In this work I employ abstraction as a method to address the constructed nature of reality inherent in photomedia's apparatuses and processes and our culturally constructed concepts of nature and truth. Through a combination of abstract photography, camera-less production methods, and kitsch aesthetics I seek to expose the inauthenticity of the ‘nature’ we experience—particularly in Europe. The landscape in my work is a symbol of my idea of nature; yet it is a tamed, domesticated and manageable version of the real thing. There is no nature here. I use the productive practice of photomedia (or expanded photography) to mediate my own touristic experience of nature in the same way that users of the Claude Mirror— a pre-photographic optical device used by artists and tourists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which I use as a metaphor for my own artistic methods—mediated their experience of the landscape. The Claude Mirror was used to frame and simplify the visual qualities of the landscape; to depict nature as “picturesque”, unthreatening and therefore one step removed from reality. Sometimes I place prisms, or other optical modifiers, in front of the lens during in-camera exposure, distorting, fragmenting and abstracting the view. Later, I subject some of these images to a second iteration of mediation through ‘darkroom interventions’ extending the “timespace” of the image beyond the moment of in-camera exposure. I seek to expose my process and the constructed nature of image-making, while simultaneously allowing for poetic expression. Photomedia can not only disguise but also highlight its own implicit failure to represent reality objectively. I seek to transcend this problem by acknowledging the fact that the representation of truth in photomedia is always subjective. My work is both sincere in its quest for authenticity and a secular, ungendered and contemporary sublime; yet ironic, knowing that my goals are ultimately unattainable.