points to the well known imagery of the large-scale film productions of my generation. They are disaster movies, the what if scenarios that have their origin in real news items: environmental problems, international terrorism and disasters.
Or as Susan Sontags says in On Photography: "But the true modern primitivism is not to regard the image as a real thing; photographic images are hardly that real. Instead, reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up -a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing- that 'it seemed like a movie'. This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was."