Video Game Photography: Pascal Greco’s Ode to Pixel Masters

Photographer Pascal Greco is challenging the traditional boundaries of landscape photography by treating virtual environments as legitimate geographical territories. In his monograph, Photography, Video Game, Landscape, Greco applies the rigor of traditional fieldwork to digital worlds, arguing that contemporary experiences of landscape are increasingly hybrid, blending synthetic imagery with remote vision.

Published by Editions IDPURE in December 2025, the 128-page book features 76 photographs captured across a selection of contemporary open-world video games. Rather than treating these spaces as mere entertainment or virtual settings, Greco approaches them as sites to be surveyed, framed and returned to with the patience required for professional landscape work.

Methodology of the Virtual Gaze

Greco’s approach is defined by a strict adherence to photographic discipline. He avoids the overhead angles often used in gaming, which he believes flatten the environment. Instead, he maintains a consistent perspective, shooting always at eye level and using a 50mm focal length to mimic the human gaze.

This method is intended to move in-game photography away from being a novelty and toward a formal photographic inquiry. By scrutinizing and composing his shots with the same precision he would apply to a physical rock outcrop, Greco seeks to capture moments where real emotion surfaces within an entirely artificial world.

The resulting images span a dozen different games and imagined geographies, including:

• The volcanic expanses of Iceland in Death Stranding
• The Caribbean of Far Cry 6
• Greece in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
• Norway in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
• Japan in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
• The neon-lit California of Cyberpunk 2077
• Pennsylvania in Silent Hill 2
• Bolivia in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands
• Mexico and Australia in Death Stranding 2

Origins in Isolation

The project evolved from Greco’s earlier work, Place(s), a book of Polaroid-format screenshots released in 2022. That series began in March 2020 when lockdown measures in Geneva prevented Greco from traveling to Iceland. During this period of environmental stasis, he purchased a PlayStation 4 and discovered Death Stranding.

Greco recognized the volcanic landscapes of the game as a substitute for the horizons he had planned to walk in reality. This experience established a coded feedback loop between the artist and the game engine, using the virtual world as a way to maintain photographic thinking while physical fieldwork was suspended.

The Poetics of the Glitch

A significant element of the work is the intersection between the simulation’s attempt to mirror reality and the inevitable emergence of synthetic errors. While many of the images appear mirage-like and documentary in nature, Greco includes “glitchy” photos that serve as a counterpoint.

The beauty of his photographs lies in this intersection between conformity to reality and the synthetic material that inevitably shines through, in the hope that progress in this field will not deprive us of these happy accidents.

Le Monde

These poetic accidents remind the viewer that even in worlds meticulously built by developers, the unexpected can arise. The transition from screen to paper further alters the materiality of these images, as the physical textures of the book highlight the synthetic origins of the landscapes.

Publication and Contributions

The book, which measures 30 by 22.5 centimeters and is available in both French and English, includes contributions from video game scholar Matteo Bittanti and Claus Gunti, as well as a conversation with art historian Nadine Franci.

Following its initial release in December 2025, the book was launched on January 15, 2026, in Switzerland and on March 30, 2026, in France. A launch event was held on March 31 at the librairie Le Grand Jeu in Paris.

Further promotion of the work continues with a scheduled talk on April 17 at Payot Rive Gauche in Geneva, where Greco will appear alongside photographer Michèle Bloch-Stuckens.