Northern Light: Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the North 9783839439753

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Chris Goldie, Darcy White (eds.) Northern Light

Image  | Volume 120

Chris Goldie, Darcy White (eds.)

Northern Light Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the North

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Aileen Harvey, »Siabost 000028052010«, from the series »West from here«, 2010 Typeset by Justine Buri, Bielefeld Printed by docupoint GmbH, Magdeburg Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3975-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3975-3

Contents

Preface and acknowledgements  | 7 Introduction  | 9 Chris Goldie and Darcy White

Walking and photographing Northern landscapes: a dialogical approach  | 19 Aileen Harvey

Wanderings through the fog: A xel Hütte and the German landscape tradition reimagined  | 49 Darcy White

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders with Sweden, Norway and Russia  | 77 Susan Brind and Jim Harold

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime  | 97 Julia Peck

53 Degrees parallel north  | 117 Fiona Maclaren

Vaguely Northern: in between in England  | 133 Joanne Lee

Landscape, documentary, and Northern England in the 1930s  | 143 Chris Goldie

Illustrations  | 169 Biographies of contributors  | 171

Preface and acknowledgements The essays in this collection originated in papers delivered to a conference, which was also accompanied by an exhibition, at Sheffield Hallam University on July 4th and 5th, 2016: Northern Light: Landscape Photography and Evocations of the North. For both the conference and this publication we invited practitioners and theorists to respond to a number of questions. What is meant by ‘north’: is this a geographical designation relating to the location of a place, its climate, its topographical characteristics? Alternatively, is the ‘north’ to be understood in largely cultural terms? If the focus is geographical then where exactly? This question is pertinent because ‘north’ is always relative to the place from which it is observed, even though certain places and types of environment become identified with the concept. If the ‘north’ is a cultural concept then it also has a history, arising within particular historical conjunctures and places, taking specific visual and literary forms, and given shape by the social groups for whom the concept has meaning and value. All of this might suggest that the ‘north’ is a rather evasive term, both geographically and culturally. It might even be argued that there are many ‘norths’, none of which is fixed in place and time, each the product of the prevailing cultural narratives of an era, none the consequence of pure observation. Our objectives in staging the conference were to raise these questions, to invite debate amongst practitioners and theorists, and to create a dialogue across a range of disciplines – art history, philosophy, cultural and literature studies, cultural history. This book emerged from the conference and we would like to acknowledge, therefore, the latter’s role in stimulating the debate about northern landscape and in providing the inspiration for further discussion. The conference could not have occurred without the support of the Department of Media Arts and Communication, and the Art and Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, and we are grateful to both these bodies for making it possible. We thank Michèle Lazenby, who curated the accompanying photographic exhibition, and those who assisted in its curation and management: Stephanie Hartle, Sonya Robinson, Tom Harrison and Andrew Robinson. Thanks also to the technical team for their work in helping to hang the show and to Ci Davis for

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Nor thern Light: Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the Nor th

his invaluable contribution in transporting the photographic work. The exhibition provided the conference with a vital link to the work of practitioners in this exciting field; we are grateful to all involved in its organisation for their efforts in making both the conference and exhibition a success. All of the essays in this book began as conference papers but the event itself, the contributions from other delegates, the lively discussion, the emergence of a dialogue across disciplines, were vital components in the creation of this publication. We would like to thank all who attended the conference, therefore, for making this book possible.

Introduction Chris Goldie and Darcy White

The geographer J.B. Jackson defined “landscape” as “a concrete, three-dimensional, shared reality”, implying through such a definition: possession, boundary, exclusion and inclusion, relative permanence, and function, whilst also acknowledging landscape’s equally viable existence as a two-dimensional picture, an aesthetic spectacle (Jackson: 5). The significance of landscape, according to David Matless in Landscape and Englishness, “resides in it being simultaneously a site of economic, social, political and aesthetic value” (12); it is a concept that points towards these different types of reality as well as obscuring distinctions between them. This duality in the conception of landscape indicates the difficulties inherent in any attempt at definition or classification, but also that ambiguity might be one aspect of its usefulness as a term (5). When we approach the northern landscape problems of definition and classification are compounded. As several contributions to this collection make abundantly clear: landscapes are places; and yet, what constitutes them as such may not reside in a distinct topography, nor in the geographical precision of latitude, but in a type of culturally inflected sensory perception. As the book’s main title – Northern Light – implies, landscapes may be classified in terms of a particular characteristic of light, and yet ‘light’ is several things: a measurable quality, a situated, perceived experience, and a cultural preconception. Northern regions are places, tangible realities, but they are also depicted through the changing, powerful, often contested tropes and traditions of northern landscape representation. Something of the historically changing and contradictory nature of conceptions of northern territories is captured in William Morris’ account of his journeys across Iceland in 1871 and again in 1873. Morris’ account reveals what will become evident in several of the essays contained in this collection, that perceptions of landscapes are powerful and direct but are also informed by preconceptions and shaped by significant cultural narratives. Morris undertook his Icelandic journeys in order to leave behind an unhappy domestic situation. In his journal Morris described his search for “wilderness” in the hope of experiencing catharsis, a “trial by ordeal” (Purkis 1999: 7), and

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he did indeed find the place to be “strange and awful” … “a doleful land” (7). However, Morris became aware that in spite of his own preconceptions of Iceland as a site for both adventure and retreat, that this was also a place of habitation, after which its reality began to impress itself on his experience. On one occasion he “felt a queer feeling something akin to disappointment of how like the world it was all over after all” (17), but on the next day he undertook an arduous journey along a valley from Markfleet to Thornsmark, climbing onto a glacier, where at last his expectations appear to have been fulfilled: “surely”, he wrote in his journal, this “was what I came out for to see” (18). Another journal entry gives a sense of the way that at times he thrilled at the sense of danger. At the end of one long day of journeying he feared that he and his party would not make it back: “Yet with that came a feeling of exaltation too, and I seemed to understand how people under all disadvantages should find their imaginations kindle amid such scenes (18).” It was not only extreme topographies that Morris had come to experience. Morris was also drawn to Iceland by its tradition of Saga, which had to a large extent shaped the route of his journey, and he was elated when at last he saw Thingvellvir – the birthplace of democracy in the North – which was, he wrote, “such a joy … this first sight of the greatest marvel and most storied place of Iceland” (Greenlaw 2011: 167). Writing more than a century later, Ysanne Holt discusses similar tropes associated with northern landscapes, in this instance in relation to northern England and Scotland, arguing that: North is a relative concept, but English/Scottish northern landscapes have been typically characterised (mostly by outsiders) as remote, harder places with an adverse climate, biting winds and driving rain. They have been often and variously perceived as anti-or pre-modern places of dearth and emptiness: uplands, debateable lands, untamed and unruly, alienating and abandoned, with a haunting, melancholic pastness; or as physically testing and questing, ascetic sites of solitary contemplation, regenerative retreat and escape, with an elemental purity, sometimes viewed as imagined elsewhere, places of mysticism and miracle (Holt 2013: 218).

The influence of the history of art on these tropes of northern landscapes can be considered through two notable studies – by Svetlana Alpers (1983) and Robert Rosenblum (1975): each reassesses the development of northern art in relation to conventional approaches within the Western art history tradition; questioning the influence of Italy (Alpers) and France (Rosenblum), and ultimately of the classical world. Neither study denies the power of such influences but each contributes an additional interpretation of the character, interests and wider impact of the art of the north. In The Art of Describing, a book about 17th century Dutch painting, Svetlana Alpers argues that there is a distinct art of northern Europe in contrast to the

Introduction

dominant, Italian, pictorial tradition. A painting, as conceived through the Italian Renaissance and according to the “Albertian definition of a picture”, is as “a framed surface or pane situated at a certain distance from a viewer who looks through it at a second or substitute world”. This world, according to Alpers, is “a stage on which human figures performed significant actions based on the texts of the poets”; it is, above all, “a narrative art” (Alpers 1983: xix). Alpers argues that, in contrast, 17th century Dutch art and “the northern tradition of which it is a part” are not, primarily, an art of narrative: northern art “embrace[s] an essentially descriptive pictorial mode” (xx-xxi). Northern art rejects narrative and textual reference and favours instead “description and visual surface”, emphasising “the prior existence of a world of objects depicted on the flat canvas, a world indifferent to the beholder’s position in front of it” (Jay 1993: 120). In the early 1970s, Robert Rosenblum offered a revised account of the development of modern art in the west – a “counter-French tradition in modern art” – proposing a new perspective on northern art and, ultimately, its representation of landscape. In Rosenblum’s account the sublime is a key interpretive category able to explain not only the achievements of Friedrich and Van Gogh but also of Mondrian, Rothko and others. Reflecting upon a period of 150 years, beginning with Friedrich and his Monk by the Sea (1809) and culminating with Abstract Expressionism and Rothko’s Green on Blue (1956), Rosenblum observes that the inclination of these artists was towards the representation of “emptiness”, a “renunciation of almost everything”, and the production of images of “almost nothingness” (10). Rosenblum argues that this sublime experience was initially represented in religious subject matter but later became part of a secular tradition and, through an aesthetic approach, “penetrated… the domain of landscape” (17). Rosenblum notes correspondences in the formal structure of such paintings and suggests that these arose from “a similarity of feeling and intention” (10). Equally he identifies comparable tendencies in examples of Turner’s later works, based in the latter’s “isolation of nature’s primordial elements – light, energy, elemental matter” – which he argues were also found in the “abstract vocabularies” of Rothko, Pollock and Still (12). During the 1960s the prevailing insistence on the ‘death of painting’ meant that artists turned to every possible alternative medium with which to create work. Some continued to explore painting’s potential – Gerhard Richter being the preeminent example – but this was largely marginalised within the art world at the time. However, from the mid-1980s, fine art photographers began to turn to larger formats, thus moving into the domain traditionally occupied by large narrative painting and later by modernist painting, notably Abstract Expressionism. As Maren Polte argues: “essential in that regard was the approximation of formats and processes of composition to those used in painting” ... which was sometimes “seen, art historically, as a kind of backtracking” (Polte 2017: 211). Today, some landscape photographers continue to pursue

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image making on a grand scale while others consciously opt to produce work in a quieter, more humble register. In so doing, the latter implicitly demand that any viewer of their work pauses to look carefully. The modus operandi of this type of small-scale photography is a rejection of the increasingly visually overloaded world we inhabit, a world from which landscape as a genre also appears to offer a refuge. In their various ways the works discussed by Rosenblum can be interpreted as attempts to address the unrepresentable, as can much landscape work today. And as Philip Shaw suggests: the “difference between Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism can therefore be measured in their contrasting attitudes to the unpresentable” (Shaw 2016: 6). Alpers’ argument is illuminating because of the parallel she draws between northern art and photography: both are “modes of visualisation” or of “pictorial making” quite distinct from the mode of representation prevailing in the southern artistic tradition. In both can be found: “fragementariness; arbitrary frames” and “immediacy”; an “attention to many small things versus a few large ones; light reflected off objects versus objects modelled by light and shadow; the surface of objects, their colours and textures, dealt with rather than their placement in a legible space; an unframed image versus one that is clearly framed; one with no clearly situated viewer compared to one with such a viewer” (Alpers 1983: 43-44). Holt, Rosenblum and Alpers all offer differing perspectives on the tropes of northerness and the notion of a northern artistic tradition. All suggest in more or less explicit terms that this tradition is a mode of pictorial representation, a way of depicting scenes and objects rather than a record of actuality. The landscapes of the North may be real, therefore, but artistic representations with a northern theme are not simple records, they derive their form and content from decisions made by photographers or painters; choices inevitably shaped by prevailing traditions, preconceptions, ideas about the ‘North’ that in some respect are the product of perception and observation whilst also an encoding of social and cultural relations of power. All of the essays in this collection to some extent address the tensions revealed in these critical approaches: through addressing the complex relationship between the perception and conception of landscape; exploring the limits of signification; proposing a photographic practice within which narrative and perspective is supplemented by the immediacy of direct experience; and by critically examining the sublime, its relationship to the northern landscape tradition in painting and the influence of this tradition on contemporary photographic practice. The richness of and variety in the essays contained in this collection are a confirmation of the continued as well as renewed relevance of ‘north’ as a site of cultural practice and artistic endeavour. Geographically diverse and emerging from different critical traditions there are common themes across the range of contributions. Essays by four photographers – Aileen Harvey, Fiona Maclaren

Introduction

and Susan Brind & Jim Harold – all stress that experience, of being in the landscape rather than a detached and distant observer of it, is crucial to their practice. Darcy White and Julia Peck each, from quite different perspectives, undertake a critical reappraisal of a German landscape photographer, both, nevertheless, dealing in questions concerning the sublime, a key concept inherited from the 19th century landscape tradition. Joanne Lee and Chris Goldie discuss northern England, the former considering the region’s post-industrial spaces through contemporary artistic practice, the latter undertaking an historical study of the northern landscape represented through the 1930s documentary movement. The geographical diversity of these individual studies is considerable: Aileen Harvey’s photographic practice and research was carried out in North-West Scotland; Fiona Maclaren’s study ranges across locations from Iceland through North-East Scotland to Scandinavia; Susan Brind and Jim Harold’s research was undertaken within the Arctic borderlands of Russia and the Nordic countries; Julia Peck’s critical examination of the photography of Olaf Otto Becker begins in Iceland and Greenland and concludes in the Global South; the work of Axel Hütte, discussed in Darcy White’s essay, occurs across a range of landscapes: Arctic regions, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway; the Alps, parts of which are in Italy, are also the subject of his work. Whilst the diversity of northern landscapes examined in these studies is interesting the distinctive approaches taken by their authors is not driven by geography, primarily. Rather, the purpose of these studies is to question dominant modes of landscape representation, particularly as it has been established within conceptions of the northern landscape. The tropes of northerness to which Holt alludes are wide-ranging, but at least some of these can be detected in representations of landscape in other places beyond England and Scotland. A key aspect of Susan Brind and Jim Harold’s essay, “At the limits of reliable information: Finland’s Arctic Borders with Sweden, Norway and Russia”, is to question the type of ‘outsider’ perspective emphasising emptiness and adversity as characteristics of northern territory. They cite the case of an 18th century visitor to the place now forming the border between Finland and Sweden who defined it as ‘wilderness’ or desart, a term he used firstly to denote a landscape of no value, within which nothing useful was produced, secondly to suggest a challenging physical environment characterised by dangerous cataracts, dense woods, treacherous marshes, steep mountains, and insufferable insects. Brind and Harold argue that such a conception made no sense to the indigenous people of the region, however, and contrast the notion of northern regions as wilderness, found in the writing of outsiders and explorers, with the argument found in Sámi writing in the 1940s, in which the real value of this landscape is said to be in its inhabitant’s symbiotic relation to it; it existed as a “series of dynamic and interlinked spaces and time registers” held together through both narrative and experience (86). By shifting the

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perspective from observation to experience, an indeterminate landscape – irreducible to abstract measurement – is substituted for one anticipated through historically formed predispositions, determining the mode of observation and the nature of the encounter. Brind and Harold are sceptical of the capacity of representations to provide accurate information about places: landscapes cannot be reduced to fixed entities or measurable locations; abstractions of space cannot capture the full sense of a landscape, which can only be apprehended through other forms of knowing and imagining a place. Other contributions acknowledge that tropes of northerness are formed from an outsider’s perspective. A key theme in the essay by Chris Goldie – “Landscape, Documentary, and Northern England in the 1930s” – is that landscape is always the product of forces outside of its field of depiction, the encoding of social and cultural relations rather than a direct representation of actuality. The argument is based on Edward Said’s conception of the “Orient”, in which Said argues that such a complex and persistent notion is far more than a description of a particular location’s geographical coordinates and material existence: It “is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there” (144). Following Said, Goldie argues that the otherness of the North is conceived on the basis of exteriority, an outsider’s assertion of a rudimentary distinction between the North and the South. This is not to propose a reality beyond signification, however, but to suggest that the relationship between the moment of the analogical recording of a material reality and its signification is critical. All landscapes are encoded depictions, their meaning determined as much by agency and the social and cultural perspectives of the observer as by the actuality of the place observed. That northern territories have been defined in terms of the adversity of their climate may have been the consequence of an outsider’s perspective in the past but some contributions to the collection suggest a different approach in more recent periods. In Fiona Maclaren’s “53 Degrees Parallel North” the encounter with the landscape of mountains is moulded and determined by constant, dramatic changes in the weather. Maclaren argues that a cultural perception of mountains based on awe and fascination and motivated by the quest for the sublime and the desire to conquer has been replaced by one more attuned to the climactic conditions of mountainous terrain. For walkers and climbers an immersion in the weather – the driving wind, ice cold air, fluctuating light – is the basis of knowledge of this type of landscape. For three of the artists and writers whose work is considered in relation to mountain landscapes – Lesley Punton, Olafur Eliasson, and Nan Shephard – the weather is a crucial factor in their embodied encounter with this terrain. And yet it should also be acknowledged that not all photographers represent the weather in terms of embodiment and lived experience. As Axel Hütte, the subject of Darcy White’s essay, has argued:

Introduction At times, when looking at clouds in the sky … you realize that it is only a small step from the reality to dream.” … “My images are deliberate constructs. What one cannot see is as important as what one can see. Mist, darkness and water reflections are the protagonists of my work. They turn reality into phantasm or a dream. The image is what we see, but above all it is presented as an opportunity to explore a wider territory. The imagination of the spectator reveals the work” (Ewing 2014: 249).

In Chris Goldie’s essay the landscape of Blackpool is discussed in terms of the relationship between sea and land and the important role that periodic violations of the boundary between these played in the development of the town as a popular resort. It is argued that working-class experience of Blackpool took the form of a collective sublime, not on the basis of visitors looking at awe-inspiring scenery – this was largely absent – but as a tangible, embodied, exciting, occasionally terrifying experience of sea, wind and rain. Goldie suggests that this physical experience might be comparable to the encounter with the harsh climate of mountainous regions but that it is also different as a consequence of its communal dimension, the terrifying force of nature becoming intertwined with collective social energies, the liminal space between sea and land acquiring through this a utopian potential. In “Walking and photographing Northern Landscapes: a dialogical approach”, Aileen Harvey discusses the idea of landscape as experience – lived, embodied, tactile, sensory – whilst also recognising that this is shaped through anticipation, through historically formed conceptions as well as the individual expectations of the photographer. There is a tension between the directly perceived and the indirectly conceived aspects of a landscape, and therefore a questioning of the capacity of the photograph fully to capture the meaning of a place. Harvey argues that “the problematic aspects of landscape photography are very much connected with the false equation of photography and seeing”. Her practice had often produced results in which “there is almost nothing to see. The experience of viewing these images is one of straining to make something out, of a thick darkness pressing on one’s eyes”; within the “poverty of pictorial content” there can be discerned “just a faint shadow of a promontory, an indistinct grassy edge, or an overwhelming blueness” (43-44). Nearly all of the contributions address at some point in their discussion the relationship between signification and indexicality in the photographic image, some positing the idea that the experience of landscape can move us beyond signification, others arguing that the relationship between actuality and its representation is always unresolved and in a state of tension. Arising in these essays is an interest both in the actuality of these places and the ways in which they have been represented. Darcy White’s “Wanderings through the fog: Axel Hütte and the German landscape tradition re-imagined” conceives of fog as a metaphor for problems

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of interpretation for Hütte’s landscape photography, while also exploring its use as a recurrent motif. White explores the uneasy tension in Hütte’s work between very different traditions: the cool, detached and rigorously neutral mode of representation, an approach epitomised by Bernd and Hiller Becher at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, where Hütte studied; and the tradition associated with the sublime aesthetic of 19th century German Romantic painting. This essay contests interpretations of Hütte’s photography that foreground the influence of the Bechers at the so-called ‘Düsseldorf School’, arguing instead that it is more fruitful to place this artist’s work in relation to a trajectory of painting – from Friedrich, to Barnett Newman, and to Gerhard Richter. White suggests that such work operates through the suppression of detail and an insistence that the experience of art takes place ‘now’, rather than through interpretive modes of engagement. As with other essays in this collection, White explores the tensions in relation to the indexicality of the photograph, considering the role of the indexical in the wider experience of landscape art. She argues that Hütte’s work embraces the challenge of working with the indexical while it resists the powerful inclination of the human perceptive organ to make sense of what is seen. In her chapter Julia Peck explores the photography of Olaf Otto Becker – whose work began in depictions of the Arctic landscapes of Iceland and Greenland – and how it has addressed the causes and effects of climate change. The key to understanding the significance of Becker’s work, Peck argues, lies in their indeterminacy, the tension they exhibit between the affective and the effective, in their “renegotiation of the sublime through an engagement with the real” (114). By taking this approach Peck questions orthodox readings of Becker’s work – those describing his aesthetic as “lyrical documentary” – arguing instead that a recognition of the ambiguity of his images enables an analysis of its relationship to a neoliberal world order. Drawing upon Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life, the chapter argues that photography “plays a role in producing and reproducing” conceptions of nature; it contributes to how capitalism organises nature, through: “earth-moving” and “idea-making”; but it can also produce “a multitude of practices where a critique of neoliberalism can be enacted” (98). Joanne Lee begins her chapter by noting the types of indeterminacy that are a hallmark of certain places: landscapes in which there is “a curious mix of the rural and industrial” or “the beautiful and the despoiled”, characteristics not exclusive to the part of England “framed” as the North, but, she suggests, this condition of being “in between” does seem to be one of northern England’s notable features in the post-industrial era. Lee examines the various definitions of North that might incorporate such an indeterminate landscape. Some writers postulate fixed but relatively arbitrary boundaries; others insist that the definition is cultural and political rath-

Introduction

er than geographical, emphasising the relational aspect of the North and its identity – places in northern England are defined “by their subordinate and residual relationship to London and the South East” – whilst the tendency to define the North in negative terms is considerable: “a narrow and inward-looking enclave”; the site of production of “necessities such as coal, steel, cars” but for “the use and financial gain of those elsewhere”, a ruined and “fallen landscape”, and “bleak, harsh and unforgiving” (134). Various notions have been employed to define this condition of indeterminacy: “edgelands”, “junkscape”, “urban void”, “deadzone”, and “urban interstice”, but Lee favours the concept of “terrain vague”, a term of 19th century origin but mostly associated with Surrealism and used as the title of a photograph by Man Ray in 1932. To conclude, each of these essays confronts a range of issues concerning the actuality of the ‘north’. They inevitably deal with a question addressed by Jorge Luis Borges in 1946 in his short fictional account of the dilemma faced by cartographers when mapping a terrain – what to include and what to leave out? In “On Exactitude in Science” he describes – through a fictional storyteller, Suarez Miranda, purportedly writing in Lerida in 1658 – a “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it” (Borges 1975). The story serves to illustrate the task faced by all representational landscape artists, in the context when no image can usefully include everything seen. Selection must always take place. Similar in some ways to the map discussed by Borges, landscape images are not depictions of an unmediated reality but are, as Gerhard Richter proposes, “abstractions”; a distillation, a reduction, always and necessarily a partial account of a place (Elgar 2011). As Jorge Luis Borges demonstrated, for a map to show all that a given place contains it would need to be the same size as that place itself (op cit). Artists also add to what they encounter. Since ‘landscape’ as a concept only exists as a result of cultural framings, landscape images are not simply manifestations of actual or imagined places, but also the result of the complex of ideas that artists carry with them when they make images of land.

R eferences Alpers, Svetlana (1983): The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, London and Chicago: John Murray in association with University of Chicago Press. Borges, J.L. (1975) “On Exactitude in Science”. In: London: Penguin Books. Elger, Dietmar, (ed.), (2011): Gerhard Richter Landscapes, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz . Ewing, William, E. (2014): Landmark The Fields of Landscape photography, London: Thames & Hudson.

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Greenlaw, Lavinia (2011): Questions of Travel. William Morris in Iceland, London: Notting Hill Editions. Holt, Ysanne (2103): “A hut on Holy Island: reframing northern landscape,” In: Visual Studies 28/3. Jackson, J.B (1984): Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Jay, Martin (1993): “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In: Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique, New York and London: Routledge. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1982): “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime”, Art Forum, April. Matless, David (1998): Landscape and Englishness, London: Reaktion Books. Polte, Maren (2017): Class of their Own, The Düsseldorf School of Photography, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Purkis, John (1999) [1962]: The Icelandic Jaunt: a study of the expedition made by William Morris to Iceland in 1871 and 1873, Chippenham: Anthony Rowe Ltd. Rosenblum, Robert (1975): Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Friedrich to Rothko, London: Harper and Row. Shaw, Philip, 2006, Oxford & NY, Routledge. Wells, Liz (2011): Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, London: I.B. Tauris.

Walking and photographing Northern landscapes: a dialogical approach Aileen Harvey

Walking immerses a person in a landscape in a particular way. It embeds the walker in the place, over a period of time, and it gives a participatory experience of the environment, one that works against static viewpoints. If it is a longish walk, it alters not only how we relate to that landscape, but also our mode of being: it renders us more receptive, open to the process of exchange that is occurring between us and our surroundings. The particular give-and-take occasioned by walking is a central feature of how I engage with place. In my art practice, I use walking to structure the making process, combining it with photography – or with drawing, collecting, or writing – in order to give legible form to that exchange between perceiver and place. This chapter stems from reflections on walking and Northern landscape photography within my practice. Artworks are process-led, in that the outcomes are whatever the process leads to. Works such as West from here and Tarbet (Sutherland) are sequences of photographs; each sequence is made according to a set of self-devised rules, as a record of a walked landscape. This text begins by considering how my methods are informed by ideas of exchange and balance, and suggests a notion of dialogue as the focus for this way of thinking and working. It goes on to look at a series of conceptual tensions that emerge from thinking about these aspects of process in a wider theoretical context – starting with the problematic status of photographs as records given that they are also products of framing and imagination. This first contrast finds echoes in other oppositions, and the discussion becomes a space for thinking around photography and place, centred on four concept pairs: fact/imagination; subject/object; present/past; and visual/non-visual. Examining in turn how each concept pair relates to landscape photographs, and especially the example works, the text explores an approach to these pairs that treats them not as binary oppositions to be resolved, but as productive dialogues.

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A dialogical approach to process When making a series of landscape photographs, I begin by fixing a set of rules for the work, then carry out the project according to them.1 The rules guide both the walking and the photographing, and they produce an ordered sequence of images. This way of working is motivated by ideas of balance and the specific. It is intended as a method for making the work reflect an interaction between perceiver and perceived, a mutual shaping. The process should balance the two perspectives of person and place – it should let them both speak.2 Figure 1: Scarasta 000004062010, from the series West from here, 2010

1 | Which is not to say that there is no improvisation or choice within the process – the rules only control some of its parameters. 2 | While the text refers to two perspectives – the walker’s and the landscape’s – this should not be taken as exhaustive. These are the perspectives that are primary to the making process, but others may be involved, as discussed below, including wider​ socio-cultural understandings, or the point-of-view of a companion.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

Further, that exchange should not be generalised, or made free-floating, it should find expression in a manner rooted in the here and now. This entails making space for the effects of chance, weather and circumstance. The rules are a framework for finding this balance. By taking away certain creative decisions (for example, where to look, when to stop, or what to attend to), they create openings for the contingencies of timing to intervene – and for the land itself to determine what is made visible. At the same time, the rule-system is not neutral or generic. It is a construction that arises from thoughts about the landscape in question; here, a Northern landscape, with its particular qualities of light, socio-historical character, and cultural resonance. So the rule-system has this paradoxical quality of evenhandedness: it is shaped by the maker, but then it circumscribes her or his control of the making in particular respects, so that the place is allowed a role. Photographs, within my practice, are understood as measurements (of light, of time) as much as images. They accumulate light, over time; they lie open to what transpires. The rule-governed process emphasises receptivity, providing an occasion for something to coalesce. And walking too measures: a measuring of and by both body and world, in which neither is still, but interacts with the other, moves and changes. Not clear-cut, objective measurings, rather these are contextual processes, producing slippery, compromised data. This presence of ‘noise’ is purposeful; it draws attention to the composite and the mutable. The walking basic to my practice is everyday walking, or at least walking as part of life. It is not resolutely solitary – West from here included a companion; Tarbet (Sutherland) did not. In contrast with walking that seeks a singular encounter with the sublime, or a heroic testing, it does not look for extremes of experience: awe, fear, prowess, or a meditative state.3 All of those aims might require solitude or single-mindedness. Rather, in walking I aim at a quality of attention, an openness to place – and these can be reinforced by an observant companion.4 3 | Compare, for example, Jitka Hanzlova’s lone excursions into the forest, of which John Berger writes ‘The dryads beckon, beckon further in. Natural to follow – but unaccompanied...’ Berger 2005, no page numbers. 4 | Of course, an accompanied walk is different from a lone one; it has a different emotional tone, engenders different states of mind and responses, is inflected by the presence of another. However, these effects are not necessarily problematic, nor should they be overemphasised. A person’s experience of landscape will always contain communal elements; it connects with a shared cultural and social history. When a companion is present, his or her additional perspective on the landscape is a facet of the subject’s experience, which might be described as a micro-culture within (or in contrast to) the larger social background. I am overall resistant to the trope of the lone artist, creating in isolation. Humans are social animals. My use of accompanied walking reflects my

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The acts of walking and photographing are both exchanges, imperfect interactions in which receptivity matters. Both can be understood as placing the walker/maker in dialogue with a place: each action a to-and-fro, on analogy with a conversation. Within that dialogue, a kind of equilibrium between self and world is possible. In reciprocal measuring, as in the use of rule-systems, I’m seeking a visual language that is grounded in specifics, just as walking grounds the foot on the path. Grounding and balance are mutually supporting ideas. Both relate to a goal of making landscape work that is authentic to a place, not by seeking to eradicate the assumptions and distortions that constitute a perspective, rather by bringing those effects to the surface. The chosen approach is to be precise about my individual experience but also, by explicitly acknowledging its limits and context, to look beyond it.

F act/I magination (inde x and frame) A landscape photograph is a document, but also a reduction, an edit. It is a record of certain facts, but it is not purely actual. It is responsive to, and limited by, what is really there, but it is also a constructed image, the product of framing, conceptualisation, an encoding of the world. A very simple aspect of this is that a number of choices have been made: about which perspective to capture, what to include, what time of day, what weather, the photographic equipment and materials to use, how to print, and so forth. In the context of a rule-based process, where many of these choices are explicitly determined by the instructions, the role of these decisions is (or can be) foregrounded, and their arbitrary nature acknowledged within the work. Thus systematic making allows this tension between the actual and the encoded to be worn openly. Indeed, in the way it relates to that tension, it suggests that the duality is not an either/or, but an and. The use of a system is intrinsic to my landscape photographic projects. The system determines how the work turns out and it remains within the photographs; it is their shape. For example, West from here (2010) is a set of seventeen photographs, where each was a one-second exposure, facing the western horizon, at midnight. They were taken on consecutive nights, a day’s walking apart, during an eighteen-day walk along the western coast of the Outer Hebrides archipelago. The walking and the repeated actions give the work its outline. The rules generate a structured record; the photographs register small geographic and calendar displacements, local topography and weather. This systematic approach lends the project the currency of a survey or field study. It at first seems general attitude that it is good to be in company – and it acknowledges the social nature of the self, the ways in which identity is socially made.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

to encourage the idea of photography as factual, objective – even, as many have argued, as automatic. Rosalind Krauss (1977a; 1977b) bases the automaticity of photography on its indexical nature. Photographs, she writes, are caused by light reflected from the object that they depict, and so (within the Peircean system of signs) they are indices, marks made directly by the referent.5 Thus a photograph is the physical trace of a fact; it is like a shadow, or a fingerprint. Furthermore, she says, photographs are signs empty of meaning. Because they are indexical, they are like the word “this”, they point away from themselves.6 Just as “this” has meaning only through context – gesture, the presence of an object, or supplementary discourse – so, Krauss argues, something extra is needed to supply a photograph with content. This alignment of photographs with linguistic shifters leans on her claim that a photograph is a mere register of presence, and (therefore) is disengaged from the articulate syntax of aesthetics.7 The bare index-as-imprint at the heart of Krauss’s account serves both to establish the photograph as a document of “undeniable veracity” (1977b: 59) , and to preclude any process of encoding that would engage it with language, culture and history (ibid: 60).8 However, there are other ways of reading the same terms. Where Krauss brackets together the index as contact and the index as shifter, Mary Ann Doane (2008) notes the radical difference between these sibling ideas. She finds in Peirce a dual form for the index: physical trace, but also deixis, the pointing finger – the gesture that in language becomes “this”. And whereas deixis, the bare direction of attention, is itself empty of content, an imprint can have any degree of figuration, from a smudge to the fullness of the cinematic image. To Doane, the two definitions of the index thus appear incompatible, yet they 5 | Krauss’s account, written in the 1970s, concerns analogue photography: “the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface” (1977a: 75). My own photography practice is exclusively analogue, and within this text I leave aside the possible complications of digital photography. 6 | Here Krauss makes use of the linguist Roman Jakobson’s term “shifter”, a sign which depends for its referent on the occasion of use. This category includes words like “here”, “I” and “you”. (cf. Krauss 1977a: 69-70). Kriebel notes the continual interplay within Krauss’s theory between indexicality and this notion of displaced meaning (2007: 26-27). 7 | For Krauss, a photograph’s direct link to the order of things in the world rules out aesthetics: “the connective tissue binding the objects contained in a photograph is that of the world itself, rather than that of a cultural system”; it is “the mute presence of an uncoded event” (1977b: 60). 8 | For a wide-ranging critical discussion of Krauss’s indexical view and its place within her theory – as well as its importance for critical postmodernism – see Emerling 2012: 54-63.

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are bound together in an “irreducible intimacy” (ibid: 7), wherein they can neither be collapsed together, nor separated. Further, this tension generates movement, such that the index’s nature as trace, as touch, “allows it to escape the narrow confines of the this” (ibid: 9) – a movement that gives photographs their aesthetic possibilities (ibid: 4, 9, 12). Martin Lefebvre (2007) re-examines in detail Peirce’s index, and the work that it does within his semiotic taxonomy, in order to untangle photographs from indices. For Peirce, the indexicality of a sign doesn’t exclude it from also standing for an object by being iconic (a likeness) or symbolic (culturally tied to it). Indeed, in genuine signs (existent as opposed to theoretical) these three ways of representing are mixed, so that in practice every index is also an icon (ibid: 225, 230).9 Moreover, Lefebvre argues, a photograph is not more indexical than any other sign or image, nor is it limited to indexing only the object that once stood before the lens.10 The mistake lies in trying to define a semiotic essence of the medium. Rather, we should see indexicality as the basis for one, very common, use of a photograph: as a sign of a fact. For Lefebvre, following Peirce, the semiotic identity of any sign is inseparable from how it is used – from the contexts, conventions and collateral knowledge that allow it to be interpreted and understood (ibid: 241-3).11 Jae Emerling (2012), too, notes that Peirce’s index is not suitable for building – and was not intended for – a definition of photography. However, he finds a role for indexicality in understanding photographic images, via Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the index. For Deleuze, on Emerling’s reading, what matters is not that an index is a sign of a particular kind (one that refers to its object through a physical link), but how it functions. An index connects what is presented to the viewer to something else, the out-of-field, the “open”: “a situation or history that is not given within the frame” (ibid: 69). The open is what animates the photograph, a “deframing power” that “traverses” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 188; quoted by Emerling 2012: 233) the picture, enabling it to become an image. 9 | Otherwise put: every sign both denotes and connotes; the sign indicates, or refers to something and “affords a representation of it by way of some quality that both sign and object share” (ibid: 230). 10 | It is not intrinsically more indexical because every (existent) sign is causally embedded in the world in multiple ways, and each of these links could found an indexical function. A photograph is existentially connected to – and thus could index – a number of things: the photographer, an aesthetic movement, or a defective camera mechanism (ibid: 228-29). The distinction between direct (contact) and indirect (pointing, demonstratives) indexical relations is also very helpful (ibid: 231). 11 | For further reflections on the importance of context and knowledge to the meaning of signs, see Brunet 2008: 34-49.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

These three re-examinations of indexicality share lines of thought that strengthen one another. And all three allow the indexical relation a more complex, supple way of functioning. They also lead us to the clear difficulty with Krauss’s automaticity: photographs frame, just as essentially as they record. The photographer’s construction of an image will always be in tension with the photograph-as-index.12 The frame is the counterpart to the index, and the frame too is dual. It is what (physically) separates a photograph from the world; it makes it a sign. The frame as framing is also an act of selection, of inclusion and exclusion. Returning to the example of West from here, the impression of facticity that is lent by a process of scrupulous rule-following is swiftly unravelled by a simple question: “why choose this set of rules?” Figure 2: Luskentyre 000003062010, from the series West from here, 2010

The rules direct the framing: that is, the framing of the individual photographs, but also the perspective of the resulting sequence. And the rules solidify a set of interests, such that the overall structure expresses a Northern landscape that has already been conceptually and imaginatively framed. The explicit use of a 12 | And this remains true whether we accept Krauss’s index-as-imprint, or something more nuanced.

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system of rules, which implies an objective record, also serves to underline the framing of the series. It reminds the viewer that this frame (like any frame) has been chosen, that the images result from a subjective delineation of a project. The project began with thoughts of Northern midnight twilight and the West there as a threshold, a liminal space. Indeed, it may be fair to say that the rules project onto the landscape, before it is encountered, a pre-visualisation: my anticipation of the place. There was something that I hoped to see: a prospect of a particular light, a soft and strange illumination of a place that is as much water as land. In part, what I intended was a kind of cross-checking – of this expectation that land and ocean would elide, and that in early summer the horizon to the west would be middling bright at midnight (as it sometimes was and sometimes wasn’t). This process of framing something before seeing it may involve this imagining of what will be in the frame, and how it will be organised, but by its own logic of constraints, the photograph will be of whatever turns up. Not a foreclosure, but a question. The framing of West from here began with a visualisation – of Northern coastal light – closely tied to a conceptualisation: a set of thoughts about edges. About, in particular, a western edge that is geographical, cultural and socio-historical. As well as being a landscape where land, water and sky have a tendency to mingle, the Western Isles are the western edge of Scotland. From the mainland, they are a line along the far horizon, seemingly the last, outermost fragments of land, where the ocean begins.13 So, what is it like to stand on an edge and look out? Well, when you get there, it doesn’t feel like an edge, it feels like a new middle-of-things. The landscape twists and turns and rises up around you; it escapes any idea of line and edge. And the West, being a relation rather than a location, retreats as you approach it – without losing its potency as an idea. It is especially resonant, here, as a cultural memory, because this is a shore with a long history of departures westward, for Canada and the USA – many of these journeys enforced during the Highland Clearances of the rural population in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then continued, in a process of ongoing community loss, with 20th century emigration. If devising a rule system for a piece of work can be compared to formulating a question, then perhaps the extent to which the rules are tailored to a landscape that has been imagined and thought is the amount of content the question has.14 The shaping of the question limits the possible responses, but the responding still falls to the actual, the encounter with the place. In this met13 | Although, in fact, not the last fragments of land. From Harris and North Uist, on a clear day, you can see the stacks of St Kilda. 14 | What would be the effect of a set of rules that were chosen at random? They would still express something, perhaps a generic question, perhaps involving a meta-assumption about process: “What is it like there (when randomly sampled)?”

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

aphor of interrogation the idea of dialogue returns – the tension between the perceived (the what is there) and the conceived (the idea of what is there) playing out through rule-following as question and answer combined in a single act/object, a collaboration. The systematic making process makes explicit the composite nature of photographs, that they are both actual and encoded, active and passive. It displays the technics that for Jacques Derrida conditions every act of perception, which Emerling describes as “a set or ensemble of framing conditions, that records and alters, creates and documents” (Emerling 2012: 74). In my work, the rule system has another purpose too, that of estranging the act of framing. What is recorded is determined by how the project is delimited – the fixed timing, compass direction and standpoint – but paradoxically those limits are partly a way of not framing a view. They are a desire to defeat photographic habits, to take what comes and let the land determine what is visible. The rules pre-frame, so that the partiality of the photographs is determined at a distance from the act of hand and eye. This is a way to keep myself more quiet at the moment of making, to not be looking for something, but just looking (or: listening properly, not finishing someone else’s sentences). A dialogue requires that both parties be active and passive in turn. So, the rules are there to ensure balance between perceiver and perceived, to draw out the give-andtake of experience. They are also intended to underline contingency: the role of chance in determining where I ended up, what was visible to the west (and whether it was pouring with rain that night). Systems make room for chance by removing opportunities for human choice – human choice being unable to generate randomness. I see the presence of contingency in the work as important to groundedness and the specific: the here and now understood as an unrepeatable, unreproducible accumulation of choices and happenstance. Contingency is also related to a sense of the making as a process of gathering data, with data’s usual fluctuations. A photograph, like an experiment, is always both passive and active, and this contrast is not only irresolvable, but essential to the life of the photograph.

S ubject/O bject – a field study Making an artwork according to a system is both like and unlike conducting an experiment or study.15 The process for a genuine field study rests on a larger structure of theory, as well as clear, quantitative investigative aims – and a place within a body of knowledge. Whereas these works are made according to an 15 | Maybe it is a little like conducting a home experiment (using a potato to power a lightbulb), or the sort of drawing room demonstration that was common during the Enlightenment.

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improvised process, without a scientific context or rationale. For instance, the photographs record a quantity of light, but no external scale is given; visual detail is sparse and uneven, mistakes are embraced. The method is applied with strict consistency, yet it doesn’t cover everything, and it is subjective and person-relative, fluid. Blake Stimson notes an absence of information in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s epic typologies of industrial architecture, a deliberate lack of “the particulars of design, operation and social function” (Stimson 2012: 3), and of any categorisation or chronology. By excising “the sort of detail that would be of interest to technical historians or social historians or historians of any sort really” (ibid: 3), they divorce the photographs from any instrumental goal, enabling them to instead be compared as shapes or physiognomies (“like nature” (Becher 1988: 57), they say). The Bechers construct their sets through repeated procedure and format that allow the structures to be read as both the same (of a kind) and differentiated.16 The system is like that of a natural history archive, but this typology without context or analysis “does not provide greater knowledge” (Stimson 2012: 6), rather it generates rhythms and repetitions, it allows an aesthetic appreciation of the buildings as “anonymous sculpture” (ibid: 6). Their method throughout is distinguished by a dynamic poise, between system and aesthetic, objectivity and subjectivity, sameness and difference, group and individual – where interpretation cannot settle on one node or the other. Further, in the seriality of the Bechers’ approach to photography, Stimson finds an ethical dimension, a tempering and qualifying of visual delight by commitment that could be a template for social engagement.17 He calls this their “photographic comportment”, and describes it rather beautifully as: “an elastic liminal bearing that continually bounds between sides, between a cool, quasi-disembodied objectivity and a hot subjective comportment that speaks of its own history and desire towards the world” (ibid: 2). Stimson’s analysis of the Bechers’ project is useful because it pinpoints the importance of tension-as-balance within their approach. It is precisely such an emphasis on tension as (if we carry the physical metaphor through) a force that is connective as well as disjunctive that I am seeking to capture with the notion of dialogue. Within landscape photographs, a rule-governed methodology throws certain tensions into relief. Adherence to a rule-system, and the qualities of consistency and repetition that come from it, suggest objectivity, reliability, a basis in the actual; but the system itself is a framework of the imaginary, 16 | So that they form a “grammar” (their word, cited in Touraine 1989: 9) for the viewer, a unified inscription of (some) possible forms for this type of object. 17 | Emerling is sceptical of Stimson’s notion that the repeated act of photographing can take on a cultural expressiveness that allows it to model social behaviour; for Emerling this stretches a metaphor (2012: 152).

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

built on subjective visions and desires – and thus the photographs that result from such a process will not settle to one side or the other but insist on being read as both fact and imagination, both objective and subjective. Walking within a practice of landscape photography can have a parallel effect, bringing both subjectivity – the walker’s experience – and objectivity – the place itself – into the work. In my own practice, I use walking to determine parameters of distance or duration for sets of photographs. With West from here, for example, the walking sets the geographic interval between the photographs – as the ground covered in one day. Walking fixes parameters collaboratively: as a measurement of terrain by the body, and of body by the terrain. The walk is an event that comingles the actions and points-of-view of subject and object. However, it doesn’t occur in isolation; it is embedded in the world of causes and forces, and takes shape within a net of meanings and cultural structures – in this case including the micro-culture of companionship. So, although within this walk my body was the determinant of pace,18 the transaction between body and landscape is complicated by surrounding activities and understandings. It is not as straightforward as “How far can I walk today?”, coupled with, “how steep or rough is the ground?”. Within “today”, for instance, there is also “How windy or wet or hot is the day?” (the handiwork of luck and of latitude), and “which day is it?”, as the time spent walking increases my stamina. At the day’s end, there is “where is the next good stopping place?”. This last, a question of terrain and of personal standards, is revealing of the complex of factors at work in a process that is person-relative in this way, some objectively measurable, some not19 – not only bodily strength, but also various decisions, memories, preferences, habits and character traits. Moreover, my own character includes a preference for company on long journeys, adding a further layer of contributing forces both external and internal: a companion’s help carrying equipment or his distraction by wildlife, on the one hand; on the other, the way that it is easier to ignore weariness in company, but also more appealing to sit an inefficient moment longer over lunch. The walk remains an exchange between walker and landscape, but the complications welcomed in by a person-relative process show something about what it is to be a subject or an object – to be composite, socially constituted, and permeable. The American artist Helen Mirra has used walking as part of a structured system for making artworks. Her 2010 series of prints on linen, gehend (Field recordings 1-3), relates to hikes in three regions of Switzerland and Germany 18 | As the slower of we two. This is not to ignore that a companion alters my capacities – as discussed below. 19 | We must take care not to elide the subject and the subjective – the property of belonging to the subject’s perspective. The subject of experience is also a thing in the world with objective aspects.

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over a three month period. She walked on most days, for seven hours, and each hour stopped to make an ink imprint from an object (branch, stone, reed) found along the path. Like photographs, these direct imprints are indices: traces of the landscape and extracts from a larger span. Like a book index, which maps words back onto a text, the prints point to objects in the world 20, and have a structural relationship to a whole, but convey very little of its flavour. Mirra’s prints are particularly quiet and ambiguous in their picturing of the objects they refer to. They are mirror images, abbreviated and loose, blurry – “facts”, Mirra says, “without too much information” (Eleey and Mirra 2011: 14). This same almost casual reticence runs through her process, where both walking and recording are carried out in a manner that heightens their subjectiveness. Her rules are minimal and flexible, and more than that, Christina Vegh (2011) notes, she breaks them, incorporating the unplanned. With every set of rules, “Mirra affirms its inherent faultiness, accordingly adapting it to her own idiosyncratic preferences and interests” (ibid: 4-5). Furthermore, Mirra’s system for measuring walks is not only relative to her body, but also to the region walked – it is stated in hours for the surroundings of Zürich, kilometres for Bonn, and steps for Berlin.21 Her translations between these units remind the viewer – as walking itself does – of the embodied nature of human experience. And with the shifting irresolvability of this spatiotemporal equation, she shows how body, time and location are inextricable within a walk. Further, by including her own personalised unit of bodily movement, Mirra gently questions the objectivity of all measurements. She reminds us that scientific information has cultural content, and consequently of the impossibility of separating nature from culture in our grasp of a landscape. A similar elusiveness affects the system of measurement for Tarbet (Sutherland). For this set of photographs, I began with distance: not measured, but determinate, fixed by the land/water borders of the landscape. Distance, walked, is transformed into duration, which is measured – as a variable quantity of light – by a pinhole camera. Three photographs document three walks, done in a single day. To make each photograph, I walked an isthmus, from the edge of one loch to the next and back again, opening the camera as I set out and closing it on my return – traversing the three strips of land in order to think of them as sites of portage for boats. These three narrow stretches of land concatenate four lochs, like a string of beads. They are at a hamlet called Tarbet, which is Scots Gaelic for “portage”, so the walks relate to the derivation of the place name. 20 | Both the objects they refer to, and the array of objects not selected. As Peter Eleey writes, they “implicate everything left unnoted” (2006: 149). 21 | It might be interesting to compare the attitude to walking expressed by Mirra’s determinedly elusive measuring with that communicated in Richard Long’s clear statements of distance and time.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

In some sense they try out the practicalities of a theory, although not through re-enactment (no crew of Vikings, no boat); rather the walks are a feeling-out. They use the kinesthetic sensations of a body in motion to invoke a historical landscape. In a qualified sense, too, the images are calibrations: the density of each image reveals in its relative brightness how long it took me to go across and come back to close the camera. However, there is no way to read time, distance, or pace back from the photographs, except in the vaguest terms. Ramshackle aspects – the unevenly cut sections of 120 film, edges partly masked out with tape, that attest to a project improvised in situ – underline the handmade, the subjective, the fallible. What is more, the relation between duration and gathered light is modified from one image to the next, made relative by the fading February afternoon, so that in this failure even of comparison they also note the passing of a short Northern winter’s day. Figure 3: Tarbet (Sutherland), 2013

Tarbet begins with the particular structures of the land, but then measures these with a disheveled process that is full of gaps, unsettling objective facts with subjective systems. It carries out similar reversals with time and with presence. In recording duration it registers the limited moment of my being there, in order to point away from it, towards the vast expanse of time when I’m not. Each of the three images faces my sight line, which is also my walked line, and in their definition, or lack of it, they reflect my walking pace. However, although I am within the frame of each photograph, motion makes me invisible.

S ubject/O bject – A bstraction These uses of relativity and presence are closely related to the aim of specificity. When I make work, I want it to be specific, so there will be aspects of the work that are made relative to that particular place and time, and to me. This is an acknowledgement of subjectivity and context. Ideally, a photograph should attest in some way to a photographer’s presence in the landscape. However, I also

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try to build in some aspect of abstraction, which I see as a trajectory away from one person’s perspective. If a landscape is to be given a wider life, not reduced to the scenery for one person’s experience, then some opening out is necessary, through abstraction from the content of present experience. Of course, as Emerling points out, photography always abstracts, in that it “separates itself from concrete existence” (2012: 75). But this movement of separation is so quiet that it often goes undetected by the viewer – or photographs would never be taken for facts. So I suppose I mean something further: some reduction in, or gesture beyond, the pictorial content of the work. This could be a haziness that welcomes projections and interpretations; it could also involve treating a picture as not (or not just) a picture, by attending to its other significances – as material object, as surface, as symbol, or as the outcome of a mechanical process, for example. Or abstraction can function through multiplication of the picture – repetitions and rhythms of line, motif, gesture, drawing the eye to phenomena of continuity and differentiation. For instance, in West from here, the concentration on the western horizon imposes a geometry on the photographs. The pronounced horizontal, reiterated in each image, causes them to be also readable as two blue rectangles of varying proportions, tone and hue. It draws a wavering line through all seventeen images, pulling the viewer along. And it refers outwards to a horizon that is not any of those photographed, to every horizon, to histories of looking. However, another thing that this framing does, when applied in this location, is to reduce the evidence of human habitation within the photographs. Abstraction is a taking away; it subtracts information. There is a decision to leave out, or move away from, detail or clarity, over and above the selectiveness inherent in any photograph. It seems that emphasis on abstract form or symbolic resonance within landscape practices can be “at the expense of engagement with particularities of place” (Wells 2011: 13), and therefore, as Liz Wells has pointed out, can be a way of not grounding the work. Consequently, we arrive at a methodological principle that appears to contradict itself: there is the need to give up some specificity in order to reduce the autobiographical content of the work, in tension with the need to stay grounded in particularity, so as to be faithful to a landscape as it was met.22 In other words, keeping a balance between the subject of experience and the experienced world requires an equivocation between the material and the abstract, not because the two tensions are aligned, but because they cut across one another – because 22 | This tension relates to Robert Adams’ view, cited by Liz Wells (ibid: 7), that the “three verities” of landscape photography are “geography, autobiography, and metaphor”, and that these are best taken together, so that they “strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact – an affection for life” (Adams 1996: 14). The idea that apparently opposed approaches when combined strengthen one another is particularly interesting.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

the relationship between the particular and the general (between that which is individual and that which is shared) animates subject as it does object.

S ubject/O bject – P henomenology What does this mean for how we should theorize subject and object – and how to keep them in dialogue?23 Phenomenology offers one possible way to think the two together, through its characterization of the conscious subject as an “openness” to the world. For Heidegger and also for Merleau-Ponty, human experience is fundamentally embodied, active and in relation to a habitat. There is no (legitimate) way of separating the experience of a subject from their surroundings, nor from what they are engaged in doing. At the heart of Heidegger’s phenomenology is his notion of “being-in-the-world”, which he calls the “basic determination” of human existence (Heidegger 1927: 164). It is a unified awareness of self and world, one that involves “going beyond ourselves into the world” (Smith 2016: 47). The world in question is a meaningful whole in which we dwell, the context in which all entities gain their sense – including both subject and object, so that being-in-the-world is prior to both of those concepts (cf. ibid: 46-47). According to this way of considering things, there is no gap to be crossed between the subject and object of perception (this being one of the standard problems of Western philosophy), rather there is a continuity, a unity within which those concepts are to be thought. MerleauPonty’s later account inflects Heidegger’s with an emphasis on the body as “a primary opening onto things” (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 99). We do need to be reminded, in our culture that overuses vision as a template and metaphor, that the body is the basis of experience, and is experienced as both subject and object, as that which senses, and a physical, perceptible thing. Could we then understand the body not as a membrane with the world, but as a fold, implying that self and world form one substance? The metaphor of folding promises an involution instead of division, a turning point instead of a break; it proposes a situation of material continuity and difference.

23 | On a practical level, the problem is how to make tangible an experience, and admit to its specific slant, without an overemphasis on the autobiographical that reduces landscape to the scenery for that experience? And how to be grounded in the materiality of a place without pretending to have captured the landscape ‘in itself’, unobserved?

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Figure 4: Howmore 000010062010, from the series West from here, 2010

In The Fold, a work of rich exegesis and suggestive ideas, Deleuze (1988) develops24 a concept of the fold as generative and organising principle. Processes of folding, enfolding (inclusion) and unfolding (elaboration) are the bases of what Alain Badiou describes as his “vision of the world as an intricate, folded, and inseparable totality such that any distinction is simply a local operation” (Badiou 1988: 55). Within this totality, Deleuze describes two levels: the individual subject is “a unity that envelops a multiplicity” (1988: 25) – and that multiplicity, the world, is also “set or creased in matter” (ibid: 116), “developing the One in the manner of a ‘series’” (ibid: 25). The relation of self to world, then, is dual or bilateral; it is both a bringing-in and an unfurling (or expansion) – an unfolding, it is important to note, that is not the opposite of folding, but its continuation. And the point of contact, the “singularity”, is not a caesura, but a point of inflection. The fold, in Deleuze’s hands, dissolves oppositions. Rather than distinctions, or gaps, we have continuity, “the exchange of values at each real point” (Badiou 1988: 54), so that binary concepts can no longer be separated, let alone placed in hierarchies, “except at the price of a global abstraction” 24 | Deleuze does not advance a theory, but – as Alain Badiou says – “he shades” (Badiou 1988: 54). He describes, narrates, enunciates.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

(ibid: 54). This analysis functions as a corrective to any tendency to take our categorisation of the world too literally. Geoffrey Bowker rightly points out that categories are needed if we are to talk about anything, but that we can – and should – recognise the language of contrast and exclusion that structures our categorical systems as only a useful “first level of approximation” (2010: 130). The language of the fold, he says, “gives us a way of understanding the world as inherently multiple and porous” (ibid: 131).25 The Deleuzian fold reminds us of how entities fold into one another, such that what is considered outside can also be inside, and the perspective of a single perceiver can include the group point-of-view. A fixed distinction between inner and outer, particularly in relation to our bodies, cannot be sustained, neither physically nor philosophically.26 The experiencing subject is, Badiou writes, “an intimacy spread over the entire world, a mind folded everywhere within the body” (Badiou 1988: 61). Deleuze’s fold is a zigzagging, complicated process of imbrication and extension. In its emphasis on flow over fixity, exchange over binaries, it picks up the qualities of a good conversation: the giveand-take, openness and mutuality of what I have been calling dialogue. The dynamic of folding, it strikes me, comes alive in the experience of walking – the body in motion finding with each breath exactly that combination of expansiveness and intake that Badiou and Deleuze so vividly describe. “What matters”, Deleuze concludes, “is folding, unfolding, refolding.” (Deleuze 1988: 158) It seems clear that there is merit in a re-orientation of the discussion of subjective experience, away from the visual and towards the bodily, as a way to vivify the reciprocity between self and world. However, if we pursue a phenomenological approach, we remain on the side of experience, rather than of the place itself. There are good reasons to think that a phenomenology of landscape needs to be balanced by attention to landscape’s materiality and its socio-historical aspects. Robin Kelsey (2008) argues that phenomenology perpetuates the very distancing of subjects from the landscape that we hoped it might correct. This is because it “always comes to experience in its writing, with all the belatedness and deferral thus entailed” (ibid: 209, my emphasis). Writing about belonging to the world, he argues, involves “the fantasy that writing does not retrospectively concoct this belonging within itself” (ibid: 209-10). Kelsey is making this point in the context of a wider argument that any theorising of landscape is an iteration of the human fantasy of separateness from our sur-

25 | Bowker is reading The Fold as a model for critical analysis of science. 26 | The skin is not a separator but a site of interpenetration. Bowker links this thought to Michel Serres’ work on the senses: “where the outside gets folded into our bodies” (Bowker 2010: 126).

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roundings.27 This seems to assume that a better theorisation of the relationship of subject to world cannot impact on attitudes and behaviour towards the world. However, he also offers a specific criticism of a phenomenological approach: the suspicion that it tends to reinforce existing attitudes. In its attention to what is given in experience, phenomenology takes that experience as it presents itself. In principle, this tactic was meant to enable the phenomenologist to shed all assumptions and interpretations and engage directly with a pre-reflective world, but in practice she or he cannot avoid taking certain things for granted. Such an analysis is, for instance, unable to accommodate the trace of a past that lies beyond our experience. The difficulty lies with beginning from experience, which inevitably has already been shaped by the phenomenal subject’s perceptual matrix, including their socio-cultural context and the limits of their vantage point. Every phenomenologist has his or her own blind spots. Phenomenology can therefore – and here Kelsey cites Judith Butler’s important feminist critique – operate as a “scopic regime of exclusion” (ibid, footnote 113: 300). Furthermore, Kelsey suspects that it could lead us to normalize our experience and to mask “the social structures and operations that determine the conditions under which it can exist as such” (ibid, footnote 115: 300). Similarly, Jennifer Jane Marshall (2008) expresses a concern that phenomenology’s focus on immediate lived experience may serve to reinforce the seemingly natural categories that configure our experiences. What is more, political and social determinants affect our encounters with our surroundings, without necessarily being discoverable within the experience. Therefore, she argues, it is essential both to recognise the effects of ideology on experience, and to “validate experience itself as a powerful tool against ideology” (Marshall 2008: 201). Her proposal is not that we abandon phenomenology, but that our theorization of landscape should incorporate an understanding of landscape as a cultural artefact – of an encounter with place as something made 28 – while maintaining “the deeply contextual, radically contingent nature of phenomenological interpretation” (ibid: 201). Marshall’s point is that both the material critique and the 27 | The problem, for Kelsey, is not how best to write ourselves into the landscape picture; it is “a matter of trying to make belonging happen in a world of images” (ibid: 209). It is the gap between thinking and doing that Kelsey objects to, the lip-service that we pay to being ecologically embedded. We could put it this way: the practice of writing about belonging makes us feel more comfortable, which makes it easier not to do anything about it. We need to recognize that all these pictures are suppressions of our desire not to belong. 28 | That is, not only transformed in being perceived, but also conditioned by the tools with which we reach it. Marshall writes: “landscape’s varied availability to experience and reproduction is conditioned first of all by objects” (ibid: 201). This material equipment includes: windows, walking boots, tents, cameras, and so forth.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

phenomenological analysis are needed, because landscape and material culture are interlaced in a “reciprocal, relational field” (ibid: 202), such that ideological forces shape experiences, and yet individual experiences, in all their ephemeral indeterminacy, can – indeed perhaps should – be used to reinterpret ideology. These thoughts apply as importantly to practice as they do to theory. If landscape artworks are to avoid what David Brett terms “romantic solipsism” (1989: 16), a mode of engagement with landscape “in which the ultimate reality... is the sensation of the self within the environment” (ibid: 16), then they need to be shaped by more than the autobiographical; they also need a sense of the land as a physical and cultural object that exceeds the individual. Artworks based upon a notion of merging the self with its environment, Brett argues, are not capable of dealing critically with the relationship of human culture to the environment; they simply “reenact the impulse of appropriation” (ibid: 16). This is the counterpart to Marshall’s point – artworks, like theorizations, need to admit to “the materiality of what is otherwise an ephemeral and contingent snatch of lived experience” (Marshall 2008: 202). How then, do we properly engage with landscape as matter? Not, obviously, by peeling it off as an independent entity. Rather, it is by highlighting the “reciprocal, relational field” between nature and culture that we bring in a sense of landscapes as active, changing and remembering. For such a sense of landscapes as unfixed, as always both effecting and absorbing change – histories of use and of understanding, geological processes, weathering, and the consequences of technologies – it is key to consider how landscape photographs relate to time.

P resent/Past Landscapes are fluid over time, altering physically with geological and human activity, and in meaning with the stories told about them. As Liz Wells (2011) writes, this is a motile process of definition that is continually sifted and recalibrated, with subsequent stories adding to or altering our idea of a place, or our understanding being contested, perhaps overturned, by histories told from a different point of view.29 There is a symmetry to that relationship: places make us in return, within a continual reciprocal process that blurs the binary of nature and culture. This seems to me to be true both long-term and in any moment of encounter, where immediate experience is inflected with the remembered and the imagined, and with our habits and systems of thought. The two time-frames are of course related: the long-term shaping of human consciousness by places, narratives, and memories of places, is brought to bear in the 29 | Cf. Wells 2011: 19. Here Wells acknowledges the influence of Doreen Massey’s work.

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moment on any given experience of place, such that there is a feedback loop of reciprocal shaping within each temporal span. In an interview published with his book of photographs 50 moons at a time, the artist Darren Almond says that “the eye in the instant behaves like the fulcrum of experience, between present and past” (2004, loose insert without page numbers). The eye absorbs the view now – in Almond’s example, a Siberian railway bridge – while simultaneously applying to what is seen other things already known – that the bridge was built by Gulag labour – so that the flow of now is hinged to that distant past by the moment of seeing. How does this dynamic of time apply within a photograph? A photograph is often spoken of as if it were a durationless snapshot, when in fact what it captures is the span of the exposure. This could be an instant, a blink. But in the case of the two landscape series we have focused on, the exposures are fairly long: one second for the images in West from here, and between ten and twenty minutes each for Tarbet (Sutherland); a gaze, or a long time spent scanning the hillside. Both of these time spans relate to a period spent walking (whether they coincide with the walking, or with the pauses that punctuate it): one day or 18 days. This is the wider present recorded (and invented) in each set of photographs – a stretch of activity with a certain shape. As photographic series, they also represent, through their framing and internal relationships, a set of structures which thread back into the past, tracing physical, historical, and cultural contours within these Northern landscapes – inevitably filtered through the limits of my research and my sensibility. So this constructed framework creates openings, within which the agency of the landscape, together with weather and accident, determine what appears on each negative in the moment of exposure.30 The time of the photographs is thus fundamentally blurred, as if it were vibrating: the past unfolding into a sequence of presents, each enfolding a past. Within the extent of the walk, the seventeen images of West from here form a series of points that are both geographical and temporal. In the planning, I imagined a kind of dotted map of dispatches. And if each dot, each moment of observation, is also a pivot where thoughts and histories inflect seeing, then these observed details articulate two interwoven narratives: that of walking and that of thinking/remembering. But even this was, in retrospect, a simplification. Because the photographs are also images of precisely the same time, repeated, so that they form a loop as much as a line. They travel and yet find themselves back in the same twilit hour. Midnight regained, over and over. Nor can we stop there, for, like all photographs, they are suspended between the time of exposure and the time of viewing, a leap which scumbles all of these ge30 | My talk of openings can be related to Emerling’s account of “and” as a threshold. Between picture and frame, he says, “an image appears, [...] one filched from the real and yet not imaginary” (Emerling 2012: 74).

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

ometries. The photograph, as Emerling notes, is both discovery and invention. And this affects its relation to time. Turning to Derrida’s insightful analysis, Emerling describes his conception of a photograph as at once a retracing and the erasure of the line. Photography is an operation both active and passive, Derrida tells us, that catches something up only “to let it be lost, to mark the fact that ‘this took place, it is lost’” (Derrida 2010: 18, cited in Emerling 2012: 73). Figure 5: Berneray 000005062010, from the series West from here, 2010

The sequencing of a photographic series creates narrative or patterning. As discussed above in relation to the Bechers’ practice, when the photographs are taken according to a repeated fixed procedure, this produces the additional effect that Stimson calls “rhythmic continuity” (2004: 1). Recurring features such as composition, scale, lighting, or angle connect each image to the next, and the following. This builds a rhythm of seeing, wherein the viewer’s eye absorbs the familiar and notes the new, in order to read “difference within repetition” (Emerling 2012: 153). This mode of engaging the viewer means that the photographs render their subject partly by means of the network. The meaning of a single image cannot be found in isolation, but only with this contributing effect of family resemblance and difference. Besides highlighting sameness and

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variation, the sequence also draws attention to what is not in the images, but between them – to the spaces that connect them, the hours that are not pictured. And, beyond this, also to what is outside the sequence of frames: to other times, other contiguous places – to the open. I connect this idea of networked meaning with an idea of understanding as a process, not a state – maybe a process like stepping stones, at ease with gaps. This gesture that the sequence makes, towards the open which exceeds and traverses it, returns us to Emerling’s use of Deleuze’s index: the “deframing power” that opens every image onto the “out-of-field” of the unpicturable whole. “This out-of-field – the whole as the open – is never represented or contained within a single frame or set of frames,[...] yet it enables and passes through every frame” (Emerling 2012: 69). It is in virtue of this dynamic between index and frame – which is also a dynamic between materiality and abstraction – that photography is “simultaneously active and passive, framing and de-framing time” (ibid: 70). A photograph refers to a given time or times of exposure – which we could call its material time – and in its symbolic capacities, it can refer to other times brought to mind by the framing conditions, but the image itself has no fixed time. The frame points equally to its own outside: open, infinite time. As Emerling writes, “a photograph gives us a point of view that we can never take up or occupy” (ibid: 70). Photography transforms; what it shows us is not what any eye has seen.

V isual /N on - visual Even the most ‘straight’ photograph does not give us an equivalent of human visual perception. It records more detail than the eye can make out (this is what Walter Benjamin termed the “optical unconscious”) and also less, in the cropping and in its monocularity – our binocular vision sees depth, where a photograph offers everything as a set of interlocking flat planes. The lens bends and dilates objects. Further, human seeing, even the briefest glimpse, occurs over time and involves movement: the motion of things and the scanning movements of eyes and head. Moreover, human vision is not isolable within human experience; it melds with other sensations, with the flow of internal thoughts and emotions, and with the situation in which seeing occurs. These facets of experience are not merely simultaneous events, they texture one another. All of this means, firstly, that equating seeing and photographs is misleading at best. Secondly, it suggests that if we want to convey a rich sense of human visual experience through photography, something supplementary may be needed – varying perspectives, a narrative aspect, or something non-visual. However, I say ‘may be’ because it is also the case that photographs can take advantage of the familiar mixed, mobile nature of human experience, which endows vision with associative properties.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

The problematic aspects of landscape photography are very much connected with the false equation of photography and seeing. There is a problem of accuracy, and of ideology. It is too easy for landscape photographs to distort the landscape by making it appear static, flattened, distanced, available, and presented to the eye of single-point perspective (this without considering the distortions introduced by the lens, film stock, or the decisions made in printing), and therefore for them to mask several things: the immersion that is characteristic of a real encounter with a place; the continuity of humans with our environment (and our responsibility to it); the life of a landscape, its fluctuating, unpindownable nature; and the sense of excess that real places have, the important feeling that there is more than we can see. In trying to communicate something nuanced about an experience of place through photography, there are a number of possible strategies. These approaches sit within a particularly interesting wider field: the capacities of visual artworks to represent in non-visual ways. The appearance of paradox here is enhanced with photographs, so essentially a matter of seeing, but photographic works very often have representational or evocative content that is not visual. This might come as an added element, such as text, or additions to the surface (drawing, paint, collage). Or it might be at work within, or among photographs. There is the sequencing of images, to form a network or narrative – lines of meaning drawn between images generating trajectories outside of them, lines that enlarge their spatiality, temporality, or interrelatedness. Moreover, the visual acts as a carrier for other senses. This includes the “intermodal experience” (Smith 2012: 159) discussed by Edith Stein (1917), where water can look cold, rocks smooth or grass tickly. We are used to the overlap of our senses, and to reading multi-sensory information with the visual, and these perceptual habits can be encouraged. The mechanisms of photography can be deployed to enhance the haptic within images, to accentuate the qualities of texture, light temperature, proximity/immersion, and so forth, that activate the crossing from the visual to the tactile characteristic of the haptic. Such devices bring forth a desire to touch, a reminder of touch, a touching with our eyes. The haptic in photographs connects with ideas of photography as actual, as an existential link between the viewer and the objects depicted – whether we interpret the index as contact, or as a gesture towards the referent.31 And it is part of a photograph’s ability to convince that it will strike these sensory sparks; an image can suggest damp air, the aroma of a dusty path, or the crackle of leaves underfoot. These points of transformation visual/multi-sensory rely on the verisimilitude of photographs; it is through specificity that they resonate.

31 | Or both – but, after Doane (2008) and Lefebvre (2007), it seems important to distinguish the two forms of the index.

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Figure 6: Smeircleit 000011062010, from the series West from here, 2010

The visual also carries associative thoughts and emotions, which rely on various antecedents both personal and cultural. It is in the nature of associations that they can be out of the artist’s hands (for example, I remember a friend remarking that a dark seascape made her think of skinny-dipping), but they can also be more predictable; they can be mapped. Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory is a sustained and careful excavation of Western culture’s shared landscape associations, of the ancestry of the ideas woven into our perceptions of forest, river and mountain. Woodland, for instance, he examines as primeval origin, as holy grove, as concealing (dual-facing: as shelter/place of danger), as death and renewal, and as roots – his analysis following persistent threads that travel through American and European history. These ideas held in common form a “rich deposit of myths, memories and obsessions” that bind nature and culture together in landscape (Schama 1995: 14). Landscape, he writes, “is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.” (ibid: 7) The organising conditions of “culture, convention,

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

and cognition” (ibid: 12) constitute the frame that allows us to discern the form of landscape.32 I speculate that the ability to spark associations can be brought out in a photograph through a reduction in its ease of reading – as a picture, or as (part of) a narrative. The less clearly an image pictures some particular where, or fits some explicit purpose, the greater its associative power. This potential in images seems connected to poetics. Elizabeth Helsinger, writing on literary landscape, notes that much landscape in poetry “is not simply (or even much at all) descriptive” (2008: 326). Poetic representation of landscape doesn’t necessarily aspire to be realistic or naturalistic. Often, instead of describing, poetry will focus on processes, on the temporal aspects of landscapes – and on what landscape does. She writes: “The detail of poetic landscapes is often minimal, radically selective, and rhetorical. It may be highly effective in evoking a sensed particular place and the space-time of its individual and cultural perception but it does so by representing (often consciously) the processes of active shaping, both material and mental, social and individual, that turn an unnoticed forest into a landscape.” (ibid: 326). For Helsinger, as for Schama, landscapes are intrinsically related to humans, which means that they are not reducible to their material forms, but “require our participation to be landscapes” (ibid 323; Schama 1995: 10). This is a two-way relation. Landscapes occur over time, she argues, underwriting our construction of a continuous sense of self, both individually and socially. And, (in the other direction), human understandings and actions make material space into landscape.33 What makes a landscape vivid in poetry is not the depiction of how it looks, but the evocation of how it affects a perceiver, of how it touches, moves and “patterns” (Helsinger 2008: 335) a person. This is to step away from the visual, the scenic, towards landscape as acting upon us: as inhabited, sensed, felt. And these thoughts offer a way to navigate between specificity and abstraction, via a radical selection of detail that evokes processes of transformation – physical, sensory, and historical. The process-led aspect of my practice involves treating photographs partly as if they were gathered data – experiments with no predetermined outcome. A consequence of this approach to process34 is that in some of West from here there is almost nothing to see. The experience of viewing these images is one of straining to make something out, of a thick darkness pressing on one’s eyes; it is quite the opposite of the detached Cartesian eye, the comfortable spectator. 32 | Gaston Bachelard also writes beautifully on these matters, drawing out the poetic and emotional resonances of particular elements of place. See Bachelard 1958. 33 | Cf. Helsinger 2008: 327-8. 34 | Being process-led doesn’t entail this approach of accepting whatever results from the process. For example, the Bechers’ rules for photographing structures were directed towards a consistency in their images.

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And in the poverty of pictorial content – just a faint shadow of a promontory, an indistinct grassy edge, or an overwhelming blueness – which causes a frustration of the eye, thoughts stray, or attention slips to the surface, to the image as object. Since the images were entrusted to the process, this unseating of the viewing experience is partially unintended, although not unexpected. The acceptance of these ‘poor’ images – the intention of embracing whatever would emerge – is part of an approach that underlines the active and the passive in photography; it expresses the dialogical dynamic of framing a question and listening to the answer. This way of making, in endeavouring to not seek a ‘view’ but to take what comes, naturally leads to images that are not classic prospects, that do not offer themselves up to the viewer. In this resides the idea that the landscape is not there for our consumption. There is an attitude of openness embedded in a dialogical approach to landscape photography that aligns with the effects of prolonged walking – with the way that it encourages receptivity and attentiveness in the walker, as well as a bodily sense of connectedness to the environment. Walking can be an effective measure in taking a non-scenic approach to landscape. As an activity, it has the capacity to ground the walker in an environment, while also undoing any static viewpoint. Even with photographic walking projects – which do involve stopping to take pictures – the walk can introduce motion and multiplicity to the work. That said, it is plainly difficult to make these aspects of a project tangible within still images. A walk may be intrinsic to a photographic project and this not be discernable in the images without some textual support (in titling or supplementary description). It is straightforward enough to use text to inflect a viewer’s reading of the work; it is harder for the images themselves to manifest that they were made while walking. The seriality of the photographs in West from here is one attempt to solve this problem; the walk can also be suggested with line of sight – Hamish Fulton puts this to evocative use in his artists’ book The Way to the Mountains Starts Here, offering a varied, textural narrative of pavements, roads and paths, invitations to put foot to ground. Photographs encountered as objects have additional possibilities. With Tarbet, for instance, the materiality of the images (their tattered borders, the effects of flare caused by the camera-in-a-tin) is expressive of the circumstances of making, and clearly this strategy could be taken much further. In the display of images, too, connections can be made between the viewing experience and the effects of walking on perception – through rhythm, pacing or a sense of immersion. Such methods reinforce the centrality of walking to the project in question, to the experience of landscape with which it is concerned. Walking emphasises perceiving as an embodied activity, carried out over time, wherein seeing is mingled with feeling, hearing, inhaling, and proprioception (our bodies’ sensations of motion and of the relative locations of our limbs) as well as with the flow of thought. These aspects of experience can be

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

latent in a group of images, and be brought out by associating them with a walk (rather than, say, a car journey). Or the images themselves might imply a walk via phenomenal qualities – perhaps in their attention to the haptic, the physical or the associative: the roughness of the ground, motes in the air, or a series of details glimpsed sidelong. Perhaps the most subtle sign that walking has shaped a series of photographs can come through the affinities between walking, reverie, and interconnectedness. A long walk can alter our mode of seeing into something more reflective and open. It can cause a walker to look differently, to focus on different aspects of a place. And by slowing us down, as Christina Kraenzle writes in her discussion of W G Sebald’s use of photographs, walking can bring to notice traces of the past, making landscape into “a repository of historical memory” (Kraenzle 2007: 126), such that digressions about the distant past have a natural place in a description of a day’s walk. Reading The Rings of Saturn (Sebald 1998), it is clear that a walk can unearth a series of reflections that feel as if they were articulating the landscape’s own memories.

C onclusion This text began with the way that walking brings out landscape experience as a two-way, constantly altering exchange between person and place – and with the notion of treating this exchange as a dialogue. This idea of dialogue is ingrained in my working methods; it is allied to their purpose of building balance and grounding into the work. Through a discussion of those making processes – rule-following, measuring, sequencing – in relation to a wider background of theory and practice, dialogue was elaborated into a general approach to engaging with conceptual poles: an approach that does not favour choosing sides, nor looking for a median point, but rather seeks to keep the exchange vivid. The four conceptual tensions that formed this chapter’s focal points – actual/imaginary, subject/object, present/past and visual/non-visual – in their concrete application to the example works, have tended not to line up neatly. Instead they ebb and flow, cross over and complicate one another. These dynamics have been supported by a dialogical approach, wherein the concept pairs have taken on the character of conversation partners, rather than adversaries. And the results of reading conceptual tensions in that spirit, applied both to theorizing and to making, have been encouraging, particularly in making sense of apparent paradoxes, or in navigating situations where there appears to be a conflict, a need to choose one picture over another. The metaphor of the fold provides a way of thinking that is a compatible and useful complement to dialogue. In particular, it answers the question: how can we think of x and y as one continuous substance, and yet also as being oppo-

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sites, in a dynamic of tension that we can meaningfully describe as dialogue? In reflecting on the relation of subject to world, or of present to past, this model is especially fertile: it allows contradictions and activates grey areas, not as zones of exception, but as the essence of what it is to be anything. These initial discussions provide some starting points for developing the dialogical approach further – as a way to modulate future thinking and working practice. This forms a strand in the continuing process of evolving my own visual language, a tool for sustaining conversations, tolerating contradictions and lacunae, and remembering that tensions are also connections.

R eferences Adams, Robert (1996): Beauty in Photography, New York: Aperture. Almond, Darren (2004): “A glance is accustomed to no glance back.” In: 50 moons at a time, Düsseldorf: K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen/ Koln: Walther Koenig, insert without page numbers. Bachelard, Gaston (1958): The Poetics of Space, trans. M Jolas ([1964] 1994), Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. Badiou, Alain (1988): “Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque”, trans. Thelma Sowley (1994). In: Constantin V. Boundas/Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, New York: Routledge, pp. 51-70. Becher, Hilla (1988): Bernd and Hilla Becher in conversation with Jean-Francois Chevrier, James Lingwood and Thomas Struth. In: Another Objectivity: June 10-July 17 1988, ICA, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Berger, John (2005): “Between Forest.” In: Jitka Hanzlová, Forest, Gottingen: Steidl. Bowker, Geoffrey (2009): “A Plea for Pleats.” In: Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology, Casper Bruun Jensen/Kjetil Rödje (eds.), New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 123-138. Brett, David (1989): “Landscape.” In: Circa 43, pp. 14-18. Brunet, François (2008): “‘A better example is a photograph’: On the Exemplary Value of Photographs in C. S. Peirce’s Reflection on Signs.” In: Robin Kelsey/Blake Stimson (eds.), The Meaning of Photography, Williamston, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute/New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 34-49. Deleuze, Gilles (1988): The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (1992). London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix (1994): What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson/Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.

Walking and photographing Nor thern landscapes: a dialogical approach

Derrida, Jacques (2010): Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, ed. Gerhard Richter, trans. Jeff Fort, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Doane, Mary Ann (2008): “Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” In: Robin Kelsey/Blake Stimson (eds.), The Meaning of Photography, Williamston, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute/New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 3-14. Eleey, Peter (2006) “Reference Material.” In: frieze November 2006, pp. 146149. Eleey, Peter and Mirra, Helen (2011): “Dialogue, April-June 2011.” In: Helen Mirra: gehend (Field Recordings 1-3), Bonn: Bonner Kunstverein/Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art/Zurich: Museum Haus Konstruktiv, pp. 10-19. Emerling, Jae (2012): Photography: History and Theory, London and New York: Routledge. Fulton, Hamish (2001): The Way to the Mountains Starts Here, Torino: hopefulmonster editore. Helsinger, Elizabeth (2008): “Blindness and Insights.” In Rachel Ziady DeLue/ James Elkins (eds.), Landscape Theory, New York: Routledge, pp. 323-342. Kelsey, Robin (2008): “Landscape as not belonging.” In Rachel Ziady DeLue/ James Elkins (eds.), Landscape Theory, New York: Routledge, pp. 203-213. Krauss, Rosalind (1977): “Notes on the Index.” In October vol 3, pp. 68-81 and vol 4, pp. 58-67. Krauss, Rosalind (2007): “Notes on the Obtuse.” In: James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory. New York: Routledge, pp. 339-342. Kraenzle, Christina (2007): “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography and Imaginative Geography in W G Sebald’s Rings of Saturn.”, in L. Patt/C. Dillbohner (eds.) Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald, Los Angeles, California: Institute of Cultural Inquiry Press, pp. 126-145. Kriebel, Sabine T (2007): “Theories of Photography: A Short History.” In James Elkins (ed.) Photography Theory, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 3-49. Lefebvre, Martin (2007): “The Art of Pointing: On Peirce, Indexicality, and Photographic Images.” In: James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory. New York: Routledge, pp. 220-244. Marshall, Jennifer Jane (2008): “Towards Phenomenology: A material culture studies approach to landscape theory.” In: Rachael Ziady DeLue/James Elkins (eds.), Landscape Theory. New York: Routledge, pp. 195-203. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945): Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C Smith (1961), New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Schama, Simon (1995): Landscape and Memory, New York: Alfred Knopf. Sebald, W. G. (1998): The Rings of Saturn, trans. M Hulse, London: Harvill.

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Smith, Joel (2016): Experiencing Phenomenology, London and New York: Routledge. Stein, Edith (1917): On the Problem of Empathy, trans. W Stein (1970), The Hague: Martinus Niijhoff. Stimson, Blake (2004): “The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher.” In: Tate Papers no.1, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publicati ons/tate-papers/01/photographic-comportment-of-bernd-and-hilla-becher, accessed 7 June 2016. Touraine, Liliane (1989): “Bernd and Hilla Becher: The Function doesn’t make the Form,” in Artefactum, April/May 1989, pp. 6-9. Végh, Christina (2011): “Walking and Bending.” In: Helen Mirra: gehend (Field Recordings 1-3), Bonn: Bonner Kunstverein/Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art/Zurich: Museum Haus Konstruktiv, pp. 4-9. Wells, Liz (2011): Land Matters: Landscape photography, culture and identity, London: I.B. Tauris.

Wanderings through the fog: Axel Hütte and the German landscape tradition re-imagined Darcy White

With the opening question of Stephan Berg’s published conversation with German photographer Axel Hütte (b. 1951), the interviewer sets out to establish the artist’s relationship with, and attitude to, the tradition of photography with which he is almost invariably linked: “Is there such a thing as the Düsseldorf School of Photography?”, Berg asks, and to which Hütte makes an emphatic reply: “No. Of course not” (Berg 2009: 9). Judging by the content of the reviews and critiques that Hütte’s photography has inspired, this association with the so-called ‘Düsseldorf’, or ‘Becher’, School serves to frame, shape and effectively delimit the way/s in which his work is experienced and understood, by viewers, reviewers and academics. And, presumably, it is this that motivates both Berg’s question and the artist’s response – given that Hütte has gone out of his way to create images that encourage a viewer to experience them directly, that is, in the present – without recourse to the history of western art and where his intentions as an artist are purposefully concealed. I’m taking this as my starting point for a discussion of, and contribution to, a discourse on the work of one of Europe’s leading landscape photographers because it enables me to flush-out, and illustrate with a precise example, how works of art with enigmatic subject-matter, themselves become the subject of a stream of interpretations and speculations on their meanings – in this case one that undermines what this artist is seeking to do. The “fog” of my title therefore refers to more than one thing; the visual device employed within Hütte’s photographs, establishing ambiguity by obscuring what lies beyond, and the elaborate discourses that circulate and swirl, foglike, both obfuscating and beckoning us towards something tantalizingly just beyond our perception – ‘always already’ deferred (Derrida 1973); to paraphrase Derrida’s essential characteristic of a deconstructed text; an ambiguity that forms part of the “indeterminacy” of a contemporary sublime (Derrida 1978; Lyotard 1984).

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Hütte studied at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf from 1973 to 1981, during the professorship of Bernd Becher (one half of a famous photographic collaboration with Hilla Becher35) in what is now generally known as the Düsseldorf or Becher School – its legacy is to be associated with a cool, detached and rigorously neutral mode of representation. A mode that sought to document as objectively as possible real places, structures and people; that sought to make a virtue of the fundamental attributes of the indexical image. At the same time this was underscored by a more conceptual approach than was generally the case for photography during this period. This is an important aspect of the heritage of Axel Hütte who is widely understood to be a graduate of this approach – he emerged as one of a small handful of photographers who have carried the reputation of the Bechers’ project forward into the late 20th and 21st century. However, as already demonstrated, Hütte has firmly played down this legacy. I will suggest that it would be more fruitful to relate Hütte’s aims to some of those that have occupied Gerhard Richter over a long career, for it is possible to identify approaches in Hütte’s work that parallel those of Richter. However, I will conclude that in-so-far-as Hütte has been concerned with exploring the artistic possibilities and limitations of the indexical image then it remains useful to consider his work in relation to those interests pursued by the Bechers at Düsseldorf. However, what is really at stake here is the problem of interpretation and the experience of the work of art. At the heart of Hütte’s practice, over several decades, has been a line of enquiry that explores the possibility of producing art that encourages a mode of engagement by the viewer that is not based upon interpretation either through a reading of cultural narratives or through an identification with the work’s ‘meaning’ (a word that I employ in the loosest possible way) in terms of either personal concerns or external issues. I aim to show that Hütte aspires to make photographic work that grounds the viewer in the present. To this extent his work can be fruitfully related to the practice and ideas of Barnett Newman (The Sublime is Now, 1948) and other Abstract Expressionist painters of the mid-20th century, and importantly to Lyotard’s ideas of an “immanent sublime” (Lyotard 1982: 64-69). Hütte began with a diverse range of subjects, but by the mid-1980s he had become increasingly committed to landscape. However, as often as Hütte’s work is discussed in terms that relate to the legacy of his time at Düsseldorf, it is also discussed in relation to the German Romantic tradition and associated 35 | Née Wobeser. The Bechers, who had both been students at the Kunstakademie, began to collaborate as photographers in 1959 and were married in 1961. They developed a systematic approach to photographic work that informed Bernd Becher’s teaching at the academy (1976–1996). It is this life-long collaboration that has led to the epithet the ‘Becher’ School of Photography.

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with the Sublime aesthetic of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and other German painters working in the early 19th century (Gronert 2009; Steininger 2015: 22). An aesthetic vocabulary that is concerned with the emotive, subjective, spiritual (Rosenblum 1975), phenomenological – even visceral experience of art and nature. Therefore, a somewhat paradoxical interpretation emerges – at one and the same time Hütte’s work is understood in relation to the cool, detached and rigorously neutral style and approach of Düsseldorf, while parallels with a very different tradition are invoked – that of the heady, emotive, and palpably present aesthetic of sublime and Romantic painting. In the accounts that follow later in this discussion, I show the restless to-and-fro of efforts to describe, illuminate and anchor Hütte’s work – for there is an uneasy tension between these very different traditions, where the indexical and imaginative are counterpoised. Although, not so much of a ‘tension’ if we accept that the recourse to the legacy of the Düsseldorf, or Becher, School is itself founded on unsteady ground. However, it can be argued that such a tension has always existed within Western traditions of landscape art. I will return to this in a discussion of Constable and Turner where the interplay of the competing interests of topographical drawing and those more imaginative and expressive qualities associated with academic painting were themselves held in tension. The effect on a viewer of Hütte’s work has often been compared to that of Friedrich; most notably, the sublime characteristics of pieces such as The Monk by the Sea (1808-10)36 and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1819);37 Stefan Gronert’s comment being representative of this when he suggests that: the “mists and clouds” that characterizes much of Hütte’s work are “doubtless allusions to Romantic landscape painting” (2009: 30). The designation as Sublime afforded to Hütte’s work is based upon a range of factors – primarily their sheer physical scale and material presence, such that Maren Polte suggests they are “overwhelmingly aesthetic through size” (Polte 2017: 95). However, the designation is also due to the artist’s preference for large-format photography with its imposing level of detail, combined with the sometimes extraordinary nature of its subject matter – rarely seen examples of geomorphology and patiently awaited weather conditions, that loosely reference traditional Romantic landscape painting. These are typically shot from carefully selected, pulled-back vantage points that disturb or irritate the viewer (to draw on Hütte’s own term). From the late 1980s the scale of Hütte’s prints increased to widths of up to three metres, which together with their high production values creates a level of ‘optical

36 | German title: Der Mönch am Meer, oil on canvas in the collection of Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. 37 | Also known as Wanderer above the Mist and in German: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, oil on canvas, in the collection of Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany.

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presence’ that can register the altogether more emotional, bodily, even visceral responses that they appear to evoke (based on commentary about them). It is often remarked that Hütte is very conscious of the early 19th century tradition of the sublime – which is, superficially at least, referenced through his repeated inclusion of ‘fog’. However, it may be more fruitful to consider how this functions as a device to control the viewer’s relationship to the image, for Hütte has firmly eschewed the notion that it is necessary to be familiar with such elements of Western art history in order to ‘understand’ his work. In fact he has developed his process for making photographs as a purposeful resistance to such a manner of ‘reading’ contemporary photography. Arguably the ‘fog’ is not so much a reference to this earlier tradition, nor is it employed simply as a marker of the particular meteorological or atmospheric conditions of the time and place the picture was taken, nor as another kind of sign, but rather he has selected and exploited such conditions as a compositional device effectively to flatten the images – for these photographs are composed in such a way as to resist the viewer’s entry into the image world. As such, and despite their superficial similarity, they are not immersive in the way of traditional western art. I am interested in how Hütte employs mist, fog and similar devices and what they offer Hütte in terms of the role they play in the composition and the impact they have on the experience of the image. In other words I am interested in how these images function – in relation to the viewer and in relation to interpretation. To begin to think about this it is necessary to consider how such pictures position the viewer. Traditional imagery in the West has been organized around established rules of perspective that effectively places the individual spectator centrally in relation to the image. Camera images reproduce this effect since the fundamentals of camera design follow the same principles as those historic drawing devices: the camera obscura and camera lucida. This pre-ordained viewing position produces a degree of control over the viewer, such that, through the organization of the picture surface, the image-maker can direct a particular kind of interpretation. As Liz Wells has argued, with its “emphasis on unique subjectivity … [s]pectatorship becomes, in effect, a symbolic exercise of control – of mind over matter – articulated via the pleasures of contemplation” (Wells 2011: 5). Challenging this effect was at the heart of the Bechers’ project at Düsseldorf. Following the approach begun with Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), they produced a fixed schema for standardizing their compositions for a given series of photographs – for example in their series Typology of Coal Breakers (1974). Their aim was to photograph their subjects with the maximum degree of objectivity where the “view through the lens was neutral, factual and frontal, devoid of subjectivity” (Steininger 2015: 22). The Bechers’ interest in objectivity focused on undercutting the imposition of the ‘all knowing’ author on the viewer’s interpretation. However, Hütte takes this

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further and with increased emphasis. He is emphatically concerned with the moment of viewing – his approach foregrounds the subjectivity of the viewer. To appreciate the degree to which this is particular to perhaps only a small number of current photographic artists, it is worth noting that other contemporary photography continues to follow Western traditions, employing devices and motifs that facilitate the viewer’s passage into the image world. Bernhard Fuchs for example, another, albeit later, graduate of Düsseldorf, produced a body of work near to where he grew up in Austria – the series Roads and Paths (2009). In these images fog is depicted but does not obscure the path of a road or track travelling into the landscape behind – drawing the viewer into the image. Similar examples can be seen in another series: Woodlands (2014). The use of this kind of visual syntax is long established in western art – see Claude, Poussin and any number of Dutch painters from the 17th century or Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, where paths (in the sense of roads or tracks) or beams of light, draw the viewer into the image world. By contrast, Hütte’s work does not welcome the viewer into the image along an accessible path, nor does it create familiarity with a given specified area in the manner provided by Fuchs, instead there is no fixed view or standpoint and, according to Stefan Gronert, the effect of Hütte’s approach is that “viewers must continually adjust their perspective” (Gronert 2009: 30). He explains: “our gaze makes its way from a narrow foreground into the far distance, where it frequently comes to a dead end” (ibid). Examples of this can be seen from across his career in: Island Fog, Iceland, 2002; Furka 11, Switzerland,1995, and in a series of photographs exhibited in 2010 and 2011 under the title Towards the Wood. Indeed, regardless of the subject matter, the majority of Hütte’s work operates in a similar way. Elsewhere, Hütte uses comparable devices: for example, surface reflections on water can create a similar effect and in his nocturnal cityscapes such as those in the series As Dark as Light, 2001, and After Midnight, 2006, the pervading darkness suppresses both depth and detail. Each of these devices serve to obstruct the viewer’s gaze into the deeper space of the image. In this sense it has more in common with the Abstract painting of Pollock, Rothko, Still and Newman than it does with traditional landscape imagery.38 Whatever the mechanism, visually speaking they are not immersive images. Although, as the artist himself suggests, some of these operate differently – where it is possible to glimpse fragments of the landscape through “holes in the wall of fog” but where it” becomes clear that much of what is invisible is present as ‘realitas’” (Hütte 2009: 26). Hütte has spoken publicly about his modus operandi many times but perhaps most usefully, for my purposes, during the above mentioned interview with Stephan Berg. What quickly emerges is his pursuit of an approach to pho38 | Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still and Barnet Newman.

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tographically derived image making that subverts the inclination to arrive at an interpretation based upon pre-existing understanding; in Hütte’s own words making images – “that don’t show the viewers anything that they might be able to decode in terms of cultural knowledge” (Berg 2009: 22). Working with ‘fragments’ Hütte builds images that “have been emptied” in order to force the viewer “to integrate their own imagination and experiences into them” (Berg 2009: 22). To this end all references to any specificity of place or time has been expunged. Hütte has himself drawn attention to this characteristic of his work, noting the “enigmatic nature of space”, which is “often coupled with the sensation of slowed time” – for example in his architectural works.39 With this move Hütte encourages a rejection of traditional modes of engagement in pursuit of a different kind of response; that forsakes the employment of the single viewpoint typical of Western spatial perspective and reliance on established cultural narratives. Hütte explains that he found it “more interesting not to tell stories” (Berg 2009: 23) and importantly to avoid facilitating the “historical” … “decoding logic” typically relied upon by the art-world, through which it proffers a starting point for discovering the ‘meaning’ of a given image. Hütte even suggests that it is this logic that explains the success of Jeff Wall, for it has provided a mode of access into ostensibly difficult work – perhaps rendering it palatable (Berg 2009: 23). In contrast, Hütte is not interested in providing any obvious route into his work. Instead, he makes things rather more difficult for both viewer and, interestingly, for himself – for the following reason: by virtue of its inherent indexicality, photography does not readily lend itself to the purely abstract. Where abstract painters can try to insist upon a non-interpretive form of engagement from the viewer, a photographer has to deal with the material world, making Hütte’s aim of negating interpretation a genuine challenge. But Hütte has elected to negotiate this inherent characteristic, not to say ‘problem’, of photography, the ultimate of all indexical images, and perhaps it is true to say that it is this that forms the substance of his research. I will argue that in this he appears to be following Richter’s example. Hütte’s development of this approach came together in a solo exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in 2009. Out of Darkness was accompanied by a catalogue of the same name and it is worth noting that, unusually for an exhibition catalogue, it contained no supporting essay or introduction – no explication in other words. Even the titles and other information were secreted at the end of the volume. In what I take to be a clear and purposeful move, this absence coheres with Hütte’s fundamental aims; his declared interest in not showing the viewer how to ‘read’ his images was followed through in this catalogue. In a substantive way this approach continues the direction taken by Barnett 39 | Axel Hütte, Axel Hütte, Fantasmi e realtà exhibition review website, no page number, [28/11/2017] http://www.itsliquid.com/axel-hutte-fantasmierealta.html

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Newman in 1948. In The Sublime is Now Newman declared that he was only concerned with “absolute emotions”. This constituted an appeal to be free to create “images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches” such as those drawn from Western European painting – which he dismissed as “obsolete” (Newman 1992: 171-173). He claimed the right of artists to be released from what he called the “impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth” (ibid). Newman, who aligned himself with other Abstract Expressionist painters, argued that he and others were creating abstract art “out of ourselves, out of our own feelings” by way of a materiality that was “real and concrete” (ibid). For Newman it was this palpable concreteness that could directly engage whoever occupied the position of viewer – so long as they were consciously engaged rather than elsewhere mentally, distracted by the habit of interpretation through recourse to established narratives. To this end Newman stated that he “became involved with making the viewer present” (Hess 1971: 74). To paraphrase Maria Lind on abstraction and the example of Frank Stella: “What you see is what you see.” The image [painting] “has become an object” (Lind 2013: 17). Robert Rosenblum’s 1961 essay The Abstract Sublime addressed the experience of such images, which he likened to a religious or spiritual feeling where “we”, the viewer, “can only submit to them as an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths”. As such, he argued, they operate in a comparable way to Friedrich’s Monk or similar works by Turner. However, he suggested a key difference: that in the case of an Abstract Expressionist: “we ourselves are the monk before the sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures” (Morley 2010: 110). Writing in response to Barnett Newman Jean-Francois Lyotard asks whether we are really to understand the sublime as “here and now” and concludes not: “it alludes to something that can’t be shown, or presented”, an idea that he points out he has borrowed from Kant, who used the term “‘dargestellt’” (Lyotard 1984). Instead, he argued that the kind of time Newman alluded to was not that of the “present instant” but: “this ‘now’ is one of the temporal ‘ecstasies’ that has been analysed since Augustine’s day and particularly since Edmund Husserl” … “it is what dismantles consciousness, what deposes consciousness, it is what consciousness cannot formulate” and finally “What we do not manage to formulate is that something happens” (ibid). As has already been mooted, large-format photography produced in recent decades, such as that by Hütte, has been described as an object-based form, Michael Fried suggesting that as such and more than ever before – “issues concerning the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it became crucial for photography” (Fried 2008: 169). In much the same way as with the canvasses of the Abstract Expressionist painters, these engage the viewer directly by virtue of their scale and very materiality – where the object/image is present with the viewer – and where this present-ness is the result

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of a direct encounter with the work in its physical form. As Chevrier argues, unlike earlier forms, new modes of large-format photography are “not simple prints – loose handy sheets that can be framed for an exhibition then … put back into boxes”, but rather they are “designed and produced for the wall, and in the observer they evoke an experience of confrontation” (Chevrier 2015: 21). As described above, Hütte pursues a range of approaches to produce work that is materially impressive and where time appears to be slowed down and any sense of space is indeterminate – the intention appears to be that this offers a viewer an opportunity to experience something directly. In this sense it can be argued that Hütte’s photographs operate simultaneously as both image and object. What follows in this essay is a discussion that attempts to address the problem of framing for interpretation and to think about issues of photographic indexicality in relation to the ways that viewers’ experience new large-format landscape photography.

V ie wing and interpre tation As is well established, works of art are the product of the given culture in which they were made and the experience of viewing them occurs against the backdrop of the culture and context in which they are seen, which, to a greater or lesser extent, influences the response and how the work is understood (Berger 1972; Wolf 1981). In other words, the experience of art takes place through a cultural lens. This relatively straightforward idea can be summarized by the term “cultured seeing” (Wells 2011). That interpretation is an open and ongoing process is clear – works of art are interpreted and reinterpreted across shifts in time and place. It has been shown that the influence of the Bechers at Düsseldorf has dominated discussions of Hütte’s practice but that, in addition, it is habitually related to German and European Romantic painting of the 18th century. It is perhaps unsurprising that this longer history has itself been variously interpreted. To take the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich as an example, as Dietmar Elger has pointed out, they “can be read as allegories of German national liberation from Napoleonic domination” (Elger 2009: 175), whereas for Robert Rosenblum they function through their affordance of a spiritual experience perhaps in the same way as works by Rothko – as an abstract sublime (Rosenblum 1975). Such references and interpretations potentially shape a viewer’s experience of a given artwork or artistic output. Discussions of Axel Hütte’s artistic development rarely suggest the influence of Gerhard Richter, who was a Professor at the Kunstakademie from 1971, and who purportedly represents the “polar opposite” of the Bechers’ approach at Düsseldorf (Elger 2009: 191). For example, Stefan Gonert’s account, in The Düsseldorf School of Photography (2009), plays down Richter’s contribution and

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impact. In a study that ranges over the course of more than three hundred pages, Richter is mentioned just twice and in the first instance only to explain that he will be “excluded” from the discussion; collapsing the complexity of his practice in the term “hybrid form”, by which Gonert appears to mean a style of painting that incorporates photographic representation (Gronert 2009: 15, 35). Yet, according to Günther Uecker, “the entire Becher class … cannot be fully understood without considering the presence of Gerhard Richter at the academy” (Elger 2009: 191). Indeed, Hütte himself notes the influence of other tutors at the Kunstakademie – naming Richter as one among several. Hütte explained that it was like an art academy where philosophy was also a key element and – importantly – not at all like a typical photography school such as those in other parts of Germany at the time. Furthermore, he notes: the “work method wasn’t developed by Becher, but has a tradition in Germany that is associated with the New Objectivity movement” (Berg 2009: 9). During the early stages and long into his career Richter often found himself defending painting as a medium, arguing that it continued to have currency in the postmodern context. He had similar trouble with landscape as a suitable genre for a so-called ‘serious’ artist to persist with – although he did persist and in 2011 published a lifetime’s work in Gerhard Richter Landscapes (Elger 2011). In a letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann40 written little more than a decade after Rosenblum’s Abstract Sublime, which had concluded that “the disturbing heritage of the Romantics …”, by which he meant the Northern Romantic Tradition, “… has not yet been exhausted”, Richter claimed that: A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. … if it is ‘good’ it concerns us – transcending ideology – as art that we ostentatiously defend (perceive, show, make). Therefore, ‘today,’ we can paint as Caspar David Friedrich did (Richter 1995: 81).

In other words, the experience of art exists in the present. Artists can continue to work in old forms and viewers can find it to be rewarding in the here and now. I suggest that this is highly relevant to this discussion of Hütte’s practice – his is an ostensibly traditional landscape mode but one that pushes at some of the challenges raised by the interplay of abstraction, photography as an indexical medium and Richter’s own explorations through landscape photopainting. To compare the approach of these two artists, Richter’s early painted seascapes (c.1969) were often based on a combination of photographs where typically the sky from one time and place was almost seamlessly montaged with the sea from another. Disconcertingly, the body of water was sometimes even turned up-side-down. Richter’s practice was to utilize his own small printed 40 | Notable Swiss art historian, curator and supporter of Richter, Joseph Beuys and their contemporaries.

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photographs taken on holidays and those drawn from popular culture: those “amateur family photos, those banal objects and snapshots” (Polte 2017: 69). Containing limited visual information, these were then worked-up into large paintings where the viewer is left to imagine the details that are missing. As has already been established, Hütte’s finished pieces begin as fragments of analogue photographs taken during trips to carefully selected locations – the fully realized images reveal no evidence of the specific time and place and the picture-space is compressed. But in contrast to Richter, Hütte’s raw materials are always his own and typically produced using a large-format plate camera and therefore contain extensive detail, particularly where the photographic conditions and viewpoints have been very carefully considered. In both cases, the original visual material may have been based in reality but the resulting scenes are not identifiable. Engagement with manipulated and ambiguous landscapes like these demonstrates how we humans try hard to make sense of what we see.41 For Richter the interpretation of ambiguous or abstracted images is clear: The paintings take their meaning from the viewer’s wish to recognize something in them. Everywhere, they show similarities with real appearances, which somehow never allow themselves to come into focus (Richter 2009: 176, 179).

Similarly Dietmar Elger, Richter’s biographer, also notes their “indeterminacy” (Elger 2009: 175),42 but suggests that Richter’s manipulated landscapes “prove how imperfect this process can be” by exposing the “intensity with which the viewer tries to establish the echo of a familiar representation, even in abstract structures” (Elger 2009: 176). Indeed, we are all familiar with those instances where viewers can find it hard to let go of accustomed ways of looking, continuing to draw upon conventional modes of interpretation – especially with regard to abstraction. An awareness of the effort involved in this informs Hütte’s approach to landscape work. Although Stefan Gronert doesn’t appear to sense a link with Richter’s work, he does appreciate a key element in how it functions when he suggests that Hütte’s nocturnal pictures emphasize “the medium of photography as subject matter” where it has been “taken to extremes”, making us “aware of our own urgent desire to see” (Gronert 2009: 30). But can this be all? It doesn’t seem nearly enough of an explanation of the work of either of these formidable artists. Richter suggested that while his own landscapes can be understood “as manifestations of private, hidden sensibilities”, in that they may be derived from his personal world, they live in the mind of the viewer on different terms (Elger 2009: 175). To this end from the outset Richter explored 41 | See for example Aumont, Jacques (1994). 42 | Elger is a curator and Director of the Gerhard Richter Archive.

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the place of the viewer through his practice.43 Through experimentations with composition, he effectively positions and repositions the viewer and their perceived distance from the various objects or structures depicted in an attempt to side-step the action of classical perspective; wrong-footing the viewer (Elger 2009: 175). Therefore, despite the manifest similarities in the subject matter, such paintings do not have a “romantic basis” and are “far more sceptical and modern”, according to Elger (176). For Richter the crucial element for the viewer is not concerned with being able to “do a thing” – such as gauge distance within a landscape for example – rather it is “seeing” that is the “decisive act, and ultimately places the maker and the viewer on the same level” (Elger 2009: 175). The author is no longer concerned with providing a meaning for the reader to interpret. Moreover, Richter aimed to bring the genres of landscape and abstraction closer together, discerning no significant difference between them. Elger suggests that to this end Richter sought particular kinds of landscape photographs to form the basis of his paintings – ones that “transcend the time-bound, captured moment and avoid the anecdotal correctness of a specific situation” (274). As Richter explained – the landscapes that he chose to paint are “free of elements that could connect the subject to a certain place, time, event” and this is despite the fact that in most cases a precise title is given alongside the image – as for Davos S. or Davos N. (both 1981), for example. This is intended as something more than a depiction of place, as Elger explains: “the image transcends the knowable topography”. This avoidance of temporal and spatial specificity undermines the representational status of these works, making them available as sites of abstraction. However, Hütte has taken this further. Where Richter’s pictures are based upon evidently social landscapes in that they are not of “untouched regions” or the “fictive or idealized world view of the German Romantics”, Hütte often avoids social detail and his locations appear more unrecognizable and anonymous as a result – despite the fact that they may also carry titles that index specific places. Moreover, where Richter puts a distance between his initial, indexically derived visual model and the resultant image, through the use of paint, Hütte’s finished works hold on stubbornly to the originating material – making it all the more difficult to achieve the kind of response that is more usually the aspiration of artists working with pure abstraction. Richter seems cognizant of the fundamental advantage of using paint in this respect – from his perspective paintings offer a greater materiality than photography, arguing that “it has more reality than a photograph because a painting is more of an object in itself, because it’s visibly hand-painted, because it has been tangibly materially produced” (ibid). In removing the temporal and spatial specificity of the pro-filmic events, both artists effectively undermine two of the key portals through which such 43 | That is, from the Corsica paintings made in 1968.

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images are typically interpreted, and in-so-doing they encourage an experience in response to the very materiality of these artworks. Richter achieves this by minimizing detail through super-enlargement and through taking a soft brush across the surface to blur remaining detail at the end of the painting process. Hütte goes for something similar – by employing devices to flatten the image and occlude some visual information, he purposefully retains detail in places where it is possible to peek through the fog (or whatever) to glimpse at something beyond. In these ways Hütte attempts to achieve with an indexical image what would usually only be hoped for with a purely abstract image – an audacious aspiration to say the least. But in neither case does the artist entirely let go of the indexical information – and this is important to how these images (all images) function. In discussing Richter’s practices Paul Wood argued that: “Imaginative reflection upon the paintings operates under a dual aspect: the paintings as paintings and the paintings as models” … “such looking is always embodied, and always discursive” (Wood 2009: 188). Wood insists on the simultaneous play of material presence and references to the external. Abstraction as a strategy attempts to expunge all references to the external in order to avoid the associative and interpretive modes of engagement of representational art. Richter’s conviction that the materiality of paint facilitates the viewer’s direct engagement, and his perception of no fundamental distinction between landscape and abstraction, have driven his experiments with technique and approaches to landscape over a period of more than three decades. But whereas for Richter, photographs function as a direct source for transcriptions into paint using an episcope – Hütte is faced with the inherent detail and sheer quantity of visual information supplied by the large-format photographic image. For him the task of producing representational landscape images that do not behave as representations but instead enable a direct engagement with a material object (the final photograph) – and importantly – one that achieves a state of presence for the viewer, is all the more challenging.

I nde xicalit y – topography and cre ative e xpression However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real - Hiroshi Sugimoto (2005: 33).

From its earliest beginnings, discourses on photography have negotiated questions concerning the indexical nature of the photographic image, and these remain potent within discussions of contemporary practice, that is, in the age of the manipulated image. Central, are issues concerning the relationship to ‘truth’ and to ‘rank’. The status of the photograph in terms of reliability – the extent to which they are faithful to the pro-filmic event or expressive, creative

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and encoded – and the impact this has on the viewing experience, are fundamental to the current discussion. But also of interest is the historic perception of photography as a ‘low’ form, due to its inherent nature as a ‘copy’, a characteristic that has been construed as ‘mindless’ – an idea rooted in academic art and famously articulated by Joshua Reynolds when he said: “The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it” (Reynolds 1987). This tradition asserts that only where the “exertion of mind” is evident can an image be assured of its status as art. Following this principle, for a photograph to be considered a ‘high’ form, something additional to, or other than, mere copying, must be discernible within it. Reynolds (writing before the advent of photography) was clear that creating “perfect form” in a work of art was achieved by “leaving out particularities, and retaining only general ideas”, a “principle” which he said should relate “to every part of the Art … to Invention, to Composition, to Expression, and even to Colouring” (ibid). While the indexical status of the photographic image is central to discourses on the medium, what is not so often considered is the possibility of indexical characteristics in a painted image. This is highly relevant to this discussion, because northern European landscape painting as an artistic genre has its origins in the studied recording through visualisation of scientific, topographical and archaeological discoveries, where the Netherlands is understood as the central locus of this inclination – described by Svetlana Alpers as “the mapping impulse” (Alpers 1983: 124). For example, Britain was strongly influenced by this practice, where from the early 17th century a “thriving tradition of documentary landscape” had been established (Wilton 2014: 79). Much of this activity was associated with the emergence, for the first time, of organized support for scientific endeavour and historical research in the form of societies such as the Royal Society (1660) and the Society of Antiquaries (1717), who commissioned artists to document their findings. Views were produced both for “information” and “for the sheer pleasure of … contemplation” (ibid), until, as Andrew Wilton explains, by the end of the 18th century the topographical view, particularly in watercolour, “had developed into a sophisticated art form, capable of a great range of expression” (Wilton 2014: 79). Some artists remained committed to the “clarity and precision” of the Dutch example, for others, however, this fed into the development of a more subjective form – a new romanticism that, to a greater or lesser extent, abandoned the topographic document preferring a schema of simplified elements with which to compose their landscape images. In some cases novel methods were devised for arriving at compositions. In one example, the prominent and influential artist Alexander Cozens encouraged the strategy of making random marks with ink on crumpled paper that would then be developed into a ‘landscape’ image. Similarly, Thomas Gainsborough, although an avid walker in the countryside around his home, nevertheless com-

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posed his landscapes on a table-top using props such as pieces of moss and foliage, sponge, stones and even a model horse. There is, therefore, an inherent contradiction in the register of this practice – the form originally prized for its veracity developed into a vehicle of expression, appreciated for its potential to evoke sentiment, values and ideals. It seems that in pursuit of a new and vital visual language, artists were willing to experiment – whether with the more familiar techniques of drawing and painting or through exploiting more serendipitous approaches. But in certain cases this was also in order to assert their sense of the rightful status of landscape as a genre – by the addition of something evidently inventive and creative. However, it is possible to argue that the most successful and enduring work was by those who continued to root their practice in the direct experience of real places – such that both the place and the experience of that place was represented – notwithstanding that one was an attempt to record terra firma whilst the other was concerned with emoting illusive sensation. With respect to these painters (I am thinking here primarily of Constable and Turner) it seems clear that both objective and subjective elements were sought. The technical and emotional held in balance and tension – where the subjective register was in some important ways dependent for its effects on the visual record achieved through the careful study and diligence by the artists concerned. Also clear is that the traditions of both north and south were present in much of this work. While British painters admired and emulated the topographical approaches of Dutch art and the northern tradition more generally, the influence of the romantic south was also in play and formed the backbone of Academic painting. The paradox that is present in Hütte’s work – the restrained and factual counterpoised with the imaginative and creative – is evident in the very origins of northern European landscape art. This discussion now turns to whether particular approaches to landscape painting (though not all approaches) can be legitimately described as possessing indexical characteristics on this basis. During the early to mid-19th century Constable, and then Turner – in different ways and to differing degrees – pursued approaches to landscape painting that sought out the ‘truth’ in what they saw and felt. Constable eschewed the classical and the learned in favour of something more ‘natural’, Turner, on the other hand, consciously attempted to bring topographical elements into his work while also pursuing the aesthetic standards suggested by the academy. For Constable this meant the habitual study of the effects of weather, from direct and careful observation of the skies above rural East Anglia, typically near to home. These were captured primarily through sketching in oils and with a diligence more familiar to scientific approaches to recording evidence. Long after his death, in the modern period, these studies established Constable’s lasting reputation. His interest in naturalism was rooted in several factors – one being a preference for the early work of Thomas Gainsborough, the

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latter having in turn been influenced by 17th century Dutch landscape painting. Dutch painters were understood to have worked close to home and to have been relatively unaffected by the discoveries and mythologies of the classical world with its hold on painters in southern Europe. Constable was disinclined to follow the example of academic painting. He was self-taught to a significant extent and extremely well read. He did not feel the need to follow where the academy led and could therefore read the various art treatise of the day critically, selecting only those influences that suited his own inclinations. Like many around him, Constable valued the close study of nature but where others used this as a point of departure, preferring, as Gilpin maintained, to “correct” nature in order “to produce a harmonious whole” (Kitson 1991: 12), Constable, Michael Kitson argues, was more inclined to celebrate the “apparent randomness of nature” (ibid). He emerged as an artist with a strong commitment to the direct encounter with the ever-changing appearance of the world he inhabited, the study of which formed the basis of the preliminary work for all his major paintings. However, Kitson speculates that Constable’s pursuit of “truth” – the artist’s preferred term for his working practice of drawing from nature – was motivated by the “political, moral and religious as well as aesthetic” (ibid). In other words, although anchored in the ‘real’ and founded on a belief that his approach was “legitimate, scientific, mechanical”, Constable’s landscapes had things to say (Moore 2015: 60). Ray Lambert takes this further, in refuting what he takes to be the “myth” of Constable’s naturalism, he argues that a “picture is a fictive version of a perceivable world” for which the “representational artist” must “select which recognisable things to include … and how to put them together into a coherent whole” (Lambert 2005: 19). In Turner’s case the pursuit of ‘truth’ was through a process of negotiating and refining the factual characteristics of the topographical landscape image, bringing them together with creative or expressive responses to the places he painted, away from home in locations across Britain and Europe. Despite the artist’s known admiration of Claude and Poussin et al and his reputation for expressive painting, Turner imposed on himself a challenge that his work should demonstrate his equal command of these two competing interests: the factual and expressive. Wilton argues that his aim was to produce a “vividly accurate presentation of atmospheric effects: he chose to be accurate in his depiction of light and air rather than simply the physical objects in the scene” (Wilton 2014: 83), and to achieve this he developed a very free approach to the handling of paint, for which he was criticized in his day. Wilton claims that Turner’s “ambition was huge” in pursuing two different modes within his career – as a skilled producer of topographical watercolours and as a history, landscape and seascape painter with the highest of reputations within the academy (ibid). So, while very different painters in many ways, like Constable, Turner kept faith with a perceived need to anchor his expression in the real, stating:

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Darcy White however arduous, however depressing the subject may prove; however trite, complex or indefinite … however trammelled with the turgid and too often repelling recurrence of mechanical rules, yet those duties must be pursued (Wilton 2006: 6).

However, it is perhaps obvious that no matter how dedicated these artists were to an idea of naturalism or ‘truth’, Lambert’s point is compelling, and one that undercuts any claim to the indexicality of a sketch made through the direct observation of nature. An approach suggested by Richard Shiff is useful in negotiating these concerns regarding the indexical aspects of images. Shiff proposed the notion of the “proper” image as one that is sanctioned by convention and generally relatively factual – in our case the topographical drawing. Relative to this, the more imaginative elements of a representation are, again using Shiff’s term, “figured” (Shiff 1989). In this way the creative, expressive, “figured” characteristics of landscape images are evident precisely because of their divergence from their conventionally factual, “proper” counterpart. Constable and Turner’s studies from observed reality emulate the “proper” approach of the topographical artist while the techniques they used to represent the sensual or phenomenological experience, or to flag their more ideological interests, constitute the “figured”. This has the further effect of elevating their final paintings into a ‘higher’ realm, according to the standards of academic art. This discussion will now consider whether it is legitimate to claim that the creative aims of Constable and Turner in the early 19th century parallel those of landscape photography in the age of the manipulated image. After all, technically speaking, photographers now have the facility to shape creatively their images to an unprecedented degree, while at the same time the raw materials for this remains indexical. That Hütte creates photographs using indexical material and yet purposefully avoids, obscures or removes particular kinds of recognisable visual information, is interesting. In spite of their apparent objectivity, his work has moved beyond the “proper” to the “figured”. Through enhancement of the merely factual Hütte has elevated his work – in Reynold’s terms, he has pursued “perfect form” through “leaving out particularities, and retaining only general ideas” (Reynolds 1987). Specifically, the discussion will explore the role played by so-called ‘truthful’ or ‘factual’ elements of landscape images with regard to the experience of viewing, and speculate on the extent to which the viewer seeks evidence that the image of a landscape is based in reality – whether topographical reality or experiential reality. Indeed, an entire mythology has developed around Turner’s painting as a conduit to a real experience, the famous example being his seascape Snow Storm – Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (exhibited 1848). It was purportedly based on Turner’s own direct encounter with the ferocity of that storm as witnessed from the precarious vantage point of a crow’s nest. While the account is unlikely to be true it persists in the imagination of viewers and the “story has endured as a way of demon-

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strating Turner’s full-blooded engagement with the world around him.”44 Furthermore, it is suggested that Constable’s sky studies became so highly valued because they speak to an authenticity – the painter/author was there – and that this is instrumental to his large-scale fully realized paintings. It would seem that for some viewer’s at least, knowledge of the image as representative of a real experience contributes something to the experience of the painting itself. In other words – both the factual and the imaginative seem to facilitate effective engagement for the viewer. This is perhaps in the same manner suggested by Barthes in his discussions of the mechanism by which ‘realism’ operates – allowing the ideological messages, embedded in these images, to slip through. However, John Walsh voiced a note of caution regarding the supposed accuracy of the skies in 17th century Dutch landscape painting. Through careful analysis and the help of a meteorologist he was able to demonstrate that whilst the representations of specific cloud types could be “subtly rendered” they were selected from a “relatively narrow choice of situations” – leaving most “weather conditions unrepresented”. He concludes that the “intention was not so much to describe nature as to exemplify it” (Walsh 1987: 96). Like the Dutch before them, Constable and Turner selected from the sights and experiences of real places in order to make their art. Hütte is also selective – taking extraordinary care with identifying specific places, times, conditions of light, weather and viewpoints – his working method is designed to capture large amounts of visual data, however, his choices are made to suit his own purposes and therefore (even leaving aside adjustments in postproduction) cannot be understood as ‘truthful’, despite their apparent indexicality. In recent decades the walking artist Hamish Fulton, has attracted attention with regard to similar issues. According to Jean-Francois Chevrier, Fulton’s work could be described as “objects of thoughts”, by which he suggests that such images collect and store information about, and experience of, the place walked (2015: 24). To be clear, since 1972 Fulton has only made work in direct response to his experience of undertaking daily walks, of varying durations and in diverse landscapes. He represents some of the visual elements of such experience through black and white photographs and wider experience is captured through short pieces of descriptive text and other written information. In this way the work is the product of a physical, as well as mental, experience of walking in rural and remote places. The resulting artworks are indexical in that sense. Arguably, no less than Constable’s direct study of the skies above East Anglia or Turner’s experience of the snowstorm (if it were true!). Indeed, Florian Steininger suggested that some of Fulton’s photographs – namely his series 44 | Gallery label, February 2004 from Tate Britain Display Caption from online catalogue http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-snow-storm-steam-boat-off-a-har​ bours-mouth-n00530 accessed 06-09-17

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Alaska I-VI (1977) “become sublime places in spite of the factual topography” (Steininger 2015: 22). Yet this seems to overlook the long established conviction, amongst commentators of the sublime, that sublime experience can more readily be a response to the real as well as to dramatically heightened representation. For this reason, indexical and factual elements of an image may act as a prompt to a sublime response, which Derrida suggested are: “encountered in art less easily … more easily in raw nature… There can be sublime in art if it is submitted to the conditions of ‘an accord with nature’” (Derrida 1978: 127). Interestingly, Fulton has pursued walking as a strategy for discovering a fresh way of making art. He explains: “you enter an uncharted world, because if you say you want to make art about walking, then it’s wide open – it’s not like abstract painting, which has a history” (Sooke 2012). This is instructive. While Hütte’s choice of aesthetic language leaves him with the problem of the obvious similarities with earlier conventions of western landscape painting and is focused on trying to side-step them through compositional strategies, Fulton avoids this problem altogether, by literally breaking new ground.

V ie wer ’s R esponses To restate the claims posed in the introduction: Hütte sought to remove the visual indicators that might point to ways that his landscape photographs could be read. This situation leads me to an obvious line of enquiry. Given that the work has been purposefully stripped of readily identifiable ‘meaning’, where ‘readers’ are encouraged to become ‘writers’ (Barthes 1977), the following will consider a range of accounts and interpretations within numerous critical and popular reviews of his work, the purpose of which is to find out what is said when nothing is said, when the work is ‘mute’ (Rosler 1994). What follows is a consideration of the reception of Axel Hütte’s landscape photography, with its inherent paradox – the objective versus the imaginative – firmly in mind. It explores the terms upon which Hütte’s works are experienced and valued by their viewers. From fairly early on Hütte’s attempt to reposition the viewer (in relation to that encouraged through a classic Western perspective) appears to have been noticed by commentators although not always understood. It is often pointed out that Hütte is the traveller of his generation of Düsseldorf photographers and this seems to create an expectation that his work addresses the direct experience of a given place and that the aim is to provide the viewer with an experience that approximates the real thing: a sense of place, a specific place. The degree to which pleasure or satisfaction is achieved is of course partially dependent upon the interests prioritized by the given spectator. In the following case the viewer appears to want information. Emma Braso considers Hütte’s

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2011 work Rheingau (then on show in Helga de Alvear, Madrid), first explaining that Rheingau is a wine region on the banks of the Rhine, brim full of historic buildings, where Hütte retraced places where one of his predecessors from New Objectivity, Albert Renger-Patzsch, had taken photographs 60 years previously. However, finding only the suggestion of the essence of the place, it is with unveiled disappointment that Braso declares: The truth is that these pictures look very similar to many others he has previously taken in natural landscapes in distant places like the Canary Islands, New Mexico or Venezuela, and reveal very little about Rheingau itself or the way its representation has evolved (Braso 2011: 105).

However, Lisa Ortner-Kreil suggests that Hütte is “not interested in documenting, but ... in aesthetic reception; photography serves him as a means of visualizing and conveying natural phenomena to the senses.” (in: Brugger & Steininger [eds.] 2015) Whereas, the very characteristic that Braso takes to be a weakness appears to have intrigued another writer: “One may never have actually visited any of his locations but they do appear peculiarly familiar” (Gregos 1996). Katerina Gregos (1996) notes that “All details in the picture space are rendered with alarming equality”, achieving an effect where “no part of it appears more important than another”. Furthermore, avoiding elements of “anecdote and narration” also contributes to the “neutral pictorial space that encourages a sense of individual empathy” (ibid). However, noting the use of a particular approach to the organization of the picture space is an observation of a different order to the notion that the employment of such “compositional and structural devices” creates “an intense atmosphere” capable of evoking feelings such as “solitude and loneliness” – since the first describes a formal approach and the second the resulting experience for the given viewer (ibid). In other words the perception of intensity, solitude and loneliness must surely reside in the interpretive capacity afforded at least in part by the viewer’s individual psychology and experience. In other words Gregos’ review begins with the general but ends on what must be her own individual experience. Some reviewers focus on Hütte’s approach or strategy (and this largely becomes the interpretation), while others centre their discussion on possible responses to the resulting images. A reviewer in fotografia magazine attempts to bring the two together, finding that the flattened picture space makes it “almost impossible” to read spatially, s/he describes Hütte’s landscapes as “awe-inspiring” and suggests they aim to prompt an imaginative response through their large scale and “detached, unemotional” aesthetic language. This, they suggest, has the effect of throwing the “mysterious, even intimidating majesty of nature in the observer’s face”, which serves to “trigger experiential, visionary leaps” (the language of the sublime) where engagement with the image becomes “an experiment in

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perception and its limitations” (2014). Indeed, the idea that the nature of the photographic image, in relation to the human urge to make sense of what is seen, has itself become the ‘subject’ of these images appears to be widespread. This is frequently taken to be at the heart of Hütte’s project and viewers appear to have a sense that they are being invited to notice what the medium does to their experience of seeing and perception. The following reviewer finds that the ‘light’ in Fantasmi e Realtà (Venice 2014) guides the viewer into a conscious awareness of the viewing process, while they are simultaneously “capable of wandering freely through the fantasies of the imagination”, bouncing them into adopting “a conscious and not passive approach” (Fondazione Bevilacqua 2014) . Many commentators centre their discussion on what they take to be the large scale, imposing detail and high production values of Hütte’s landscape photographs – leading Maren Polte to note the way that the “resulting power of suggestion and illusion” can “physically incorporate the observer” (Polte 2017: 95). For many this seems to affect a response where the viewer explores their own internal world or reflects upon other things. For such viewers these landscape images have “a very ambiguous kind of natural beauty” (Gronert 2009: 30) that affords them the space for contemplation and reflection. In this example the viewer experiences an opportunity to go “on a journey deep within themselves, discovering their inner emotions rather than being guided by the photographer’s intentions”, believing that the artist remains at a distance and that it is the artwork itself that takes them “on a trip of learning about themselves.” (Widewalls 2016) What interests me here is that these accounts reference the indexical in terms of lack – in that they don’t mention the visual detail when it is apparent – only when there appears to be an absence of specific information. But how such lack is understood by different viewers, varies. Broadly speaking there are two camps, both of which echo two earlier debates regarding the topographical and the imaginative. One speaks to a disappointment when a palpable evocation of place seems absent. While, conversely, the other understands the absence as a potential for a different quality of engagement; a space for contemplation, for presence. The range of responses described also inhabit a duality with regard to internal and external triggers for aesthetic experience – along the lines debated over in theories of the sublime. Internal and external prompts can lead to sublime experience and the above accounts can be understood in these terms also. From the outset my trajectory has been bent on exploring the terms upon which new large-format landscape photography is understood, experienced and appreciated. Taking Axel Hütte as an example has enabled me to think about the role of the indexical and the expressive for contemporary work in this genre. Maren Polte pointed out in 2012 that Hütte’s work has not yet been theorized to a significant degree – “there have been phenomenological descriptions …

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though the theoretical analysis of his evolution has yet to materialize” (Irrek 1996: 75-77; Polte 2017: 14). Yet all other Becher students, of Hütte’s generation, have – so why is this – why the scant critical engagement? On what basis does this difficulty arise?

Towards a conclusion In 2011 Professional Photographer magazine put forward the theory that the Düsseldorf School had effectively killed off photography, arguing that the work of the group leaves the observer cold, that it presents no opinion, no personality.45 If only it were that simple. For Axel Hütte, as for any artist working in the realm of abstraction, the aim of grounding the viewer in a present is challenging – as this discussion has suggested, the more so working as he does with indexical raw material and against the inherent, powerful inclination of the human perceptive organ to make sense of what is seen. With contemporary practice we expect art to make demands on us as participants rather than spectators – to follow Barthes’ assertion, we relish the pleasures of consumption (Barthes 1977). If the aim of such work as Hütte’s is to create time and space for contemplation and for “immanent sublime” experience, then it is prudent to consider as Lyotard did – what happens if nothing happens? (Lyotard 1984). There is a telling parallel here between the illusive ‘meaning’ of these photographs and examples of Abstract Expressionism of the late 1950s. In Hütte’s case, work that purposefully removes reference points, motivated by his desire to put the business of making the encounter ‘meaningful’ firmly in the hands of the viewer, as compared with the earlier movement’s emphasis on the personally derived expression of the artists concerned. However, recalling the problem of Abstract Expressionism for the frustrated younger generation of American artists that came after the likes of Pollock and Rothko – such work was ‘in fact mute’ (Rosler 1994). As is well documented, it was frustrations such as this that spurred the move away from expressive art and fuelled the further development of conceptual and critically engaged art. And it was a moment for democratizing access to art and in actively involving the viewer in the production of meaning. That Hütte has carefully considered the viewer and foregrounded the moment of viewing in the production of his landscape photography, is evident. But how/where has the viewer been positioned in all of this? Not only in relation to Hütte’s work but to any art where ambiguity stands in for subject matter. Inevitably, where ambiguity is pursued as a strategy there is potential for vacuity – although well intentioned the emphasis on the view45 | See case re accusation from Grant Scott (Editor) – http://theculturetrip.com/ europe/germany/articles/the-dusseldorf-school-10-things-you-should-know/

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ers’ participation could leave some art hollow – devoid as it is of meaning and intention. If this particular body of work by Hütte has simply been reduced to a study of the tension between meaning and ambiguity or an opportunity for a viewer to consider their own processes of perception, then perhaps it does leave itself open to accusations of vacuity. If a ‘work’ of art, in Barthes’ sense, becomes a ‘text’ only at the moment of viewer engagement and through the activity of the production of meaning – then, in the presence of the absence of meaningful content, the only production that can take place must be derived from the viewer themselves. What I am getting at here is to question whether in the post Benjamin/ Barthes period (Birth of the Reader) – it is possible that interpretation has been left so open that some work – in its efforts to free the viewer – is in danger of having nothing to say. Rather than being a container brimming full of potential it threatens to become an empty vessel: a ‘chocolate box’ art – too easily accessible, too undemanding, in danger of co-option into the merely decorative or of becoming domesticated – brought into close proximity through a variety of visual applications; repurposed and reabsorbed into mainstream commercial uses such as those found in the advertising of outdoor leisure wear and even in cookery books (Nilsson 2015). I feel bound to question whether there is sufficient discernible difference between the work of this supposed ‘high’ form of photography produced by Hütte and ‘lower’ forms of illustrative and fictive landscape photography produced and functioning within the commercial world. Working from the 1960s onwards, in a context where so-called ‘serious’ art equated with conceptual art, Richter, somewhat defiantly, painted images that were visually pleasing. But doing so, Elger argues, “did in effect politicize them – precisely because they were so blatantly apolitical, uncritical, and timeless in sentiment” (Elgar 2009: 273). And the only explanation that Richter offered was “I felt like painting something beautiful” (ibid). It is perhaps unsurprising that during the maelstrom of mid-20th century western art some artists, in a challenge to Expressionism, articulated the idea that art needed to be conducted on different terms. In the visual arts those who became known as Minimalists established a mode of art that rejected the personal expression of the artist, instead foregrounding the phenomenological experience of the viewer as active participant; while composer John Cage asserted his preference for saying “nothing”; and conceptual artist John Baldessari toyed with voiding his work of meaning with his paradoxical written statements that sought to deny the ideas they were exploring. Indeed, both Cage and Baldessari, each in their different ways, invoked a paradox – doing so in an unambiguous way by literally spelling it out: “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it” (Cage 1949); “No ideas have entered this work” (Baldessari 1966-67). Hütte’s work is more ambiguous – working in a landscape mode that is immediately

Wanderings through the fog: A xel Hütte and the German tradition re-imagined

recognizable a viewer might look for ‘meaning’ or might seek ‘presence’ – but find that nothing comes. Is it possible to suggest that such ‘muteness’ in the face of environmental catastrophe is an abdication of responsibility in Rosler’s terms? As depoliticized speech – where history and context is avoided in favour of depicting pristine places. His predecessors, the Bechers, were notable participants in the New Topographics project of 1973 – however, Hütte typically avoids the central theme of this project the “Man-altered Landscape”.46 Instead, his work appears to seek out the apparently untouched places of remote regions. Can he be asking that we question the status of the apparent absence of human alteration? If so, can it be argued that the difficulty of the work and the utopian possibility that it offers – does potentially invite/elicit a meaningful critical engagement with the circumstances of 21st century global crisis? If so there is scant evidence that this is how viewers do understand his work. This discussion has attempted to consider how these images are actually experienced and to identify what viewers appear to be looking for and to speculate on what they appear to offer the viewer: a vicarious experience of places and spaces that are out of their reach but desired in some way? And if so in what is the desire rooted and what appears to satisfy this – faithful, factual depictions and documentary images – or images that are expressive in some way of the author, or the author’s experience? The outcome of this investigation points to works of art that bring the two together – the figured and the proper. Axel Hütte’s work operates at the axis of indexicality/abstraction – his process appears to ‘play’/balance on this knife-edge. His work bears an ostensible familiarity – it looks like somewhere – yet the visual language used by this artist renders it impossible to determine precisely where, or for that matter, precisely when it was taken. Therefore, despite the place names ascribed to the works, Hütte’s landscape photographs can seem less than precise. As already shown, some viewers (Braso 2011) clearly feel let down by the effect that the absence of specificity in the work has on their viewing experience – apparently frustrated that artwork that purportedly took a precise place as its starting point only found what could equally be found in any other place. With no obvious sign of the artist’s direct experience of place, the indexicality of the work is questioned and appears to undermine this particular viewer’s satisfaction with it. And my digression into a discussion about 18th century landscape painting was an attempt to consider the role of the ostensibly factual in the aesthetic/ sublime experience of the viewer, where they appeared to be seeking both: “information” and “the sheer pleasure of … contemplation” (Wilton 2014: 79).

46 | New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape (1975) exhibition at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, October.

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Lyotard argued that with the advent of photography “the idea of the industrial readymade had arrived”, putting painters into a new and challenging position where, he suggests, painting “became a philosophical activity”. If we are willing to think about the activity of new photography in a similar way – where some new photographers are behaving more like painters – then this too can be thought of as a “philosophical activity” (Lyotard 1982: 64-69). Lyotard concludes with a statement that serves my argument about the activity of Hütte well: The governing principle of the post-industrial techno-scientific world is not the need to represent the representable, but rather the opposite principle. … The spirit of the times is surely not that of the merely pleasant: its mission remains that of the immanent sublime, that of alluding to the nondemonstratable (ibid).

But Lyotard is clear that it is, at the same time, not the job of the artist to explain their work to viewers – instead he says: “The responsibility of communicating the meaning of thoughts and paintings belongs to the intellectual” (ibid). For Lyotard understands artists as: “his brothers and sisters in experimentation” (ibid). It seems to me that Hütte works very much in the realms of experimentation and philosophy where he rightly follows this principle of not explaining his work. My only fear is that the ostensible simplicity of some of his landscape photographs means that his work can be construed as the “merely pleasant”. Perhaps unhelpfully in suggesting this, I am alluding to a potential problem without offering a solution. I guess this is simply a risk that Hütte is willing to take.

R eferences Alpers, Svetlana (1983): The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aumont, Jacques (1994): The Image, London: BFI Baldessari, John (1966-67), painting: Everything is purged… Barthes, Roland (1977): “From Work to Text” in: Image, Music Text, London: Fontana Press. Barthes, Roland (1977): Image, Music Text, London: Fontana Press. Belsey, Hugh (June 1991): ‘Acknowledgements’ in: From Gainsborough to Constable, The Emergence of Naturalism in British Landscape Painting 17501810. Exhibition catalogue, Sudbury: Gainsborough’s House Society. Berg, Stephan (2009): Conversations with Photographers. Axel Hütte Speaks to Stephan Berg, Madrid: La Fabrica Editorial and Fundacion Telephonica. Berger, John (1972): Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: BBC & Penguin.

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Braso, Emma (2011): “Axel Hütte Helga de Alvear – Madrid”. In: Flash Art, Nov/ Dec 2011. Brook, Caroline and Valter Curzi (eds.) (2014): Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner: British Painting and the Rise of Modernity, Milan: Skira. Brugger, Ingried and Florian Steininger (eds.) (2015): Landscape in my Mind, Vienna: Kunstforum Wien. Cage, John (1961) [1949]: “Lecture on Nothing”. In: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press. Chevrier, Jean-Francois (2015) [1989]: “Photo-Kunst”, exhibition catalogue, Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. In: Ingrid Brugger and Florian Steininger, Landscape in my Mind, Vienna: Kunstforum Wien. Constable, John – from Constable’s Royal Institute Lecture 16 June 1836, in John Constable’s Discourses (ed. R.B. Beckett), Suffolk Records Library 1970. In Hugh Belsey, June 1991, “Acknowledgements”, From Gainsborough to Constable, The Emergence of Naturalism in British Landscape Painting 17501810, exhibition catalogue, Sudbury: Gainsborough’s House Society. Davies, William (2015): The Happiness Industry. How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, London: Verso. Derrida, Jacques (1973): Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1978): The Truth in Painting, Paris, Editions Flammarion. Edwards, Steve, (2003): A ‘pariah in the world of art’: Richter in Reverse Gear. In: D. Green, J. Lowry, D. Campany (eds.): Where is the Photograph?, Brighton: Photoforum. Elger, Dietmar (2009) [2002]: Gerhard Richter A Life in Painting, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elger, Dietmar (ed.) (2011): Gerhard Richter Landscapes, Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz. fotografia magazine (2014): “Axel Hütte the lesser-known photographer of Dusseldorf School” http://fotografiamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/ sites/6/2014/06/axel-hutte (14/08/17). Fried, Michael (2008): Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven: Yale University Press. The Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa and the Fondazione Fotografia Modena – exhibition Fantasmi e Realtà – Venice 2014, http://www.bevilacqualamasa. it/axel-hutte-eng (22/08/17). Gilpin, Revd William, “Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales … made in the Summer of 1770” London, 1782 (edited by Sutherland Lyall), Richmond 1973, In: Belsey 1991 (ibid). Gregos, Katerina (1996): Axel Hütte, http://www.zingmagazine.com/zing3/re views/034_hutte.html (30/11/17)

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Gronert, Stefan (2009): The Düsseldorf School of Photography, London: Thames and Hudson. Hess, Thomas, B. (1971): Barnett Newman, New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Hütte, Axel and Holm-Johnsen, Hanne (2006): North/South, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel. Hütte, Axel (2009): In: Stephan Berg, Conversations with Photographers. Axel Hütte Speaks to Stephan Berg, Madrid: La Fabrica Editorial and Fundacion Telephonica. Hütte, Axel: fantasmi e realtà, website at: http://www.itsliquid.com/axel-huttefantasmierealta.html [28/11/2017]. Irrek, Hans, (1996): “Nacht und Nebel. Phanomene der Auflosung.” In: Axel Hütte, Theorea, Munich: Shirmer/Mosel and Fotomuseum, Winterthur. Kitson, Michael (1991): In: Hugh Belsey, “Acknowledgements”. In: From Gainsborough to Constable, The Emergence of Naturalism in British Landscape Painting 1750-1810, exhibition catalogue, Sudbury: Gainsborough House. Lambert, Ray (2005): Constable and the Theory of Landscape Painting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lind, Maria (2013): “Documents of Contemporary Art: Abstraction”, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1982): “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime”, In: Art Forum, April. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984): “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”. In: Art Forum, April. Moore, Peter (2015): The Weather Experiment, London: Chatto & Windus. Morley, Simon (ed.) (2010): The Sublime, Documents of Contemporary Art, London & Massachusetts: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. Newman, Barnett (1992) [1948]: “The Sublime is Now”. In: Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, John P. O’Neill (ed.), Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nilsson, Magnus (2015): The Nordic Cook Book, London and New York: Phaidon. Polte, Maren (2017) [2012]: A Class of their Own, The Düsseldorf School of Photography, Leuven, Leuven University Press. Reynolds, Joshua “Discourse Four, Discourses on Art, lecture delivered at the Royal Academy 1771”. In: J.C. Taylor, Nineteenth Century Theories of Art, California, University of California Press. Richter, Gerhard (1995): The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interview 1962-1993, (ed.) Hans-Ulrich Obrist, London: Thames & Hudson. Richter, Gerhard (2009) [1999]: from Stefan Koldehoff, “Gerhard Richter, Die Macht der Malerei [The Power of Painting]”, (Interview). In: Dietmar Eger, Gerhard Richter A Life in Painting, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Rosenblum, Robert (1975): Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. Friedrich to Rothko, London, Thames and Hudson. Rosenblum, Robert (2010) [1961]: “The Abstract Sublime”. In: Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, Documents of Contemporary Art series, London: Whitechapel Gallery. Rosler, Martha (1994): “Art and the Left”, television interview, Open University course: Modern Art, Practices and Debates, London and Milton Keynes: BBC and Open University. Shiff, Richard (1989): “Phototropism (Figuring the Proper)”. In: Studies in the History of Art, Vol 20. Sooke, A (2012): “Hamish Fulton wanders the neural pathways”. In: The Daily Telegraph (17/01/2012,) [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-fea tures/9014354/Hamish-Fulton-wanders-the-neural-pathways.html]. Steininger, Florian (2015): In: Ingrid Brugger and Florian Steininger, Landscape in my Mind, Vienna, Kunstforum Wien Sugimoto, Hiroshi (2005): Hiroshi Sugimoto, exhibition catalogue, Washington D.C. and Tokyo: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Turner, J.M.W (2006) [c.1820] “Lecture on Perspective, British Library Manuscripts. Add.Mss, C, f, 2”. In: Andrew Wilton, Turner as Draughtsman, London: Ashgate. Walsh, John (1987): “Skies and Reality in Dutch Landscape”. In: David Freedberg and Jan de Vries, Jan (eds.), Art in History, History in Art, California, The Getty Centre. Wells, Liz (2011): Land Matters Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, London. New York, I.B.Tauris. Wilton, Andrew (2006): Turner as Draughtsman, London, Ashgate. Wilton, Andrew (2014): “Turner and Constable: Poetics and Technique” in Caroline Brook and Valter Curzi (eds.), 2014, Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner: British Painting and the Rise of Modernity, Milan: Wolf, Janet (1981): The Social Production of Art, London, Macmillan. Wood, Paul (1994): Truth and Beauty: the Ruined Abstraction of Gerhard Richter, reprinted in Beech, David, 2009, Beauty, Documents of Contemporary Art series, London, Whitechapel Gallery, pp.183-188. Widewalls (2016): Distinctiveness of Axel Hütte, http://www.widewalls.ch/ar​ tist/axel-hutte/ (24/0817)

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“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders with Sweden, Norway and Russia Susan Brind and Jim Harold

I ntroduction 65°51’N 24°09’E 69°02’37’’N 20°51’22’’E 68°46’N 28°46’E

These numbers identify fixed points within a rational system of measurable locations. They are abstractions of space. Given the northerly inclination of the figures they suggest a high latitude; approaching or within the Arctic Circle.47 If, however, we give each set of numbers a name – Tornio, Saana Fell and RajaJooseppi respectively – we may come a little closer to something that might indicate a place, whether that is one known or imagined. The specific terrains denoted are in fact remote landscapes visited along Finland’s open Arctic borders with Sweden and Norway, and its more controlled boundary with Russia. These wilderness regions – or desarts as they were deemed to be by many early travellers – are set at the limits of cultural boundaries and of commercial productivity (hence the appellation, desarts). To be in such environments, as Adam Nicholson says, is to be placed, “at the limit of reliable information” (1985: 19) and the images that emerge, both photographic and textual, we argue, mirror that state. Through a sequential discussion of the characteristics and historical relevance of each of the three sites, this text considers both the contrasting inscriptions placed upon such remote landscapes, and their palimpsest-like nature. 47 | The precise degree of the latitude of the Arctic Circle shifts depending upon the Earth’s axial tilt in relation to the Sun, and tidal forces resulting from the orbit of the Moon. On February 10, 2017 the latitude denoting the southern-most reach of the Circle was 66°33’ North of the Equator.

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In our attempts to make sense of the world our understanding always rests somewhere between received facts, political, economic, social and cultural histories, and our own subjective experiences. When considered together these are the same properties that coalesce in the idea of ‘place’, whether viewed as a fixed topographic location or as a conceptual or fluid space. Our perceptions are touched, too, by our physicality, as discussed by Tim Ingold (2010: S122), and by more remote regions within ourselves, alluded to by Yves Bonnefoy and detailed by Stephen Romer (2012: 20), that can neither be fully explicated nor definitively located. These are the layers that form the palimpsest through which the following three border sites are viewed: • Firstly, the Tornio River and Kukkola, just south of the Arctic Circle. This area was the focus of the 18th century mathematician, philosopher and man of letters, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis in his research into the curvature of the earth. The river now forms the borderline between Finland and Sweden, emerging in the Bay of Bothnia at Tornio (and Haparanda on the river’s Swedish side). • Secondly, the north-western Arctic lake area and fell region of Kilpisjärvi and Saana Fell. This is an area sacred to the indigenous Sámi people, and the place where the Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish borders meet. • And thirdly, the only sanctioned border crossing between Finland and Russia in the Arctic Circle, known as Raja-Jooseppi (Joseph’s Border). Here, to compress Yves Bonnefoy’s sentiments (ibid: 1-2), the earth not only ‘is’ – affirming that the word ‘presence’ has a meaning – but dreams or reveries exist in this place as supplements to the physical world and its image. This essay emerges from practice-led collaborative research that incorporates academic writing with images taken at Tornio and Kukkola, Saana Fell and Raja-Jooseppi, and texts written in the form of letters that reference events witnessed first-hand in those places. The letters assume the voice of an anonymous I and are written to an unnamed you.48 They draw upon the long tradition of using the journey as a means to reach a deeper understanding of the world, starting with the Histories of Herodotus (written in 440 BC); the early pilgrim narratives from Europe; and the journeys made by the Islamic 48 | The letters included here are extracted from a larger co-authored series that form a collaborative artwork by the artist-authors. Iterations of the work have been exhibited as part of Foreign Encounter, Galerie Foë, München, 2015, and as a sculptural installation entitled Bitter Rose ... for you, one part of the larger Bitter Rose project designed for Glasgow International, 2016, by Birthe Jorgensen and Tawona Sithole. Extracts from the series have also been published in the journal The Burning Sand, Volume 5, Glasgow: The Good Press, April 2016: 5-9. ISSN: 2052-5699.

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders

“men of letters” and the rihla tradition of the Arab world (which dates from the 14th century), both categories of traveller described by Houari Touati (2010: 56-60). Perhaps more pertinent to the geographical locations visited here are: the diaries of Jean-François Regnard, his voyage to Lapland made in 1681 and published under the title, Voyage de Laponie in 1731; and the history of Lapland, called Lapponia by Johannes Schefferus (John Scheffer), translated into English in 1674. The latter of these two works is referenced in this text. The letters included in this essay are intended to transmit images with as much clarity as those contained within the photographs themselves. In the light of contemporary theories regarding representation and the photographic image, however, this essay demonstrates that all the emerging images from such journeys are not simply the depictions of sites or places (documents) but that, as Jean-François Lyotard argues in his essay “Scapeland” (1989), they become the poetic embodiments of the wilderness they represent. Kukkola, 3rd August 2000 I am sitting on the wooden balcony on the first floor of Jaakko’s house overlooking the river Tornionjoki – now the border that separates Finland from Sweden. We’ve just eaten freshly smoked white fish and it was delicious. We arrived in the village this afternoon in time to witness the local fishermen land and share their daily catch equally amongst the community. They fish from makeshift wooden platforms that project out over the cataracts. The catch was dealt out between all the families’ baskets and some kind of token system was employed to ensure that each member of the cooperative got their fair share. The fish were then taken off for curing by each family. I sat with J in his timber smoke house while he smoked his share of the day’s catch. Impaling them on roughly whittled sticks, he propped them in the fire pit and basted them in salted water as they cooked over hot wood ash. The combination of the smells was incredible and they slowly infused themselves into the fish flesh. Wood is used for everything here. The house we are sitting in now is entirely made of wood: J’s father built it by hand using local timber. There is tranquillity in this house that I know you would sense too. The view westwards through the trees pictorializes the turbulent river, and a moment ago we watched the sun set as a slight mist rose from the forest on the Swedish side. J told me how in the winter months the river freezes so hard that he can ski across to visit his friends. Liquid becomes solid, yet the border becomes per-

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P ierre -L ouis M ore au de M aupertuis and the Tornio R iver region Image 01: Interior of the Old Church tower, Tornio, built in 1686, and dedicated to Queen Eleonora of Sweden, 2000.

In 1736 the French mathematician, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, travelled to what was, then, Swedish Lapland. He was engaged in a research expedition, as a guest of the Swedish crown, along what are now the border territories between Finland and Sweden; beginning at Tornio, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, and travelling north along the Tornio River towards the forest interior. His aim was to test Sir Isaac Newton’s hypothesis that the shape of the Earth was not perfectly spherical but was, in fact, compressed towards the Polar Regions. De Maupertuis’ expedition was the northern, and successful, part of a two-pronged research endeavour organised by the Academy of Sciences, Paris. The southern part was led by the French astronomers Charles Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer and Louis Godin, along with the Spanish geographers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, amongst others. They were sent to an equivalent region in Peru. In contrast to de Maupertuis’ northern expedition, theirs fell into organisational and philosophical chaos and the endeavour was ultimately unsuccessful.

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders

To de Maupertuis, a cultured city-dweller, the landscape that he and his team encountered was truly daunting. The Figure of the Earth: Determined from Observations Made by Order of the French King, at the Polar Circle (1738), the published account of his expedition and mathematical findings, is inter-laced with descriptions of the alien nature of the terrain and its inhospitability as a landscape. These alien qualities were described mainly in the terms of the land conditions and the wildlife but also in relation to some of the peoples encountered. The land was, to de Maupertuis and his team, both a desart and a wilderness. Their attitude towards it was by turns coloured: firstly, by a lack of understanding of what they saw to be a valueless landscape with little to convince them of any useful and productive local economy, despite evidence to the contrary; and secondly, by their desire to survive and attain their intellectual goal against all the odds. In order to achieve their main objective, the measuring of the terrain, they were forced to deal with and overcome the physical environment and their own bodily limitations. According to de Maupertuis: In the Desarts of a Country scarcely habitable, in that immense Forest which extends from Tornio to Cape Nord we must go through Operations that are not easy even where no Convenience is wanting. To penetrate in these Desarts, there were but two ways, both of which we must prove; one, the sailing upon a River full of Cataracts; the other, crossing thick Woods and deep Marshes on foot. And if we should be able to make our way into the Country, after the most painful Marches, we must have to clamber up steep Rocks, and clear the tops of Mountains of the Wood that intercepted our Sight. We must in these Desarts put up with the most wretched Diet, exposed to the Flies, which in this Season are so insufferable as to drive the Laplanders and their Rain-Deer from their Habitations to seek shelter on the Coasts of the Ocean (2014 [1738]: 40).

Out of this, aspects of an heroic language emerged through the pages of the narrative that accompanied de Maupertuis’ research findings. It is present too in the parallel account by the expedition’s illustrator, Abbé Réginald Outhier, in his Journal d’un Voyage au Nord, published in 1744. Just over one hundred years later, the authors Charma and Mancel described Outhier’s character in the following terms: [Outhier] was a precise and rigorous observer, he worked alongside de Maupertuis under sometimes extreme conditions and demonstrated remarkable physical qualities. Supporting with the same serenity the heat of the summer and the cold polar winter, he contributed very widely to the success of the expedition 49 (1857: Vol. 1, 21-22).

49 | Authors’ own translation.

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The Figure of the Earth, first published in Swedish, French and, then, in 1738 translated into English, is a description of the Lapland Journey, de Maupertuis’ travails in the wilderness and the mathematical evidence that Newton’s hypothesis had been correct: that the Earth is an oblate sphere and does flatten towards the Polar Regions. To take the appropriate measurements necessary to prove Newton’s theory, de Maupertuis and his team had to find a series of locations that were all visible, from one to the other. He notes in his journal (2014 [1738]: 47) that, due to atmospheric conditions, light and mist, these were not always easy to see. In the end, he made ten triangulation points. To affect a good sighting from one high point to the next in the chain, the team had physically to clear large swathes of trees before they were then at liberty to superimpose a series of invisible lines across the wilds. These lines formed the sides of a series of inter-linked triangles fixing previously unmapped locations into a matrix. These sightlines started from the tower of the Old Church in Tornio and extended north, via the frozen river at Kukkola, to the small village of Kittis; a distance of approximately 145 kilometres. To complete the process these points and lines were in turn fixed into their relation with key stars. It is a strange irony, perhaps, that whilst de Maupertuis was able to prove Newton’s hypothesis through fixing and measuring points on the Earth’s surface, he was in the main unable to come to terms with the actual environment itself. It was to remain a difficult, exacting, threatening and, at the very worst, dangerous world, precisely because he did not have the language to give it closure and, therefore, a fully meaningful form. It was not simply that it was “chaotic” (ibid: 49) and unruly to the eye. It was that it did not seem to have any identifiable economic or cultural value. As a result, the northern landscape lay beyond easy inscription and, therefore, was an unresolved spectre at the feast of rational enquiry. Interestingly, for all this, de Maupertuis did recognise something intriguingly ‘other’ in the land when, for instance, he was crossing a lake in the region of Niemi (to the east of the Tornio river between Avasaxa and Kittis) where he commented, given “the air [his present location was like] an enchanted Island in a Romance” (ibid: 55) and later, in the same region he felt it to be “a place of resort for Fairies and Genii” (ibid: 56).50 By the turn of the 21st century, some 260 years after de Maupertuis’ expedition, this area, now a part of Finnish Lapland, has changed in its appearance, its population size, and in its reading as landscape. It can no longer be described as either a desart or a wilderness in the terms expressed by de Maupertuis for it has become a relatively cultivated and peopled landscape, in spite of its harsh climate. In many ways, though, given the extreme seasonal weather conditions, the presence of wild animals and the large tracts of wild forest, it can still be an environment threatening to the existence of a careless traveller. 50 | The capitalization and italics are from de Maupertuis’ original text.

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders

Image 02: The Tornio River, Kukkola, 2000.

The Kukkola area has become a domesticated and productive place with a strong history of farming and a centuries-old form of collective fishing. Behind these traditions which shape its place identity there still lies the inscrutability of nature, located in the Finnish phrase, ‘the Nature’: an expression that encapsulates both a sense of nature alive in the present (of which we are a part), and the nostalgic longing for a lost northern Arcadia. At Kukkolaforsen we stand on the banks of a series of fast flowing and rock-strewn cataracts. Whilst a stillness pervades this image, that stillness is, in a very real sense, the gift (or limit) of the medium itself. We cannot hear the sound of the rushing water or of the wind. Apart from the buildings across the river and the fishermen’s walkways constructed to reach out into the flow, there is no other indication of human activity. The image seems locked in that eternal timelessness that the un-peopled photograph can often convey. The areas of actual movement, the speed and the temporal nature of the river are simultaneously contradicted and accentuated by the duration of the camera’s exposure. In the middle distance the foam on the surface of the turbulent water freezes, into a form of photographic winter. This is a border location. It is a natural feature, exploited to form a divide. This political separation did not exist in de Maupertuis’ time, but has done since Sweden ceded power over its eastern territories to Russia in the early 1800s, and since Finland’s final independence from Russia in 1918. It is a benign and, relatively speaking, a permeable border. But borders are political occurrences, and are about the creation of territory and ideas of ‘otherness’. Given the location, then, we cannot discount the trace of a political ‘other’ in this photograph. It is, however, predominantly the presence of nature as the ‘other’ that tugs the viewer in two directions at the same time. We are simultaneously ex-

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posed to the suggestion of the threat of the roiling waters, whilst being offered a space of desire and the idyll of a balanced pre-industrial rural Arcadia. This is not, though, a pastoralist arcadia like that encountered in Greek or Roman literature, with its Mediterranean overtones of warmth, fecundity and ease, but one framed by Northern folkloric motifs, through animism and supernatural traditions associated with a bygone nomadic existence (cf. Hultkrantz 2000: 94). It is a realm where wilderness – perhaps tinged with a sense of nostalgia (cf. Anderson 1979: 679-680) but not, however, reduced to the negative formula of a desart – can be both a physical place of encounter with non-human realities, and of daily itinerant experience. It is a place, too, of reverie. Saana Fell, Kilpisjärvi, 23rd July 2000 I’m sitting at the table in my chalet, by a window overlooking Kilpisjärvi. The screen to keep the mosquitoes at bay is veiling the view of the lake. The cabin is close to the water’s edge, which is why there are so many insects. I’ve come indoors to make coffee and to escape them. They are everywhere and it’s driving me slightly mad! Even the reindeer are driven crazy by them. They stand in the middle of the roads to avoid them, to the point of ignoring cars. Two days ago, I crossed the lake to find where the three borders meet: a concrete block, painted yellow, that identifies where Finland, Sweden and Norway touch each other. It is surrounded by water and approached by a narrow wooden walkway raised just above the water’s surface. There is nothing else there. It was somewhere and nowhere all at the same time. Returning, I sat in the boat and watched a mosquito settle on the hand of a passenger. It found the vein between the man’s thumb and forefinger and stayed there for virtually the whole journey. It made me think of the time you were bitten so badly last year. Yesterday I climbed Saana Fell, where the Sámi used to pay tribute to the god of Thunder. I had to wear my mosquito net for the first part of the climb but rising above the tree line of dwarf birches, the air was fresher and with relief I removed the net to see the landscape without the minute grid that it had imposed upon everything. I climbed up to the top of the fell; past the radio mast that silently receives sounds through the air. As I stood on the summit looking across the water to the Swedish border, I saw the sky reflected so strangely in the lake’s surface that I no longer knew its limits. Water

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders and ether merged to appear as a solid form; one world became another.

Y rjö K okko ’s The Way of the F our W inds Forest Lapland was once part of Lapp territory. But the Finn, who loves the woods, thrust his way up here along the rivers and lakes to hunt and fish, to clear small plots of ground for cultivation and to cut meadow hay for his beasts. He drove the Lapp northward. The price of forest land rose [...] the region became the domain of lumbermen. Two hundred and fifty miles from the coast the trees begin to be shorter and sparser in growth [...]. Finns no longer feel quite at home here, for they need the support and company of trees. In another thirty miles the woods come to an end altogether, and now begins the land of dwarf birch, of Lapps, reindeer [...] Mountain Lapland (Kokko 1954: 13).

These words written in 1949 are by a northern Sámi, Yrjö Kokko. Given the date of publication, the translator has used the terms Lapp and Lapland to define the peoples and the land, instead of the word the word Sámi or Sámid (cf. Anderson, 1979: 68). Despite this problem of identity and naming now apparent in the translation, there is much here that speaks of other stresses that have historically been placed on the indigenous northern culture of the Sámi peoples; stresses that can, of course, be traced back to earlier colonial periods as well as the time of Kokko’s writing (cf. Kent, 2014: 30-37). The label Lappology, used to define the study of the northerly regions, for example, took precedence as a result of Johannes Schefferus’ classic book, Lapponia, published in Frankfurt in 1673. Born in Strasbourg in 1621, Schefferus became Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Uppsala, Sweden in 1648. Despite this appointment he never visited Lapland nor met with its people. Instead he employed secondary sources throughout his research and his study, commissioned by the then King of Sweden was, in part, intended as a refutation of the prevailing suspicion that ‘Lapp’ sorcerers had been used on the battlefields of Continental Europe. As a result, the book was a collection of received law and research commissioned from others (Pentikäinen 2000: 9) that, at times, resorted to negative moral judgements (Kent 2014: 31), whilst emphasising practical modes of living over the supernatural or spiritual dimensions of the Sámi way of life. While Kokko, who was one of a number of Sámi writers published from the 1930s to the present day, sketched a culture subject to external pressure, he also wrote intimately of a living world of peoples, their relationships to each other as communities, their state of itinerancy as they follow their reindeer herds, and

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of their northern lands.51 De Maupertuis’ reductive view of the land as a desart and wilderness would have made no sense to Kokko or his peoples’ worldview. Explained briefly, the reason being that for the Sámi people the true value of the land traditionally lay in their symbiotic relationship with it. Nature and landscape were not externalised as they came to be through the European Enlightenment. Rather, Nature is understood to be part of them and they are part of it. Interestingly, recent thinking has also begun to question the Western logic of such separation, not least with regard to the issue of climate change. On a subtler level, though, considering life as a process of wayfaring, Tim Ingold,52 challenges the limits of our understanding of landscape by questioning what constitutes the ground, and by the mingling of earth and sky in what he calls, “the weather-world” – which incorporates our experiences of light and sound, of sensing and breathing – he argues that we and the world we inhabit are simultaneously coming into being. He also reasserts the role of storytelling in the integration of knowledge (Ingold 2010: S121-139). Whereas for the Sámi a symbiotic relationship with nature has a spiritual dimension, for Ingold it would appear to be a secularised, phenomenological matter. Despite the pressures of de-culturation placed upon them by external political forces, for the Sámi people the landscape was and, post the 1980’s cultural reawakening,53 is again becoming a far more complex space that seems to exist in both the terms of temporal occurrences and as an eternal realm of myth. According to Kokko, it could never be a desert devoid of any value, as expressed by those he identified as, “outlanders” (1954: 216): a category that could include the later Finnish colonizers as well as the likes of de Maupertuis. Instead, it exists as a series of dynamic and interlinked spaces and time registers that are held in place through stories and actual experiences to form what might be articulated in Henri Corbin’s metaphysical terminology (1997 [1969]: 35), as a ‘psychic time’ that admits to the parallel worlds of the human and the spiritual; in this context with the mystic or the shaman as the historical intermediaries who can move between the two. As such, theirs is a world in continual flux. 51 | It should, of course, be noted that not all Sámi cultures are nomadic now. Since the late 18 th century, many have settled into an agricultural way of life. Additionally, with the borders between Norway and Finland closing in the mid-19 th century, reindeer herding and an itinerant way of life became more difficult to sustain. (cf. Kent 2014: 226-228). 52 | In the 1970s Ingold undertook ethnographic research amongst the Skolt Sámi of north-eastern Finland. See Ingold, Tim (1976): The Skolt Lapps Today, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 53 | This movement included such notables as the Finnish Sámi author Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Norwegian Sámi rock singer Mari Boine, and the Norwegian filmmaker Nils Gaup. See Thomas A DuBois, “Folklore, Boundaries and Audience in ‘The Pathfinder’” (cf. Pentikäinen 2000: 256).

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders

Image 03: View above the tree line from Saana Fell across Kilpisjärvi towards Sweden, 2000.

Above the tree line, among the sparse and stunted birches, the tundra wilderness of the north is the perfect place to experience this heightened awareness. As the Sámi poet, Nils-Aslak Valkeapää wrote: I beat these images on the stone, on the drum it is so slow after drumming for a while I am pulled into another world to visions (1997: Poem 33) 54

Valkeapää (1943-2001), known primarily as a poet and writer, also worked as an actor, painter, composer and musician. A key member of the generation of new Sámi writers and artists, he frequently drew “on the post-war traumas [of the Sámi, in order] to create an epic of all Sámi peoples against the spiritual backdrop of the old Sámi religion, its mythology and relevance for today.” (Kent 2014: 195) When the American philosopher and ecologist, David Abram, wrote in more general terms of the shaman and shamanic traditions – whose images and drum Valkeapää evokes above – he talked of the traditional or tribal shaman: 54 | Valkeapää’s drum is intended as a link between the physical world and that of a cosmology and many such shaman’s drums are illuminated with designs related to the cosmos. By way of comparison see the cosmological drawings of the former reindeer herder, who later adopted a bohemian life, Johan Olafsson Turi (1854-1936) a native of Kautokeino in Norway (cp. Turi 1931: 289-295).

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Such visions, however formative they may seem to be, even in this landscape can perhaps only ever be fleetingly perceived. From Saana Fell, one of the sacred Sámi sites, one can literally be brought back to earth by seeing the remaining wreckage of a WWII German bomber; a trace of another time folded into the present. One can also follow the line of the road as it cuts through the landscape. It was built by the German military to link Norway to Finland, and constructed by forced labour during the Second World War (cf. Kent 2014: 6364). As Kokko described, it is: A highway 120 miles long that cut the Laplander’s domain in two – a domain that extended over the frontiers of three nations [that] had never known a road before. (1954: 216).

Image 04: World War II German military road across Saana Fell, 2000.

A number of side roads, which are still visible, were also constructed by the German army to underground strong-points that peppered the fells. The hillside is now pockmarked with abandoned military emplacements, and the main road has become the route for the Norwegians to enter Finland to buy cheaper alcohol in Kilpisjärvi than they can buy at home: from the one and only food market, liquor store and petrol station, Kilpishalli.

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders

Helsinki, 26th July 2002 Returning from the Arctic north, I need to rest for a few days before coming home to you. My travels seem to be catching up with me, and this morning at breakfast I couldn’t stop replaying scenes from my journey in which the forest stretched endlessly in all directions. In my mind I was back at a border crossing, Raja-Jooseppi, a place marked only by two intersecting lines: the road from Ivalo to Murmansk; and the six metre wide slash that runs hundreds of miles, from north to south, separating Finland from Russia. The day was warm and the sound of buzzing insects seemed to mix with the tensions, historical and current, between the former colonial power and its colony. In the car park by the Finnish customs post, at the heart of no-man’s land, was Lenin – or his likeness, that is – displayed on a white plinth. His sculpted portrait had been instated there by an old Russian man living, since the fall of the Soviet block, in a tiny caravan in the border zone. There, in the northern light, a westerly wind blew intermittent clouds eastwards. Their shadows, like natural markers of time, travelled across the trees and across Lenin too. His face darkened then lightened, only to darken again. In the shifting light, his uneasy presence hovered as a nostalgic reminder of the differing ideologies overlaid upon that wilderness. Image 05: Raja-Jooseppi, Border Point, 2002.

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J oseph ’s B order (R a ja -J ooseppi) Located on the road from Ivalo to Murmansk is Finland’s most northerly vehicular border crossing into Russia. It is named Raja-Jooseppi – Joseph’s Border – after the man who lived in the woods near to the site of the modern border post. Josef Sallila was a farmer, pearl hunter and trader who lived there with his wife from 1910 until 1943 when Russian partisans forced them and others to move to bigger villages. The site is now locked within the no-mans-land of the border, the trees in the immediate area tagged with yellow warning bands. It is used by officials from the Finnish and Russian military for meetings: to discuss problems or agree strategies relating to the maintenance and control of the border territories. The road east from Ivalo passes through long tracts of forest, beside lakes and across rocky, tumbling rivers. It is a lonely road, with relatively little in the way of traffic. Until about 15 years ago only half of the route had a metalled surface. Although, during the period that elapsed between two visits to Raja-Jooseppi – just a week and a half apart – the final 25 kilometres up to the border were completely metalled. From the border administration post it is just 1 kilometre to the actual borderline and the customs buildings. This is a most palpable edge, which is both strangely somnolent with the buzz of insects, and full of the fizzing tensions that can lie between a former colonial nation and its colony: whether those tensions are historically based or current. There are the tensions, too, between the scale of the wilderness at large and this remote outpost-huddle of small wood and brick buildings and a symbolic barrier-boom. Image 06: Raja-Jooseppi, Joseph’s farm, looking towards the Russian border, 2002.

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders

As if in contrast to the contemporary world of the border compound, the collection of small wooden buildings dating from 1910 that comprise Joseph’s house and farm, stand preserved much deeper into the forest and right up against the actual borderline. Originally set with a strategic eye for trading on the banks of the Luttojoki, the main artery for a lucrative East-West trade prior to the two World Wars and the coming of the road, Joseph, his wife and a little later the pearl hunter Huhti-Heikki, lived, farmed and traded here. The plot of land where they lived is a beautiful spot. In the summer months, the luscious meadows leading down to the river are full of wild flowers. The light that shimmers off the water is rather starkly contrasted by the dark, solid swathe of fir trees just to the east that mark the Russian border which extends north and south from there. For a long time after the Lapland War (1944-45) the buildings that Joseph, his wife and his pearl-fisher friend were forced to abandon were left to become shells of meaning, lost in an expansive frontier territory. Now the buildings have been reclaimed, repaired and circumscribed as a part of Finnish heritage. In many senses, this could create a closure on any experience of this border-site as its melancholy human history is resolved into heritage. If it were as simple as that then any experience of the border would be complete, right there. Image 07: Raja-Jooseppi border zone, 2002.

Of the three border locations named in this text, however, Raja-Jooseppi, on the eastern perimeter of Finland, is the most carefully monitored, patrolled and guarded. It is a cautious realm full of watchfulness, hesitation and anxiety. With its brief stretches of tall wire fences and CCTV cameras, it seems the most palpable of boundaries. Finnish maps of these eastern marches show only white areas across the border in Russia. Not the white, however, of the

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seasonal snows, but the white of paper that denotes what Nicholson called the “limits of reliable information” (1985: 19). In this regard, these maps provide a representational limit that only just frames the compound and its margins. The place is a limit for each national narrative, and yet the land itself, a dense forest wilderness (not so different from that encountered by de Maupertuis around the Tornio river area in the west) stretches unaffected by human machinations to both the east and the west. The natural elements of the scene visible from Joseph’s gently flowering meadow – the light, the river, the endless trees, the varieties of flora and fauna, all of which colonize, migrate or traverse across and beyond this enclave – do not recognise or pay attention to the artificiality of human stratagems. Consequently, that eastern border, through the symbolic act of wiping out the details, seems to have become an area of land that lies outside signification: a cartographic wilderness beyond naming; beyond the civilizing effects of language and the concept of landscape. According to the American poet, Howard Nemerov (1920-1991): Civilization, mirrored in language, is the garden where relations grow; outside the garden is the wild abyss. (Nemerov, quoted in Snyder 1995: 166).

C onclusion It is this ‘wild abyss’ – the forest – that troubled de Maupertuis. He could see no value in it. While to the Finns, as cited by Kokko, it was a wild landscape returned to language through its commodification. To many Sámi, however, the apparent ‘wilderness’ was full of meaning and value precisely because of the varied and continual forms of movement (wayfaring) that were imposed upon them by the latitude, terrain and prevailing weather conditions of each season. This created an open-ended sense of place that did not conceive of a final destination as such, and that allowed perceptions of the land to operate in a more fluid fashion, whether practically or spiritually. In another but equally remote landscape, specifically Armenia, the late French philosopher and poet, Yves Bonnefoy (2012 [1972]: 164-168), sensed this experience of place as open ended. He ascribed to such wilderness landscapes the quality of reverie, despite their being touched by hard realities, and described them as arrière-pays. This was a term adopted by him that defies exact translation into English but it comes closest to the concept of the hinterland; an area remote, undefined, “a thought” (ibid: 169), at or beyond the margins. This intuitive quality of the arrière-pays can “[...] vaguely attach itself to images or situations or visible places scattered here and there in the real world.” (ibid: 169)

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders

As quoted by Romer in his introductory essay, in Bonnefoy’s own words such sites or scenes become a “place of absolutes” (ibid: 1): a space of liminality in which layers of meaning both reside and elude inscription. Such palimpsest-like landscapes may be politically, theologically, mystically and psychoanalytically interpreted but, at their most poignant, they seem to lie, in terms similar to those of Nemerov quoted above, outside the domestication of language and in the shadows beyond easy human signification. Here, in the image of such landscapes or places – photographed, recalled or imagined – “absence and presence coincide” (ibid: 170), and “are born at the moment of rupture” (ibid: 180). A more physical, contemporary and equally difficult term to translate, used by architects and town planners since the 1990s to denote those marginal terrains that are so frequently encountered in or at the edge of the developed urban landscape, comes to mind here: that of the terrain vague. Despite their predominantly urban context, terrains vague are places that lie outside of cultural, social and economic value but which, nevertheless, become the points for critical reflection. They are places, in effect, that have become non-places where, in the Italian writer and critic Giani Celati’s terms, “one breathes an air of urban solitude” (Mariani and Barron 2014: 7). While this is a melancholy image of place, set “on the verge of disappearance” (ibid: xii) it touches on Bonnefoy’s sense of the poetic with its shadowy strangeness that disrupts our rational sense of order. Celati’s breaths, however melancholy they might be, also seem to act as a reminder of what Ingold termed as the “mindful body [that] knows and remembers [it] must also live and breathe” (2010: S122). At Raja-Jooseppi we sit or stand in Joseph’s meadow, read it as text or view its image. It surrounds us, we inhale – an act that places us actively in the present of that landscape. We exhale and push the presence of the landscape away, creating or performing its absence. In the terms cited six centuries earlier by St. Augustine – paraphrased here from Ingold (ibid: S122) – the landscape (of earth and sky) becomes as a result of this act of breathing, both near, within us, and outside of our selves. Consequently our breath, our selves, the landscape and the world – the places – we inhabit at any given time are simultaneously coming into being and passing away. In the terms of image and representation, this space of liminality is what lies at the heart of both Bonnefoy’s writing and Lyotard’s essay (1989: 212-219) where the experiencing body, operating outside of rational language, is grounded by each breath. Standing in such a fundamental exchange with the physical world and in these Arctic border territories, we are located in Bonnefoy’s ‘present’ that is filled with a profound sense, simultaneously, of uncertainty and of becoming. In these terms, then, landscape cannot be reduced simply to a conventional sense of ‘place’ as a fixed entity (ibid: 216) – which would imply a

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state of belonging or perhaps of loss, and the attendant thoughts of nostalgia. Instead, in such landscapes, the viewer is held in their uncertainty ‘at the limits of reliable information’, where to quote Lyotard they: “[...] are no longer simply its hostage but its lost traveller” (ibid: 219). Interpreted in this way, the border, the image and the text, too, cease to be limits or fixed points. Rather, they become permeable spaces where meaning becomes dynamically other. 65°51’N 24°09’E Tornio River​ 69°02’37’’N 20°51’22’’E Saana Fell Fell 68°46’N 28°46’E Raja-Jooseppi Forest

R eferences Abram, David (1996): The Spell of the Sensuous, New York: Vintage Books. Anderson, Myrdene (1979): “Review of Tim Ingold’s The Skolt Lapps Today” in The American Anthropologist, 81, Issue 3. Bonnefoy, Yves (2012 [1972]): The Arrière-pays, Stephen Romer (trans.), London: Seagull Books. Charma, Antoine/Mancel G. (1857): Le Père André: documents inédits pourservir à l’histoire philosophique, Paris, Vol. 1. Corbin, Henri (1997 [1969]): Alone with the Alone, Princeton: Princeton University Press. DuBois, Thomas A. (2000): “Folklore. Boundaries and Audience in ‘The Pathfinder’” in: Pentikäinen, Juha (ed.), Sámi Folkloristics, Turku: NNF Publications. Hultkrantz, Åke (2000): “Fifty Years of Research on Sámi Folklore and Myth” in: Pentikäinen, Juha (ed.), Sámi Folkloristics, Turku: NNF Publications. Ingold, Tim (1976): The Skolt Lapps Today, London: Cambridge University Press. Ingold, Tim (2010): “Footprints through the Weather-world: walking, breathing, knowing” in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 16, Special Issue 1. Kent, Neil (2014): The Sámi Peoples of the North: A Social and Cultural History, London: Hurst & Co. Kokko, Yrjö (1954): The Way of the Four Winds, Naomi Walford (trans.), London: Gollancz. Lyotard, Jean-François (1989): “Scapeland” in The Lyotard Reader, Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell. Mariani, Manuela/Barron, Patrick (2014): Terrain Vague: Interstices at the edge of the pale, London: Routledge.

“At the limits of reliable information”: Finland’s Arctic borders

De Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau (2014 [1738]): The Figure of the Earth: Determined from Observations made by order of the French King, at the Polar Circle, London: Edition Nabu Public Domain Prints. Nicholson, Adam (1985): Frontiers: From the Arctic Circle to the Aegean, One Man’s Journey through Iron Curtain Borderlands, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Outhier, Abbé Réginald (1975 [1744]): Journal d’un Voyage au Nord, Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava. Pentikäinen, Juha (ed.) (2000): Sámi Folkloristics, Turku: NNF Publications. Snyder, Gary (1995): A Place in Space, Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds, Berkeley: Counterpoint. Schefferus, Johannes (1673): Lapponia, a partial English translation from the Frankfurt am Main edition of Lapponia, 27th February 2017 (http://old.no/ samidrum/lapponia/) Touati, Houari, (2010 [2000]): Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, Lydia G. Cochrane (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turi, Johan (1931): Turi’s Book of Lappland, E. Gee Nash (trans.), London: Jonathan Cape. Valkeapää, Nils-Aslak (1997): The Sun, My Father, Ralph Salisbury, Lars Nordström, Harald Gaski (trans.), Norway: DAT.

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Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime Julia Peck

The Arctic has become a significant photographic subject over the past decade, acting as a beacon for those who wish to image the effects of climate change. Photographers, artists, writers, scientists, and tourists, visit and work in the landscape as a means of comprehending, and communicating messages about, the changes in the landscape. Both the act of visiting the Arctic, and producing individual and collaborative responses that meditate on climate change, have become a significant cultural activity. The material includes campaign-style communication produced by conservation and ecological organisations such as Greenpeace, media representations, scientific imagery, as well as artists’ responses in a wide variety of media (Buckland 2006; Barth 2008; Matilsky 2013; Wells 2012). Indeed, one could say that there has been an outpouring of concern about the loss of sea and Arctic ice, and the impact this has on wildlife such as polar bears, marine life, and on the planetary weather system. There is also concern at the impact of changing biospheric phenomena on social living conditions both in the Arctic and in coastal regions around the world (Braschler and Fisher 2011). This chapter investigates the photography of Olaf Otto Becker. Becker is a German artist and photographer who has made a series of books and exhibited works that depict landscapes from Iceland and Greenland, including landscapes of inhabitation and scientific study; much of his work expressly addresses landscapes that are seriously affected by climate change. His later work shifts attention to forested regions in the global South, which have been severely compromised and reduced by fires and logging activities. Condensed into five publications, this wide-ranging subject matter is coherent in terms of Becker’s visual approach, and represents an affective and effective criticism of neoliberal consumption and the operations of global capital. Becker’s photographs invite analysis across both aesthetics and the social-economic context of the production of his work. This chapter will specif-

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ically argue that Becker’s practice utilises the language of the pensive photograph – allusive or ambiguous images – whilst also seeking to limit their ambiguities. His work plays dialectically with the conventions of ambiguity and facts, as presented through both image and text, in order to maximise the potential of his images to produce both informed and affective responses to the landscape. This dialectical interaction between the factual and allusive is further explored in relation to the aesthetics of his images where the conventions of the Arctic sublime are brought into play with the visual description of inhabited and working areas. Becker’s imagery, then, can be said to utilise both the sublime and the documentary. The analysis of Becker’s photographs will be supported by an examination of the relationship between capitalism and the biosphere as proposed by Jason W. Moore in Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015). Moore’s work, which can be seen as part of a broader movement to find ways of articulating the ecology of human/nature relationships, aims to overcome the dualism of Nature/Society by proposing that capitalism is a world-ecology, a “way of organising nature” through the “co-production of earth-moving, idea-making, and power-creating across the geographical layers of human experience” (2-3); this contrasts with traditional narratives of destruction under capitalism, which emphasise nature as external and effected or destroyed by human activity. Moore, as a consequence, has questioned whether the term Anthropocene is an adequate category for understanding our current world ecology and has instead proposed that we call our current era the Capitalocene. Whilst there have been numerous writers encouraging the understanding of ecology as a series of relationships that includes humans, technologies, and the environment, many of these texts have excluded, or only partially accounted for capitalism as a producer within the concept of ecology (Bennett 2010; Guattari 2000). Moore’s thesis, which proposes that capitalism emerged in the 16th Century, links many activities of ordering and controlling nature to the growth of capitalism before it took full shape in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Moreover, Moore’s thesis can be extended to consider the part that photography plays within capitalism’s global project. Photography, like other forms of visual culture, plays a role in producing and reproducing the ideas of nature, especially as the representations that it produces are pervasive in Western culture. Photography is also exploited by capitalism’s opportunities for profit and this in turn creates opportunities for photographers and artists to create artworks that are part of our world ecologies. This ecology of landscape photography, though, creates a multitude of practices where a critique of neoliberalism can be enacted. Becker’s photographs, which typically depict landscapes away from his native Germany, could be read as viewing nature as an external entity that is acted upon by capitalism, but I will suggest a broader interpretation: Becker’s work

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

visualises the ways in which nature is re-imagined by capitalism as a resource for appropriation as part of world-ecology; in this sense nature is a co-producer of capitalism. For Moore, nature under capitalism is Cheap Nature: a resource that is equivalent to unpaid work or energy and that exists in parallel to other forms of unpaid work/labour such as human reproduction (Moore 2015: 65). As this chapter will demonstrate the exploitation and appropriation of nature is central to Becker’s imagery. Connected to this argument is the question of photography’s contribution to capitalist systems and consumption, here primarily within the art world. Although the production and consumption of art spans many different contexts, some art is made for, or subject to, capitalist exploitation and is a form of conspicuous consumption. Becker makes imagery for consumption, whether in book form, in a gallery context, or for private ownership, as well as engaging with artistic and environmental discourses. Undeniably, photography’s entire system of production, from the manufacture of cameras and materials, to the ways of seeing that it produces, is part of the industrial heritage of the 19th century and the rise of photography’s commercial industries (Edwards 2006: 1-18). This could be seen to limit the power of photography’s critique, especially as critiques of capitalism are frequently reincorporated within capitalism’s liberalism. But borrowing from Moore’s thesis that natures and technologies are part of our world-ecology, it can be seen that photography is also part of the world-ecology, producing and reproducing our world-ecology through imagery, as well as producing a critique of that very system. Through this examination, it can be seen that Becker’s practice is itself an ecology of social relations in the art world that takes as its topic neoliberalism and its relationship to nature. The resulting projects produce a critique of capitalism, climate change, and social inequality, whilst also using the mechanism of capitalism that it critiques and represents. To demonstrate this argument I will first unpack the discussion around Becker’s aesthetic, which has been described as a ‘lyrical documentary’ practice (Badger 2007). I will reposition this categorisation as one of a dialectical relationship around sublime and documentary aesthetics. Part of this examination and argument will consider the importance of the ambiguity of his imagery and the use of captions, and therefore a discussion of the category of the ‘pensive image’ is instructive here. Unpacking these categories in relation to Becker’s imagery will enable the analysis of the relationship to neoliberalism, both in terms of what Becker photographs and how his photographs are discussed in the art world. This dialectic of reproducing the conditions of capital and appropriation, combined with critique, is a component of the Capitalocene as conceived by Moore.

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A esthe tic l anguage Olaf Otto Becker initially became known for his photographs of Iceland and Greenland as represented in the books Under the Nordic Light (2005; 2011), Broken Line (2007) and Above Zero (2009); and he has more recently photographed the forests of Malaysia and Indonesia and published them in Reading the Landscape (2014). Becker’s projects have included sublime imagery of inaccessible places, including Greenland glaciers and ice sheets, but he is equally well known for his photographs of indigenous settlements, dwellings, working landscapes, cities, and images of conspicuous environmental change, such as forest clearances. All of Becker’s books to date have combined images of inhabitation, images of environmental impact and images that are indebted to a tradition of wilderness photography. One of the intriguing aspects of Becker’s own account of his work is that he has been keen to stress the formal qualities of his imagery, such as light and movement, and also understands the landscape as a “mirror” to his own subjectivity (Gilroy-Hirtz 2011: 8). The journey that led him to Iceland was to find waterfalls so that he could study “the movement of water in contrast to the fixity of stones” (Becker in Gilroy-Hirtz 2011: 8). However, the resulting projects have more to say about the complexity of modern life and its relationship to landscape than Becker initially admitted. In Becker’s last two books, Under the Nordic Light (2011) and Reading the Landscape (2014), Becker’s awareness of the social, political and economic relationship to landscape becomes much more explicit and appears in the form of captions and commentary placed at the end of his books. The critics who have contextualised Becker’s practice, including Freddy Lange (2009), William Ewing (2014), Christoph Schaden (2007), Petra Gilroy-Hirtz (2011), and Gerry Badger (2007), have all acknowledged aspects of the social and political content of Becker’s imagery, but have also been keen to discuss Becker’s imagery in formal terms. Establishing Becker’s aesthetic context and heritage has been important to Becker’s critics. In the introduction to Broken Line (2007), Becker’s book on the west coast of Greenland, Gerry Badger situated his practice as part of the American lyrical documentary tradition, noting stylistic similarities to the photographs by Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and Alec Soth (2007: 10). This heritage has been confirmed and repeated by later writers on Becker’s photographs and indeed, his use of a large format camera, the production of wide landscape vistas, his deadpan style and inclusion of everyday settlements and buildings, has leant weight to Badger’s positioning of Becker’s practice. One of the compelling aspects of Becker’s projects is their documentary content: although the images are aesthetic and occasionally Romantic, they are also depictions of the real. Becker’s use of captions has also emphasised the documentary weight of his images: even in the most remote and wild locations Becker has consistent-

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

ly provided caption information about the exact co-ordinates of the site of the camera in the form of latitudinal and longitudinal data, together with the date of the photograph (see Broken Line and Above Zero). Less frequently mentioned are the sublime aesthetics of Becker’s imagery. Both Gilroy-Hirtz (2011: 9) and Langer (2009: 10) have acknowledged that some of Becker’s images are expressly sublime but an in-depth discussion about the sublime has not been undertaken. It is hard to know whether this absence is because it is too obvious, or whether the reference to the sublime problematises the artistic lineage established for Becker, which concentrates on lyrical documentary photography. It may also be that Becker’s work has been thought to be too complex to be straightforwardly forced into the sublime aesthetic as there are numerous photographs of buildings, including dwellings and unfinished shopping centres, as well as images of sites of work, agriculture and leisure. Yet Becker has consistently produced images that are notable for their aesthetic command of light and colour, although this is perhaps most obvious in Broken Line, especially in relation to the photographs of the icebergs. In Becker’s northern photographs, the use of colour became more restrained over time, but even with a limited colour palette, the sublime is still present in the work. Even from a distance, the Skaftfell Glacier’s power can be sensed, and the overcast cloud is effective in producing a brooding mood. A photograph of the spillway chute of Kárahnjúkar Dam, which depicts a man-made incursion into a nature reserve, also works in the sublime mode, even though the image is dryly descriptive. As can be deduced by the banal features of some of his images, Becker is moving between lyricism and more mundane visual descriptions, even though his adherence to straight imagery is consistent. What does this negotiation of the sublime propose? The sublime, both historically and in contemporary art, is associated with what lies beyond reason and certainties (Morley 2010: 12). Edmund Burke’s account of the sublime from the 18th century, defined as a mixture of “perverse pleasure, mixing both fear and delight” (ibid: 14) retains a popular currency today. Simon Morley, who provides an overview of how theories of the sublime developed from the 18th century into contemporary theories, notes that the sublime is still attached to the idea that “our lives are fashioned by forces beyond our control, which underpin and drive our acts of representation” (ibid: 18). Morley asks whether the engagement with the sublime is a way of succumbing to the “allure … of accepting our domination by and subjection to nature?” (ibid: 18). Morley notes that there are broadly four forms in which the sublime informs contemporary art and culture: the heroic act; shock and awe; reality as fundamentally indeterminate; and ecstasy. In this framework, it is clear that the sublime is a broad and important category that extends beyond aesthetics. Barbara Claire Freeman (2010: 64) has noted that the sublime is not necessarily politically aligned, although it is often associated with conservatism,

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and on occasion, with ideas of liberty and freedom. Given that “the masculine sublime … seeks to master, appropriate or colonise the other” (Ibid: 65) Becker could be accused of reproducing the masculine sublime, proving mastery of the landscapes he traverses, whilst proving his moral and physical worth.55 A feminine sublime, in contrast, would take up “a position of respect in response to an incalculable otherness” and meaning would remain “open and ungovernable” (ibid: 65). Becker’s imagery is by no means feminist and there are, indeed, contextualising narratives that situate his work as masculine. Given that some definitions of the sublime concentrate on ‘the unrepresentable’ it is important to note that Becker uses the aesthetics of the sublime, including uncertainty of scale, expansive vistas and large-scale human incursions into space, and he also represents the distinctly social and material aspects of contemporary life in Greenland, Iceland and across Malaysia and Indonesia. Robert Smithson (2010), in discussing the landscape architecture of Frederick Law Olmsted, proposes that the landscape, including the sublime engagement with it, can be dialectical. Using the theories of Uvedale Price and William Gilpin, Smithson proposes that Olmsted produced “a dialectic of the landscape” (115): Price and Gilpin provide a synthesis with their formulation of the ‘picturesque,’ which is on close examination related to chance and change in the material order of nature. … The picturesque, far from being an inner movement of the mind, is based on real land; it precedes the mind in its material external existence. … Price, Gilpin and Olmstead are forerunners of a dialectical materialism applied to the physical landscape. Dialectics of this type are a way of seeing things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated objects. Nature for the dialectician is indifferent to any formal ideal (Smithson 2010: 115).

Smithson’s essay explores tensions between land art’s reputation for conquering the land and transcendental ways of representing it. Scenic beauty and its associated art, in Smithson’s eyes, are a form of spiritual snobbery and a form of retreat (ibid: 117), and he argues for a series of dialectical relationships around the Nature/Society divide. Such an approach points the way to understanding Becker’s images. Both Morley’s idea that the sublime represents forces beyond our control and Smithson’s proposal that the sublime can be a dialectic of the landscape when it engages with the real, support reading Becker’s practice as sublime. For example, one could ask whether the sublime, as it refers to forces beyond our control, now also refers to domination and subjection to capitalism, partic55 | Becker’s desire to traverse inaccessible landscapes, which was emphasised in the narratives surrounding Broken Line and Above Zero, would support this reading. See Langer (2009) and Gilroy-Hirtz (2011).

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ularly the forces of international neoliberal capital. Indeed, such an observation may be made about Kárahnjúkar Dam, which was built to provide hydroelectric power for an aluminium manufacturing plant, a type of metal processing that is notoriously energy dependent. The plant employs eight Icelanders, the bauxite used in aluminium is shipped from other parts of the globe, and the resulting aluminium is shipped elsewhere for consumption: this is the use of Iceland’s waterpower for global economic trade (Becker 2011: 154; Magnason 2013). Becker’s image of the dam, and the concrete spillway chute, is sublime aesthetically. We can see the original depth of a gorge down which a powerful river used to run. On the opposite side of the gorge is a large concrete construction, flanked by the rubble of the dam on one side and a long fence on the other; the concrete spillway carves its way through the space. The enormity of the spillway chute is evident and impressive, and the incursions into the landscape, in the form of earthworks, are still new. The grey rock and plain grey sky are brooding and oppressive: this is landscape not as a sunny optimistic future, or even a beautiful place, but a space of awe and shock. This is an incursion that required mechanical power and considerable capital to bring about; it was also resisted by Icelanders who did not want to see their nature reserve impacted in this way. Figure 1: River 2, 07/2008, Position 16 69°46’33”N, 49°42’20”W, Altitude 870m, by Olaf Otto Becker.

Becker’s own narrative of the development of his practice emphasises the visual effects of light and the challenge of accessing hard to reach landscapes. In later projects, especially Above Zero, Becker becomes expressly concerned with the impact of climate change (Langer 2009: 8). Becker refrains from positing

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his own thoughts on the context in which these changes are realised, but instead asks Conrad Steffen, a noted climate scientist working in Greenland, to contextualise his practice (2009: 166-168). The resulting images enable him to use the sublime whilst documenting the formation of rivers and moulins, both of which materially speed up the deflation of glaciers and ice sheets. Becker’s narrative, then, is one of searching for the pristine and untouched, but finding a landscape powerfully altered by man. The Arctic has become a site of human/nature relationships and Becker intuits the complex relationship between man and nature; Becker does not disavow the social in search of the untouched wilderness but is unable to give up on the idea of the latter’s existence. In this sense, Becker’s photographs represent Nature/Society relationships in a dialectical relationship. Becker is not attempting to resolve what the Nature/Society dialectic might produce, especially as the environments that are made, such as melting glaciers, are far from an ideal synthesis of man and nature. This is powerfully demonstrated in his book Above Zero (2009), where rivers forming on the ice sheets are materially accelerating the decline of the ice. Becker’s imagery, which is ambiguous in scale, plays with the sublime partly to expose the horror of the collapse of the Greenland ice sheets, but also to visualise the difficulty of comprehending the scale of glacial retreat [fig. 1]. The images, and increasingly the text that Becker writes, engage with the social realities of the landscapes. This visual and written development sets the scene for Becker’s most explicit commitment to the representation of the effects of climate change and environmental devastation as produced in Reading the Landscape (2014). To this end it is important that Becker presents information and description around these landscapes so that they are not simply visual, even though the images’ aesthetic power is a prominent feature of his oeuvre. It is useful, now, to turn to the idea of the ‘pensive image’, in order to understand this dialectical tension between the aesthetics and social aspects of the images, a tension arising partly through the content of the photographs but also through their accompanying written captions.

The pensive image and climate change The facts of climate change are reported daily across media platforms and discussed amongst climate scientists. Whilst the representation of icebergs, glaciers melting and the Polar Regions has become a significant aspect of landscape photography, there are a range of representational strategies that have aimed to increase awareness of climate change and the risk this poses for the Arctic environment, low lying islands and land masses, and global weather systems. Some of these artists and commentators, including James Balog (2009; 2012; Orlowski 2012) and Al Gore (Guggenheim 2006), have produced strongly

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

evidential and illustrative images56 and have also worked to advise audiences on steps they can take to reduce their own carbon footprint and effect wider change. Camille Seaman (2015) has given a deeply personal account that draws upon her Native American culture to produce a reflective response to the changes in the landscapes. The repetition of the melting glacier/iceberg in photography has also led to playful and critical responses from artists including Sophie Calle, Joan Fontcuberta and others; these projects acknowledge the tropes of Arctic imagery whilst critiquing our relationships to the environment, which can be one of spectacle and exploitation (Martinsson and Desplechin 2015). Artists interested in climate change have used mixed strategies around photography, utilising both pensive images – ambiguous and open to the audience’s experience and interpretation – and illustrative images in which meaning is immanent. For example, Subhankar Banerjee (2013) has aimed to demonstrate the impact on caribou migration and indigenous Arctic lives through illustrative strategies, but he also makes pensive images, strongly emphasising the visual qualities of the image over its potential factual content. Pensive or allusive images require more engagement from the viewer, as they do not immediately explain their intent or communicate a straightforward message, but this may be part of their effectiveness. Pensive and allusive imagery may be important in climate change communication because of the limited impact that illustrative images and factual information alone have had in changing behaviour and policy (Cox and Pezzullo 2016: 198-199). Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) have argued that readers and viewers struggle to bridge the ‘gap’ between knowledge of the effects of climate change and consumer habits and patterns of living that materially impact on our climate. Cox and Pezzullo (2016: 199-200), summarising a body of work investigating this issue, have also noted that the values of the audience, and those expressed in the act of communication itself, strongly influence whether behavioural change will follow; messages need to align to the audience’s values to be effective. The artist duo Sayler and Morris attempt to address this ‘gap’ by addressing belief and argue that knowledge and belief are separate ways of understanding climate change. The artists argue that climate change is apprehended as a form of knowledge built upon a statistically created and abstract series of research projects, yet they maintain that fully understanding climate change and adopting new behaviours requires belief in the catastrophic effects of climate change. They also note that climate change is not easily communicated through visual

56 | The category of the illustrative image has been borrowed from Heine (2014). The illustrative image is subordinate to the text, which gives information about how to interpret or know the photograph (280-283).

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means57 and that photographs also commonly work to convey information – knowledge – rather than propagate belief. They propose that if photographs can represent facts then they can represent or create knowledge of climate change but not necessarily create the belief that it is happening; belief is often a state that the viewer brings to the image rather than acquiring it through the image (Morris and Sayler 2014: 302-303). Their response to this challenge is to borrow from Jacques Rancière and Roland Barthes’ ideas of the ‘pensive image’; an image that whilst indeterminate or contemplative involves “an unthought thought, a thought that cannot be attributed to the intention of the person who produces it and which has an effect on the person who views it without her linking it to a determinate object” (Rancière 2009: 107 in Morris and Sayler 2014: 301). The point of the ‘pensive image’ is to bypass the purely illustrative purposes of informational images and to “strengthen belief in the potential trauma of climate change” (ibid: 315) because it facilitates the evidentiary force of the image whilst engaging the viewer in “a depth (rather than an accuracy) of feeling” (ibid: 316). Their images, of landscapes where scientists are studying the impact of climate change, are displayed in a variety of ways. In a science museum or classroom, greater attention will be paid to pedagogy and contextualising captions, whereas other locations, such as galleries, billboards and bus advertisements, explore disorientation and a collapse of scale (ibid: 300). The responses and actions of the audience for a pensive image are not guaranteed, and the gap between communication and action is by no means closed by the pensive image; Sayler and Morris therefore argue that their pensive images are failures. Sayler and Morris, who are dedicated to activism, are aware that their pensive images fail to directly address social justice and survival in relation to climate change, but they explore these topics elsewhere in their diverse activities as activists and practitioners; for example, some of their projects aim for a “consolidation of voice and power” in their communication (ibid: 319). However, their pensive images, they feel, address issues “which they cannot adequately describe” but they remain hopeful about the “speculative cultural impact” of such work (ibid: 319). The debate about pensive imagery in comparison with pedagogic/illustrative imagery, or even direct forms of activism, may seem strange to viewers with considerable cultural capital and experience of producing systematically politicised readings of images. Certainly, affecting imagery about environmental devastation and the social injustices that often accompany it, such as those made by Edward Burtynsky, Ian Teh or Pieter Hugo, have given rise to important and nuanced interpretations of their work by sophisticated commentators 57 | The artists are not alone here: Julie Doyle has argued that climate change is particularly difficult to communicate through visual means (Doyle 2009).

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

(Schuster 2013; Shinkle 2014). Yet there are questions here about the reach of such work: if one needs considerable cultural capital in order to understand the implied messaging of the images, how large is the audience being reached? In a context where the production of images requires materials and energy surely there is a moral imperative for resulting messages, which are crucial and need to be widely engaged with, to be widely understandable? This is not to say that artists should be discouraged from making sophisticated, ground-breaking and challenging work, or that art for the culturally astute cannot be made, but there are risks that elite art can end up breeding complacency rather than producing real social, political and economic change. In this vein, the pedagogic and illustrative aspects of climate change imagery remain important and it is therefore significant that Becker seeks both the affect of the pensive image whilst explaining and contextualising the content of his imagery.

The environment as neoliberal resource Whilst Becker’s earlier books examined the icy north for their sublime aesthetics and their traces of the actions of neoliberal capital, Becker’s concern with the ravaged environment and its connection to neoliberalised economies becomes more pressing in his last book Reading the Landscape (2014); the book also signals a departure from the icy north. Split into three habitat sections, the book follows a trajectory from the primeval forests, to industrial-scale forest clearance, soil erosion and fire destruction, to a final section on the tropical man-made gardens in Singapore. There is a small section on California’s redwood forests, but the majority of photographs of primeval forests are taken in Indonesia and Malaysia. In contrast to Becker’s earlier work Reading the Landscape includes some close up images and video stills of the local flora and fauna: Becker is celebrating the living systems of the places he photographs. The book has a simple structure of primeval forest, followed by ravaged land and finishes with developed cityscapes, which could be read as an uncritical narrative of capitalism’s technological progress, or as a critique of the loss of living systems. Becker moves from a romanticised appreciation of the forest to the realities of deforestation in the Far East where clearance for crops, especially palm oil, illegal fires and coastal erosion caused by the removal of mangrove forests are shown to be widespread. Becker’s narrative is strongly redolent of the concerns of the conservation movement, one that proposes that it is possible to protect environments from industrial and polluting incursions; indeed, Dunaway (2005) has shown that photography has been a powerful tool in protecting specific environments in the past. However, Becker’s awareness of climate change has brought him to these forested regions and it is therefore anticipated that a naïve attempt at conservation is not important.

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Figure 2: Armin and Yanti Petani building their new home, Riau area, Sumatra, Indonesia 10/2013, by Olaf Otto Becker.

Figure 3: Business Building, Singapore 11/2013, by Olaf Otto Becker.

Whilst people are mainly absent in Becker’s books, one image stands out in Reading the Landscape [Fig. 2]: Armin and Yanti Petani building their new home, Riau area, Sumatra, Indonesia, 10/2013 (2014: 113). The caption for this photograph, at the back of this book, tells us that the Petanis had won their land back after a lengthy legal battle. Devastatingly, the forest had just been harvested for

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

paper before the Petanis regained their ownership, making the rebuilding of a home not just a matter of shelter, but also one of reconstructing the surrounding ecosystem (Becker 2014: 151). The final section of the book concentrates on Gardens by the Bay, in Singapore, and other corporate landscapes. This is a theme-park version of tropical woodland and Becker is at pains to illustrate just how much of this paradisal structure is man-made, including concrete, woodcarvings, recorded sounds of birds piped through speakers, and an artificially maintained climate. The diversity of the flora stands in contrast to the earlier photographs of forests where although there is an overall sense of profusion, there is little sense of an overpowering floral display. The final photographs depict high-rise buildings with lush garden displays [Fig. 3]. These huge structures, which in other contexts could be read as expressions of formal innovation and technological achievement, bring the power of international capital more clearly into focus: such buildings are only likely to exist because of the mammoth wealth that international corporations can acquire, borrow and move around the world and such structures are rarely the sole work of local economies. Moreover, the replacement of the forest with a tall and spectacular city, signals an enclosure of the commons as only the wealthy will have access to these high rise gardens. What is being alluded to here, though, is the impact of international capital, created by the juxtaposition of the garden in the luxury hotel or office block, together with the stereotype of profuse tropical greenery in the theme park version of the forest: the luxurious vegetation stands in contrast to the steel and glass structure. Importantly, across the narrative of Becker’s books a message of environmental destruction in the East and the global south is seen to fuel glacial retreat in the Arctic North. Although Becker sought opportunities to depict the Romantic sublime he has been brought into contact with the social-economic and environmental realities of the places that he has visited. In Under the Nordic Light, Becker found the imagery of the North and the sublime that he set out for: waterfalls plummeting from great heights. Yet his books already show the changing landscape that accommodates the incursion of both everyday life and the specific impacts of global international capital. Having explored Iceland, and found a landscape under transition even in the spaces that were designated as a nature reserve, Becker travelled further north, seeking opportunities to work with pristine landscapes. In Broken Line he found the icebergs and glaciers that the region is famous for, but he also found small communities struggling to survive and landscapes transformed due to climate change. This led to a desire specifically to document the rivers on the ice sheets, which are materially hastening the decline of the glaciers, as explored in Above Zero. Photographing the work of scientists and the incursions of tourists it is clear that Becker’s photographs

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allow us to explore the human fascination with the sublime alongside concerns for the ecosystem. The writers who have contextualised his practice to date have acknowledged, to varying degrees, the impact of capitalism on the landscapes that he visits. Gerry Badger, writing in Becker’s Broken Line (2007: 9-10) gives details on the rate of expiration of the glaciers. Freddy Lange, in Above Zero (2007: 10-11), acknowledges the human-altered state of the glaciers and describes the warming effects of black coal dust blown in from elsewhere. Petra Gilroy-Hirtz (2011: 8-10), writing in the later version of Under the Nordic Light, acknowledges the economic context of Iceland, particularly, the global financial crisis of 2008. William Ewing, the writer for Reading the Landscape, notes the logical process by which Becker has arrived at his subject matter as Arctic decline is partly linked to rainforest destruction and an increase in consumption of hardwoods (Ewing 2014: 8). Ewing acknowledges the global problems of climate change and how this is linked, at least in part, to deforestation and rampant consumerism. But Ewing is keen to assure the reader that Becker is not an activist. Instead, he claims, that: Becker is a photographer. As such, he is a realist, accepting the world as it is. He is neither overly optimistic nor overly pessimistic. He would prefer to see more responsibility on the part of his fellows toward the environment, but understands the effective forces (including human nature) that make most of our concerns ring insincere, and any action taken cosmetic (2014: 10).

For Ewing, a viewer of Becker’s work would rather be reminded of the inherent selfishness of humanity than engage with a social and economic understanding of our dilemma in relation to the exploitation of the Earth. Ewing’s account of Becker’s work is reductive and it is possible to see Becker’s book, together with his previous contributions to the visual discourses around climate change, as more than a descriptive and aesthetic visual record of the decline of our world. While the writers in Becker’s books have expressed concern about environmental degradation, and demonstrate varying degrees of economic critique, none have been explicit in their critique of capitalism or the economics of neoliberalism. Ewing, in particular, claims that it is impossible to stop the economic forces that are creating monumental changes in our landscapes, whether in the north or south. This is in contrast to Becker himself, who in Reading the Landscape, has noted the power at play in global capitalism: … large corporations already probably wield more influence than the entire elected representatives of people across the world ever had. The power of this economic system has now become so extensive and so completely amorphous that this is very difficult to grasp (2014: 150).

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

Becker reflects on the materials in his own living and working environment that have originated from the forests that he has photographed (2014: 150) and his imagery can be also be read as a sustained critique of neoliberalism, one that acknowledges his own role within neoliberalised economies and contexts. In the second section of Reading the Landscape, a series of images depicts cleared and burned forest. The captions to the images are significant even though they are at the back of the book. Becker provides information about the value and extraction of hardwood timbers, which are removed first and with fewer devastating effects for the forest. After the valuable timbers are removed, widespread burning is used to clear land so that acacia and palm oil plantations can be created; the logging and fire burning is often undertaken illegally (ibid: 1501). Becker notes that local people are often poor and unable to prevent logging and burning, but Becker also documents instances of resistance and activism, and indeed activists facilitate his access to the forests (ibid: 151). Becker also notes the ways in which tropical plants are used in decorating the cities in Singapore and other new city constructions. In this way Becker is reflecting on the raw materials of nature that are exploited as resources and commodities. Importantly, Becker concludes his book with an image of a botanic garden: not a modern theme-park garden, but an old one in Munich, Germany [fig 4]. Figure 4: Greenhouse, Munich Botanical Garden, 05/201, by Olaf Becker.

The study of plants has long been a project within both colonialism and capitalism (Moore 2015: 193-217). This study has been partly a visual project, with the representation and visual identification of plants and other fauna being important to the propagation and dispersal of species to new habitats. Much of

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this dispersal, of course, has been to further wealth in trade or the expansion of organised agriculture. The study of botany was crucial to the expansion of colonialism and capitalism, enabling crops to flourish in new places and landscapes were irretrievably changed in the process of creating new environments. In the first section of Reading the Landscape, Becker includes photographs of plants, flowers and fauna. At the end of the book, Becker states: The only way we can develop an awareness of and a relationship to our world is by taking an interest in it and by studying it in various ways. We will only ever be able to value and preserve what we have already got to know. … These tropical habitats seem to be so multi-layered and unique that their complexity actually transcends human understanding. And yet, having encountered them, I’ve brought home something that, for me, comes very close to a kind of understanding (ibid: 150).

Historically the study of botany has privileged drawing over photographic representations of plants. Yet it is clear that Becker sees his own work as an accumulation and production of knowledge, albeit this time in the framework of a call to curtail rampant consumerism rather than encouraging its spread. The image could be used as a tool for resource exploitation but the captions do not provide information on the uses of the plants or animals. Instead Becker reflects on the experience of being in the forest and seeing plants and animals; the resulting images convey a sense of that wonder. Becker’s work creates an image of the ecosystem of the forest but does not provide detailed knowledge of the forest as a resource. The final image in Reading the Landscape, of Munich Botanic Garden, becomes significant in regard to botany, knowledge and the ordering of the world [fig. 4]. The garden opened in 1809, moved to larger premises in 1914, and has a long history of generating botanic knowledge; indeed, research is still an important aspect of its work today. It is also a site of leisure and pleasure, and was the site for Becker to write part of the text for his book (ibid: 150). Bringing new knowledge and experiences about the actions of neoliberal capital to a site of capitalist and colonial power is fitting, and the image can be read critically. The botanic garden and the contents of this glasshouse, ordered here taxonomically, are no replacement for a living system. The plants are dependent upon the gardeners, the technology of the glasshouse, and human labour for their continued existence. Whilst the glasshouse is a site of learning and pleasure it is no replacement for our living world but it is potentially where we are heading if other Nature/Society relationships are not imagined.

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

A rt ’s capitalisms and photography ’s ecology Many photographers engaging with the environment or climate change, regardless of whether their work is illustrative or allusive, frequently avoid striking explicit political positions but may provide a short list of small changes that can be accommodated within consumerist lifestyles, such as adopting green consumption, or lobbying their relevant political actors for greater action, without specifying too clearly what the nature of that action would be (Balog 2009; Guggenheim 2006). It is hard to comment on climate change and other environmental disasters without the medium of photography itself being criticised for its role in different types of environmental destruction or impact, as Rebecca Solnit has argued (2007). Indeed, she notes that Kodak was New York State’s largest polluter, with the manufacturer emitting carcinogens in large quantities. That photographers such as Edward Burtynsky have omitted to criticise industries that are changing the world’s landscapes through extraction and pollution is, in Solnit’s eyes, an avoidance of hypocrisy but also an opportunity for reflective thought (139). Becker’s work is situated in the context of the art market, a market preoccupied with selling luxurious goods to wealthy people, but it also has a powerful critical effect and is part of a wider cultural phenomenon in the art world of acknowledging capitalism’s exploitation of nature. Some of this may well prove to be a form of green washing on the part of corporate sponsors but there is little doubt that there are photographers, designers and artists who are concerned about our environment. Whilst much of this work treats the environment as a separate space that we should aim to protect, or presents a spectacle of environmental destruction, work such as Becker’s utilises the language and technologies of photography to create messages about the biosphere, connecting together environments, resources and lifestyles. In Becker’s photographs, nature is both a resource for exploitation and a co-producer of capitalism’s power: water in a dam creates electricity for the production of aluminium and trees provide resources for elaborate gardens or other type of manufacturing [figs. 2 and 3]. Photography’s role in this, as a vehicle for imaging our lives, enables us as viewers to respond to the web of life as created by capitalism’s organisation of the world: we are able to reflect on the knowledge and belief that climate change, and the extent of exploitation, is shaping our world in a way that we may find intolerable and unacceptable. To achieve this, however, we need to be able to imagine that our social and economic world can be imagined in different configurations.

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C onclusion The written contextualising essays included in Becker’s books have situated his work within the lyrical, documentary tradition, supporting his reception within the world of art and environmental photography. Nevertheless, the reading offered by these contextualising essays overlooks the ambiguity of his images and the dialectical tension within them created through the juxtaposition of written information and visual description with the sublime and the lyrical. If the sublime can be a way of representing nature as pristine and other, Becker’s renegotiation of its familiar subject matter through a combination of the affective and the factual can invest it with new meaning whilst retaining its potency. In its original as well as current usage the sublime signifies forces beyond our control, but when employed by Becker it can denote something equally powerful yet more specific: the world’s subjection to, its domination and ruination by, global capitalism. In his renegotiation of the sublime through an engagement with the real, Becker challenges the role photography, like other forms of visual culture, plays in producing and reproducing the ideas of nature, its separateness and otherness. Becker’s images parallel Jason Moore’s argument that nature and society are in a dynamic relationship and that nature is itself a component of the process of capitalism. The interpretation of Becker’s imagery could emphasise the ecological impact alone, focusing on the damage done to environments, but this overlooks how Becker visualises new environments created by consumption and neoliberal capital: Becker’s imagery, treated as a whole, represents a powerful ecology that is shaping our world in dynamic but unsustainable and undesirable ways. Becker’s photography demonstrates the power of neoliberal capital, but there is an opening provided by the dialectical operations of the sublime and the documentary: the ecologies of neoliberalism are not fixed or permanent. Using the dialectics of Becker’s images we may be able to imagine new ways of moving beyond the accumulation of wealth to the creation of sustainable ways of living.

R eferences Badger, Gerry (2007): “Take Me Back to the Frozen North: The Greenland Photographs of Olaf Otto Becker.” In: Olaf Otto Becker, Broken Line, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 8-11. Banerjee, Subhankar, (ed.), (2013): Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, New York: Seven Stories. Balog, James (2009): Extreme Ice Now, Washington: National Geographic. Balog, James (2012): Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers, New York: Rizzoli.

Landscape photography in the web of life: Olaf Otto Becker’s documentary sublime

Barth, Nadine (2008): Vanishing Landscapes, London: Francis Lincoln. Becker, Olaf Otto (2005): Under the Nordic Light, Cologne: Schaden. Becker, Olaf Otto (2007): Broken Line, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Becker, Olaf Otto (2009): Above Zero, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Becker, Olaf Otto (2011): Under the Nordic Light: A Journey Through Time, Iceland 1999-2011, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Becker, Olaf Otto (2014): Reading the Landscape, Ostfldern: Hatje Cantz. Bennett, Jane (2010): Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Braschler, Mathias/Monika Fisher (2011): The Human Face of Climate Change, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Buckland, David, (ed.) (2006): Burning Ice: Art and Climate Change, London: Cape Farewell. Cox, Robert/Phaedra Pezzullo (2016): Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, 4th edn. Sage: London. Doyle, Julie (2009): “Seeing the Climate? The Problematic Status of Visual Evidence in Climate Change Campaigning.” In: Sidney I. Dobrin/Sean Morey (eds.), Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature, New York: SUNY Press, pp. 279298. Dunaway, Finis (2005): Natural Visions: The Power of Image in American Environmental Reform, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, Steve (2006): The Making of English Photography: Allegories, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ewing, William A. (2014): “Till It’s Gone…” In: Olaf Otto Becker, Reading the Landscape, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 8-10. Freeman, Barbara Claire (2010): “The Feminine Sublime.” In: Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, London and Massachusetts: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, pp. 64-66. Gilroy-Hirtz, Petra (2011): “Olaf Otto Becker’s Photographs of Iceland.” In: Olaf Otto Becker, Under the Nordic Light: A journey Through Time, Iceland 1999-2011, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 8-10. Guattari, Felix (2000): The Three Ecologies, London: Bloomsbury. Guggenheim, Davis (2006): An Inconvenient Truth, Paramount Home Entertainment [DVD]. Heine, Ulrike (2014): “How Photography Matters: On Producing Meaning in Photobooks on Climate Change.” In: Birgit Schneider/Thomas Nocke (eds.), Image Politics of Climate Change, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 273-298. Kollmuss, Anja/Julian Agyeman (2002): “Mind the Gap: Why Do People Act Environmentally and what are the Barriers to Pro-Environmental Behaviour?” In: Environmental Education Research 8/3, pp. 239-260.

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Langer, Freddy (2007): “Symphony of Ice.” In: Olaf Otto Becker, Above Zero, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 8-11. Magnason, Andri SnÆr (2013): “Protecting the Apples but Chopping the Trees.” In: Subhankar Banerjee (ed.), Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, edited, New York: Seven Stories, pp. 107-121. Martinsson, Tyronne/Marie Desplechin, (eds.), (2015): Expedition Svalbard: Lost Views on the Shoreline of Economy, Gottingen: Steidl. Matilsky, Barbara C. (2013): Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012, Bellington, Washington: Whatcom Museum. Morley, Simon, ed. (2010): “Introduction: The Contemporary Sublime.” In: Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, London and Massachusetts: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, pp. 12-21. Moore, Jason W. (2015): Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London: New York: Verso. Morris, Edward/Susanna Sayler (2014): “The Pensive Photograph as Agent: What Can Non-Illustrative Images Do to Galvanise Public Support for Climate Change Action?” In: Birgit Schneider/Thomas Nocke (eds.), Image Politics of Climate Change: Visualisations, Imaginations, Documentations, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 299-322. Orlowski, Jeff (2012): Chasing Ice, London: Dogwoof [DVD]. Rancière, Jacques (2009): The Emancipated Spectator, New York: Verso. Schaden, Christoph (2007): “Ways and Lines.” In Olaf Otto Becker, Broken Line, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 140-142. Schuster, Joshua (2013): “Between Manufacturing and Landscapes: Edward Burtynsky and the Photography of Ecology.” In: Photography and Culture 6/, pp. 193-212. Shinkle, Eugenie (2014): “Prelude to a Future: Global Risk and Environmental Apocalypse in Contemporary Landscape Photography.” In: Davide Deriu/ Krystallia Kamvasinou/Eugenie Shinkle, (eds.), Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 29-38. Seaman, Camille (2015): Melting Away: A Ten-Year Journey through Our Endangered Polar Regions, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Solnit, Rebecca (2007): “Poison Pictures.” In: Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, Berkeley; Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 135-139. Smithson, Robert (2010): “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape.” In: Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, London and Massachusetts: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, pp. 113-118. Steffen, Konrad (2009): “Observations at Swiss Camp.” In: Olaf Otto Becker, Above Zero, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, pp. 166-168. Wells, Liz, (ed.) (2012): Landscapes of Exploration, Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press.

53 Degrees parallel north Fiona Maclaren

I ntroduction The North resides in the imagination, in human and spatial geographies and persists as an image and idea of dualities; beautiful and ugly, bewitching and repellent, enticing and hostile. Perceptions of north are determined by our geographic place in the world, conceptualised and made manifest through the historical, social and cultural contexts of identity. Our experience of landscape is predominantly led by vision, most evident in the culturally learned instincts of seeking, beholding and depicting the desirable view. When viewed rather than encountered, the natural environment is restricted to an aesthetic experience of observation diminished of the richness afforded by sound and touch. In a series of writings on perception, environment and materiality anthropologist Tim Ingold, drawing upon the works of Merleau-Ponty and J. J. Gibson, offers a rethinking of our encounter with light, sound, and environment that reconfigures perception and subjectivity such that an experience of landscape becomes immersive and dynamic rather than distant and static (Ingold: 2000, 2005, 2007). Resonant with approaches to be found within contemporary visual art, his distinction between vision and light through a reevaluation of light, along with sound, enable him to offer a revision of landscape. Ingold proposed a rethinking of our perception of vision through emphasizing our perception of sound. He points out that visual culture has hardly dealt with the phenomenon of light but rather the relations between objects, images and their interpretations. Crucially, he emphasizes that we do not partake solely of a ‘turn to listening’ but that we explore the common ground between vision and hearing, and be guided to ‘a better appreciation of the richness and depth of visual experience’ (2000: 253). This chapter considers Ingold’s notion of a renewed vision that: “unfolds in circuits of action and perception, without beginning or end” (2000: 253). It explores the ways in which it is reflected in the processes and practice of a range of contemporary visual artists, their work contingent upon an immersive, embodied and sensory enquiry of the natural environment. Following John Wy-

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lie’s work on a phenomenological shift in the reading of landscape, a concept emerges that is: “divested of assumptions regarding observation, distance and spectatorship, the term landscape ceases to define a way of seeing, an epistemological standpoint, and instead becomes potentially expressive of being in the world itself: landscape as a milieu of engagement and involvement” (2007: 149). Structured through the predominant topography of northern territories; mountain, forest, sea and ice, the chapter posits the particularity of landscape and its lived experience as pivotal to the historical and cultural precedents that have shaped perceptions of North. The respective territories form the subject of each artist’s enquiry which, through predicating the significance of the haptic and auditory with the visual, explore the particularities of ecology, geology, light sound and weather. Vision and representation ‘meet’ in the primacy of embodied knowledge where ‘to know’ is to perceive through plural modalities. Landscape becomes animate, not static and fixed in genre, but a dynamic immersive medium readily perceived as the weather and life worlds that we shape, traverse and exist within. The chapter aims to reflect the value of a plurality of discourse and practice that proffers an expanded knowledge of, and relationship to the natural environment. In this way, it simultaneously probes ideas of north that may reappraise the perception and representation of northern landscape.

M ountain The weather landscape of mountains continually moulds their topography and determines our experience within them, each new encounter often dramatically different whereby conditions may shift abruptly from idyllic to treacherous in short succession. Their cultural perception has also shifted over time, from loathing through adoration, our relationship to mountain terrain has evolved an appreciative fascination seen in the quest to conquer, the pursuit of the sublime and their cultural upholding in reverence and awe. It is perhaps only in more recent times that our understanding, pleasure and study of mountains is derived through a more attuned affinity to the very phenomena that wrap the nature of the terrain. To the experienced walker or climber, this is a disposition of given necessity for potential survival as well as the pleasure and reward gleaned from walking in mountains. It is when immersed in weather that we respond to the force of a driven wind, the intensity of ice cold air and the fluctuating dance of light. This experience of the elements forms a fundamental and accumulative embodied knowledge, not only of the landscape but of ourselves. The mountain landscape is central to the work of artist Lesly Punton, the embodied experience of the environment an underpinning premise of her

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research enquiry that has a particular focus on polar exploration and remote landscapes. Her practice embraces photography, text, drawing and painting, in a rigorous and ongoing investigation of mountain terrain. Her work affords a wealth of interpretive response to her experience of walking and provides a reading of landscape encountered from often remote natural environments. Writing the introduction to her book Mountains Without End, director of ROOM Artspace, Sandie Macrae describes the way in which Punton places herself in the landscape. Deliberate and with measured understanding, she is “wherever she needs to be in order to be able to experience the place as it changes through her whole body” (2013: 5). Like the landscape itself, our experience within and knowledge of it, is ever evolving. This continuum, reflected in the forms of Punton’s work, parallel her embodied encounter of the environment and the processes of recording, representation and critical inquiry. An experienced walker and climber, her practice is readily informed by the histories of mountaineering and polar expedition, the act of walking and climbing, both an immersion in and interrogation of landscape. She explains: “Geography provides a means to engage with a more ontological position and one that is released through deep time of geology and within the temporarily and transitory sensations of weather and climate” (Punton: 2008). What results for the viewer is an exquisite encounter of time and space, a means to contemplate the phenomena of weathered landscape and the meaning of our place within it. She states: “The work is therefore intended to physically embody an experience as opposed to simply recording one” (ibid). The sensibility of her practice reflects an intellectual acuity and sophisticated perceptiveness that converge upon the artwork. Mountains Without End offers a meditation on the mountain, the art of walking and the nature of the image, crafted in a discourse of exchange between Punton, poet and artist Alec Finlay, Thomas A. Clark and Dr. David Watson. Revisiting An Caisteal began its inception in 2005, an accumulative series of ascents of the Munro near Crianlarich in Scotland, where a photographic image was made at the summit, each taken from approximately the same point of view. An evolving outcome rather than deliberate action, it was only on reflection by the fifth ascent, that the process of repeated image making became a conscious decision. A long ridge mountain, its name means ‘The Castle’ in Gaelic, relating to the area towards the summit that forms a series of castellated rocks. The summit permits tremendous views of Beinn Chabhair and the Crianlarich hills. Conditions dependent, visibility can stretch the view purportedly as far north as Glen Coe. The March ascents of 2005 and 2006, by contrast, reveal the continually varied sense of the mountain range determined by weather; perceptible shifts in cloud coverage, intensity of light and tone elude the understanding of distance. In 2007, April afforded what appears to have been a snow free ascent, save for a small melting streak in the left of frame, the clarity of light ensuring the

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immediate rock appears prominently ‘up close’ while the range of view expands far beyond to a distant blue at the horizon. The ascent in 2008 is once again snow, the light is soft and more mute in tone, the range not visible at distance but intensely soft shafts of angular light streak through the opacity of cloud. Each image differs of course but the distinctions function as important markers of Ingold’s notion of what it is that we perceive within. The conditions of weather point to the experience of the ascent and remind us of what ultimately governs the navigation of any terrain. Punton describes the making of the artwork as a process of interrogating lived experience, the merge in walk and image suggest a vision for, and the pursuit of alternate ways of knowing and comprehending, our world. During a three-year gap where the circumstances to undertake frequent walking were temporarily curtailed, a concluding ascent in 2011 drew the work to fruition. Like the first image in 2005, the ascent was made in November. With thorough knowledge of the terrain and an experienced walker in winter conditions, Punton was soon drawing upon this knowledge and skill to negotiate challenging conditions: “I found myself…climbing in 80 mph gusts of wind and with the summit engulfed in cloud” in exceptionally difficult conditions; the making of the image became a simple matter of necessity and expediency. “The damp of the cloud meant visibility was reduced to only around ten metres and the vista towards Loch Katrine completely absent. Point, click escape…” (2013: 63). Yet in spite of the precarious challenge the weather posed, the experience is still described as one of happiness, out on the hill Punton is affirmed by a sense of belonging, the act of walking as intrinsic to her core, the mountain nourishing her. She concludes: “The photograph was a disappointment, though somehow I don’t really mind” (ibid). What we see in Punton’s work is the manifestation of the physical experience of landscape, the embodied knowledge of its nuance, pleasure and risk. She challenges us to question and re-perceive what it is to ‘know’ something through the body, the image and language. Deep knowledge comes through time; the time of repetition, immersion and quest. The experience and perception of the mountain in An Caisteal is redolent of the work of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and here too, knowledge arises through meticulous processes of being within, exploring and responding to the qualities of a landscape. Light, perception and sensorial encounter permeate Eliasson’s work and it is perhaps in the territory of the mountain that light, its profusion of range, depth of form and tangible effect is most heightened. Working with large scale installation and sculpture, as well as photography, his immersive environments of colour and light, rigorously probe notions of time, being, and perception. Time is made palpable, not least in the harnessing of photography through repetition and recording to reveal the shifting qualities of light and the slow geological time of the terrain that, by contrast, alludes to the more transient time of human existence.

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The re-contextualisation of natural phenomena, geological and meteorological in particular, offers an enriched understanding of their particularities, while, at the same time, affording the viewer a position of enhanced awareness through which to interpret and engage with them. Photography plays a central role in a practice that constantly questions and works within the processes of seeing, sensing and perceiving. Studies of the rock, ice, volcanic craters and hot springs that constitute the Icelandic landscape form extensive photographic series. While their configuration in grid format points toward photography’s use as a mode of document, Eliasson provides us both visual geological ‘fact’ and a space through which to contemplate the notion of deep time as wrought on a remote, expansive and volatile landscape, one that so intrinsically shapes Iceland’s cultural identity and history. In 2006 Eliasson made The Domadalur daylight series and The Lauger morning light series, which both use mountainous terrain as their site of enquiry. Like An Caisteal, the work encapsulates the embodied experience, but here the use of the camera probes at visual perception through the pointed use of the camera’s systematic recording of light over a fixed period of time. The Domadalur presents two panels of thirty-five sequential images, one facing north, the other south, made over a twelve-hour period on the summer solstice. The variance in light conditions from dawn until dusk results in the landscape emerging and retreating in a subtle transition that alters the form and sensibility of the low rounded mountain range. While the bearings of camera and viewer are fixed, depth and distance appear very differently across the images, the nature of light greatly altering how the landscape is perceived. The perception of light is influenced by latitude, time of day, cloud volume and atmospheric conditions, the mountain range a topography that arguably affords the most palpable experience of what it means ‘to be’ in light. Such accounts are beautifully articulated in the profound work The Living Mountain, by writer Nan Shephard who wrote of experiencing the same visual deception of depth and distance we see in Eliasson’s work during a lifetime’s walking in the Cairngorm massif of north east Scotland: “It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light… the endless changes the earth itself undergoes under changing lights… and that, again I perceive, is the mountain’s own doing for its atmosphere alters the light” (2008: 77). She highlights the relationship between atmospheric conditions and the perception of landscape: “In a dry air the hills shrink, they look far off and innocent but in a moisture laden air they charge forward insistent and enormous and in most they have a nightmare quality” (ibid). She expands further on the effect of mist in relation to optical illusion, its weight and form capable of enhancing gradation in height or distance. In the Domadalur sequence both north and south views convey a similar deception of distance as the light’s gradual emergence and reduction shape the illusion of what “there is seen to be a near and a far” (ibid: 78), like those

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of Shepherd’s many mountain encounters. In the Lauger morning light series what takes precedence is the perception of time, the nine photographs, conveying the gradual changing light conditions at dawn over a snowy Icelandic mountainside, readily expand the notion of perception and distance through the intensity and depth of appearance of blue light. In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, writer, academic and critic Rebecca Solnit offers a rich meditation on how we find ourselves in the unknown and draws our attention to the qualities of blue light found at the horizon, perceived in what seems to be a merge of land and sky. She describes it as: “a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance” (2006: 175). The Lauger series draws attention to this blue of the atmosphere, an optical perception that has resonance in the experience of mountain terrain. Solnit continues: “For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains” (ibid). In the work of both artists, Ingold’s understanding of perception as a multi-sensory experience comes to bear. He articulates our visual awareness of weather as not merely a scene that we observe but “as much auditory, haptic and olfactory as it is visual... It is an encounter with light itself” (2005: 97). Whereas An Caisteal points to the very feel of the mountain under shifting conditions in weather that shape each walking experience, The Domadalur and The Lauger probe at how we perceive the landscape as it emerges and retreats in light within a fixed period of recorded time. While a technology of vision, the camera, in the work of both artists, harnesses the image to perceive the subtlety and shift of atmosphere and light, locating the viewer in proximity with the embodied experience. Walking through mountainous territory is to walk with known knowledge in full awareness of an inevitable encounter with the unknown. It demands an intellectual, sensorial and philosophical navigation and through each respective practice we are afforded these means to re-perceive a mountain landscape, and consider perhaps how we may determine alternative ways of reading and understanding northern territories, in order to re-think the dominant cultural perceptions of environments of the north.

F orest Pivotal to centuries old northern European tradition and community, the forest persists as a potent image that oscillates in the imagination between allure and foreboding. It evokes a dark territory, a site of the banished and forsaken as much as a beguiling retreat for solitude amongst nature, a spiritual force as well as economic resource. Immense in scale, forests are all consuming once

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within them. A perceptible sense of space and position to see beyond or above them is eroded by sheer density, spatial perspective all but impossible. They are home to our worst fears, a theatre of creatures real and imaginary, posing threat in silent or haunted presence. In a rigorous exploration and pursuit of an experiential understanding of silence, writer Sara Maitland considered the space of the forest in her work, A Book of Silence. The forest harboured a silence that she feared and in one of the few remaining sections of the ancient Caledonian Forest in Glen Affric, Maitland immersed herself in its terrain and spent several days sitting, walking, listening and observing alone: It was very silent too. I knew sitting there that I had been right to be scared. This was primal landscape and full of silent shadows of menace, the menace of being lost, magical mad like Merlin swallowed up into something bigger and infinitely more ancient than myself (2008: 176).

She evokes the fear her imagination conjured up, fairy tales of witches and wolves, stories of and from within the forest, “the terror of the wild wood is older than the oldest stories and they have grown out of it” (ibid). She points out the perception of the forest, from a southern perspective, as one of ‘madness and magic’, associations aligned to the idea of north as a heathen territory, a space of the ungodly. This notion remains prevalent in contemporary culture, such is the potency of the forest as an ominous site as narrated through folklore and its prominent place in literature. It points to the power of storytelling and the affecting qualities of the oral/aural traditions in moulding ideas of landscape and their embodiment in the cultural psyche. The forest is placed at the heart of a particular video work made by the artists Dalziel and Scullion in the Galloway region of southern Scotland. Their long established collaborative partnership attends to the complex systems of ecology and the human relationship to nature. Their extensive practice pursues new ideas to help seismically shift ways of interacting, living and consuming the earth and contributes much in raising awareness of the interdependent diversity but finite natural richness of the earth. Their work could be considered a point where art, science, philosophy, nature and culture coalesce. Much of their video and photographic work exploits the optical properties of the medium in the scrutiny of species of flora and fauna as well as geology, in an oeuvre that interrogates the natural environment, our relation to, and place within it. Visual approaches craft a re-perception and understanding of the biological and ecological systems that we depend upon, from the microscopic gaze to the possibilities that reside in our imagination. Sound is important and its use in many works points to a recognition of the sensorium long established

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in film theory and more recently the notion of ‘haptic visuality’ in the work of Laura Marks58. Speaking the Land draws upon the art of storytelling, and the particularity of woodland where so many narratives in myth and folklore have their origin and continue to dwell. The oral and audible ‘meet’ in narrator and viewer, returning us to the once deep rooted means to perceive and comprehend our locale. Dalziel and Scullion remind us of the land as a form of ‘knowledge repository’, a site of communal wisdom, and point out how the visual has eclipsed oral language as our dominant mode of perception and comprehension. Filmed in Galloway at the Waters of Minnoch, Loch Dee and Glen Trool, the territories structure the work into three parts; ‘mIncx’ ‘di’ and ‘trul’. The piece weaves us through scenes of the woodland and waters’ edge, their sounds; air, birdsong and foliage, in balance to the affecting qualities of the narrator’s lilting spoken voice. The camera immerses us in the woodland, poised to observe its form, its properties, its ecology. The elements become apparent, wind shaping structure and the space becomes animate, light dances in highlights on moss and bark, leaf shadows are thrown up the surface of tree trunks. The final segment, trul, most richly evokes notions of time, spirituality, the human relationship to nature and points at the evocative force of woodlands and forest in northern cultural imagination. Sound and voice combine to compose a re-perception of place, sound serving to cognitive effect as we are forced to retrace our thinking process to understand and conceive of complex interwoven systems of knowledge. The narration reflects the oral tradition of storytelling and audibly transports us between time and place, the mythical past and the lived present, and a contemporary reading of the landscape comes to the fore. The artists explained that the piece: “looks at the absence of a type of ‘narrative’ from our landscapes” and point towards the loss of embodied knowledge through the decline of indigenous cultures, traditions of storytelling and “wisdom of ways to live on the land” (Dalziel & Scullion: 2010). It echoes Maitland’s prose that recounts the experience of the forest imbued with the narratives of time, ancient and contemporary. She points out: “these tales have oral roots so each time they are told they are told for a slightly different purpose (2008: 178). As our relationship to the natural environment becomes increasingly removed, so too our knowledge and understanding of its systems and value diminish. In this way the work warns us that “any empathy we might once have had with the species we share our environment with seeps away” (ibid). In the closing scenes, a young delicate oak branch with new leaf is suspended in the frame as the narrator concludes: “Woodlands spell an essential commonality and equality, the distinctions of class in the city just don’t apply here” (ibid). At 58 | For a comprehensive account of ‘haptic visuality’ in relation to cinema see Marks, L (2000) Durham: Duke University Press.

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its close, the video shifts us from the immersed state of viewer/listener back to our contemporary consciousness where the pillars of culture, economy and power govern inequalities and difference. Our understanding of the forest has been forged from the folklore of legend as much as the inquiry of the life sciences. It is a transformative space that is shaped by systems of weather and climate as well as the human reaping of its resources in commerce and leisure. The work apprises the necessity of an equilibrium of existence between ourselves and the ecologies of the natural environment, and challenges the deep rooted socio-cultural attitudes towards nature. Dominant perceptions of north across the historical, literary and visual fields of representation convey the ferocity of climate, inhospitable terrain, simple peoples and parochial culture to an extent that eclipses a richer, nuanced understanding of the social and intellectual particularity of cultures, language and ways of life. Remoteness of place persists in suggesting uncivilized, unenlightened, uncultured. In The Idea of North, Peter Davidson notes a contemporary insistence towards the north eastern areas of Scotland, as “lost, grim and especially at the mercy of the weather” (2005: 245). Aberdeen, the main city of the region, hosts a thriving creative cultural economy, a diverse landscape harnessed by agriculture and leisure and its oil wealth divesting into renewables and post oil industries, yet from the lowlands it remains to be seen as “impossibly North, impossibly distant and provincial” (ibid: 246). Davidson explains how this contradictory misperception is also historical; a place of religious tolerance where the Reformation met with some resistance, many of the population “remained Episcopalian or Catholic under the protection of rural Catholic aristocrats” (ibid). Progressive in outlook and disposition, Aberdeen was in fact “the centre of cultural production in poetry, particularly Latin poetry and painting” (ibid). Davidson aligns its cultural distinctiveness with the events of this period, also contributing to the survival of its traditional music and song, most notable in the Bothy Ballads. Yet the lowland perception of the north east remained “as a place of dearth and adversity” (ibid). Photography’s agency in subjective imagining and its employ in the visual construction of ideological agendas cannot be understated. History exemplifies the use of a violent and exploitative gaze in the representation of indigenous peoples and the political enterprise of colonialism. The potency of the photographic image in its use to enforce notions of ‘stereotype’, to define and categorize by ‘type’, has served the systems of ownership, power and the interests of social and institutional hierarchies well. While photography equally brings the force of critique in counter-representation and can deconstruct dominant, normative ideologies, the image, and the context of its reception, is significant in shaping and potentially fixing our perception and understanding. This is no less true in the context of narratives of landscape, place and the natural environment. The landscape of north east Scotland is astonishingly beautiful

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boasting pristine coastline, expansive sandy beaches, woodland and ancient forest walks and boasts authentic wilderness in the Cairngorm massif, but is frequented far less by tourists than the west coast Highlands and Islands. It continues to be seen as somewhat off the map, a detour to be made out of the way and off route to the misperceived notion of a ‘true’ and farther north.

S e a and ice The far north, like the myth and folklore that instilled imaginings of the forest, has given rise to its own particularity of legend; ice packed seas, impenetrably remote beyond the reach of experience, hostile in climate and a ruthless wildness of both peoples and landscape. In the 16th century, religious reformation extended across Europe reaching the far north of Norway through the colonial rule of the Danish empire, which imposed adherence to the Protestant faith. The regions of Scandinavia were perceived by the Catholic church in Rome as marginal lands, an unholy heretic pagan culture and peoples, beyond the pale of civilisation and the church. In a determination to bring knowledge of such remote societies to central Europe, a Swedish scholar and prominent Catholic ecclesiastic and last archbishop of Uppsala, Olaus Magnus, produced the Description of the Northern Peoples. A first edition, housed in the National Library of Oslo shows an extraordinary work made up of 28 books, 778 chapters and richly illustrated with over 400 woodcuts. Preceding this written work, Magnus had crafted the Carta Marina in 1539, an evocatively illustrated cartographic depiction of the regions full of detailed scenes of hunting wild animals and seas dominated by grotesque serpents and monsters. Exhaustive in scale and ethnographic in form, the book devoted great detail to a vast range of subjects; elks, sea-serpents, snowflakes, the cold, watermills and artillery amongst copious others. The work was published in 1555, the early period of the CounterReformation. It was a mission to be conveyed to the Catholic church and wider southern Europe as well as an account of the Nordic peoples and the beauty of its lands; its aim was to prevail upon the Pope to pursue and reclaim the region for the Catholic faith. Paradoxically, Magnus’s rigorous and remarkable efforts negated his aims, vividly compounding the perception of the far North to be indeed, beyond the pale and reach of the Catholic Reformation. The ambition to dispel myth merely created its affirmation and the perception of a savage dangerous far Arctic North was set to persist for centuries to come. If the notion of a northern aesthetic were to be proffered, it is worthwhile considering the Lutheran legacy in Northern European regions as ground for enquiry. In contrast to Catholicism, Protestant teaching shaped a faith of minimal imagery. The four basic factions of Protestantism – Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist and Anglican – took hold in the Northern European countries, and

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from these evolved a new type of Christian art to proselytise the principles of the Protestant faith. While there were distinctions between the branches of faith, the extent, for example, to which the figurative was tolerated, it eschewed the depiction of grandiose biblical scenes and instead promoted the idea of the humble and moralistic, whereby bible scenes drew upon the commonplace of everyday life. The distinction in painting of the Northern Renaissance and the High Renaissance of southern Europe readily evidences the divergence in Protestant and Catholic theological ideology. The lack of visual ornateness in Protestantism could be seen as analogous to the simplicity of existence in more remote Arctic Northern regions, where sparse population sustained a simple if not harsh existence through fishing and some farming, in a landscape of challenging mountainous topography, seas of treacherous currents and a savage winter climate. Lutheran teaching could be seen as readily aligned to the existing ways of life and minimal material means beyond the necessities of rudimentary living. Promoting piety and religious duty, the Protestant faith preached a moral message of a devout life and professed the beauty in the landscape, of natural creation, to symbolise the book of God himself. In a contemporary context, the Arctic North is a landscape in peril as human led climate change rapidly alters the global landscape to immeasurable and potentially unrecoverable effect. The perception of North here, oscillates around persisting ideals and the desire for wilderness encounter; scientific endeavour to slow-down global warming; and emerging commercial opportunity for drilling fields as well as trans-Arctic shipping afforded by the potential of an open polar sea. One of the world’s fastest changing landscapes, its fate rests within the vying political, environmental and financial agendas that stand to determine the future of its territories and indigenous peoples whose centuries old way of life and unique knowledge of the polar ice fields is also unquestionably jeopardised. The contemporary image of the polar Arctic is shaped through this framework. The very crisis of its existence has intensified transdisciplinary research and exploration of its landscapes, that in turn have led to a plurality of enhanced knowledge and new understanding through an expanded field of visual representation. This is perhaps best exemplified in the collaborative work between art and science, international in scope with notable project examples being Cape Farewell, The Arctic Circle and the comprehensive survey and exhibition Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art 1755-2012 amongst many others. In his extensive study of Arctic regions, writer Barry Lopez astutely recognises “the great range of human inquiry” that arises from artistic passion and points out that “we desire not merely to know the sorts of things that are revealed in scientific papers alone but to know what is beautiful and edifying in a faraway place” (2014: 228). In a chapter devoted to the perception of light and

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ice, he defines our obligation in understanding landscape to be of “uncalculating mind with an attitude of regard”. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression – its weather and colour and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some mystery within its kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned” (ibid). Akin to Ingold, Lopez promotes the necessity of experiential knowledge derived through an immersive engagement with the phenomenological presence of the landscape environment. In the context of photography, there is a profusion of interpretive response to climate impact in the Arctic; diverse in approach and context of representation, essential in contributing to a perception of the far north as the very antithesis of a hostile barren wasteland and vital in forging attitudes towards nature and our relationship to it. It is also perhaps the medium most utilised when turning to reflect upon the opposition of beauty and hostility in an inclement landscape, light and time its intrinsic raw material. Renowned Danish photographer Per Bak Jensen, has worked extensively in remote polar regions. His observational acuity and highly measured precision of frame, convey the icebergs, rock and sea of Greenland as minimal studies of contemplation, suggestive perhaps of the visual sensibility of Lutheran legacy. Weather here is wrought on the landscape. Jensen’s pared down aesthetic allows remoteness and solitude, as well as the very conditions of place, the weather, to come to the fore of our consideration of northern territory. In Jensen’s images a sense of muteness and the monolithic scale of ice and the surrounding expanse of a seemingly silent sea suspend them in stillness. Devoid of the spectacular qualities of Arctic light, his images eschew any notion of romanticism but reveal the cool deep tones of blue, green and grey that posit such weighted intensity to the natural forms and their subtle illumination. This north is calmer, it is paused to afford contemplation, a lull between storms. While his practice is not essentially an address to climate change, the images reveal weathering on the land and we are left to contemplate what weathered terrain may come to mean. The conditions that will constitute northern landscapes of the future is an emerging terra incognita of our own making. Like Jensen, Canadian artist Jocelyne Alloucherie has been preoccupied by the nature of northern territories and has spent many years exploring the icebergs and conditions of the far reaches of Newfoundland. While neither artist locates climate change directly or politically as the underpinning of their practice, both allude to its presence and effect in different ways. Alloucehrie’s extensive body of work entitled Climates began in 2007. Composed as a series of studies titled Land of Mist, Land of Blood, Land of Snow, the work explores the elements and phenomena of the Canadian Arctic region and is exhibited in the form of large-scale installation. Climates beginnings formed a photographic study of the icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland where she grew up and

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were made from a fisherman’s boat within approximately seventy metres from the face of the ice. The scale of the images reiterates their monumental form and presence in the landscape, natural elements become like architecture and suggest their fragile status, situated between past permanence and present ephemeral emblem of the far north. Installed as large-scale photographic architectures, they are as much alarming and foreboding as they are enticing and beautiful. This duality echoes the status of the iceberg in its mythical sense; a siren that lures ships into peril, while the contemporary fear is of their loss and the uncertainty of a rapidly changing environment and ecology. Alloucherie’s oeuvre has been described as an ‘imaginarium’ of north, offering a weave of its realities and fictions, its myths and tangible encounters of extreme landscapes. She utilizes photography and drawing, often compositing and re-photographing in the process of making the final pieces and reflects astutely on how knowledge arises in the processes of practice as an interrelationship between environment and mediums. She states: “This knowledge stemming from the pictorial has to do with an acknowledgement of the visual limits between concrete and abstract space, immanence and transcendence, the real and the imaginary” (Alloucherie: 2010). The ways in which we observe and perceive are manifest in the gestures of making and she points out that in art: “in the working out of limits, their passageways, their transgressions, their shifts, it’s truly at these thresholds that tensions between things, disciplines and mediums are inscribed” (ibid). The palpable immediacy of experience in navigating and exploring the challenging nature of these terrains commands the full harnessing of our sensory perception. Embodiment is central to the processes and practices of a range of artists, highlighting its value greatly contributes to an expanded field of critically interpretive understanding. Wylie points out the necessity to perceive of “landscape as a lifeworld, as a world to live in, not a scene to view” (2007: 149), and reminds us to question the modes by which we determine a knowledge of the environment. Culturally we persist in placing our trust in sight too exclusively and so often fail to remain vigilant to its artificial capacity; knowing is not a matter of mere optics, what we see is also a matter of knowing, and that we seek to see the world in a particular way.

C onclusion In a contemporary context, perceptions of north are predominantly aligned with the topography of the Arctic, the evolving effects of climate change and the extent of its global impact. Here, the ancient mythologies and conquering quests of past ‘norths’ converge on a north of contemporary power relations. The five polar nations; Canada, the United States, Russia, Norway and Den-

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mark, frame the agenda of the Arctic north, each endeavoring to ensure navigation rights and assert ‘ownership’ over seabed mineral reserves. The present Arctic north becomes a controversial and contested site, a topographic stage whose condition and ecological future remain uncertain. In this context, the proposition to overturn the notion of beholding landscape and explore the ways in which it continuously operates as a medium of exchange would seem all the more prescient. Topographies of north host the beauty and hostility of the inclement weathered landscape. The seemingly simple, yet complex and multiple qualities of light, and the diversity of its terrain return us to phenomenological presence in keeping with Ingold’s call for a rethinking of our encounter with light, sound, and environment as immersive and dynamic in a reconfiguration of perception. The weather enters visual awareness not as a scenic panorama but as an experience of light and “in the perception of the weather-world, earth and sky are inextricably linked within one indivisible field” (2005: 12). His writing turns to painters and sees them as those who have been aware of seeing landscape through the medium of weather, for painters can see “earth and sky blend in the perception of a world in continuous formation”. Building on his project to revalue the role of light he quotes Paul Klee: “‘art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’” , it brings the world to light. So we can say what artists need to do in bringing the world to light is not a matter of “seeing out but of being out” (ibid: 104). More necessary than ever, close engagement with the environment in critical representation and plurality of discourse affords a bedrock from which the importance of the sensory realm to an experiential knowledge may take precedent, from which new possibilities of vision may be asserted. Being out in the world, partaking of a dynamic process of perception involving both body and mind, extending visual culture through a study of the inseparable modalities of light and sound can only enhance the experience and understanding of the environments we occupy and the direction of their future.

R eferences Alloucherie, J. Available from http://www.jocelynealloucherie.com/media/ press/pdf/010207.01.pdf [Accessed 11th January 2017]. Bergson, Henri, Birnbaum, Daniel, and Eliasson, Olaf (2002): Olaf Eliasson (Contemporary Artists), London: Phaidon. Brown, Charles S., and Toadvine, Ted (2003): Eco-Phenomenology: back to the earth itself New York, New York: State University of New York Press. Dalziel, Matthew & Scullion, Louise (2010): Speaking the Land. Available from https://www.dalzielscullion.com Davidson, Peter (2005): The Idea of North, London: Reaktion Books.

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Ingold, T. (2007): “Earth, sky, wind, and weather”. In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol 13, no. Suppl. 1, pp 19-38. Ingold, T. (2005): “The eye of the storm: visual perception and the weather”. In: Visual Studies, vol 20, no. 2, pp. 97-104. Ingold, T. (2000): The Perception of the Environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, Abingdon: Routledge. Lopez, Barry: Arctic Dreams, London: Vintage Books. Macrae, S. (2013): “Foreword”. In: Lesley Punton, Mountains without End, London: Roombooks. Macfarlane, Robert (2003): Mountains of the Mind, London: Granta. Maitland, Sara (2008): A Book of Silence, London: Granta. Matilsky, Barbara. C (2013): Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012, Bellingham: Whatcom Museum. Mitchell, WJT (2002): Landscape and Power, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Punton, Lesley (2008): North, available from: http://www.lesleypunton.com/ page2.htm [Accessed 12th December 2016]. Punton, Lesley (2013): Mountains Without End, London: Roombooks. Shepherd, Nan (2008): The Living Mountain, Edinburgh: Canongate. Solnit Rebecca (2006): A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Edinburgh: Canongate. Toadvine. Ted (2009): Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Wylie, John (2007): Landscape, Abingdon: Routledge.

Projects & collaborations Cape Farewell. Available at: http://www.capefarewell.com/art.html The Arctic Circle. Available at: http://www.thearcticcircle.org/

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Vaguely Northern: in between in England Joanne Lee This paper is the result of encounters with particular Northern places. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in the North Pennines, an isolated upland in County Durham whose landscape was marked by a curious mix of the rural and the industrial, the beautiful and the despoiled. This area has moorland classified as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and there are several Sites of Special Scientific Interest; it was once characterized as “England’s Last Wilderness” in promotional material designed to attract tourists, though this was of course a human-generated ‘wilderness’ whose appearance was produced and maintained by particular farming practices, land management for grouse shooting and environmental payments schemes. Several of its higher valleys were dammed and flooded to create reservoirs whose water was intended for the industrial cities downstream along the Tees, Wear and Tyne. It has also been much marked by extractive industries of one sort or another, from the quarrying of stone to mining for lead and minerals such as barium sulphate: some of these activities continue to the present, whilst in certain locations ruined postindustrial architecture persists along with heaps of toxic spoil. As a teenager, I tended to consider the area something of a cultural wilderness, and so, as soon as I was able, I left to study Fine Art at Sheffield City Polytechnic. This move to what is framed as ‘the North’ (definitions of which I will return to shortly) involved a journey some two hours south. Upon my arrival in the late 1980s, I discovered that large parts of Sheffield, which had formerly been occupied by large scale manufacturing industries, now lay empty: factories and works had been demolished and the ground cleared ahead of hopedfor redevelopment. Expanses of wildflowers flourished behind the remaining walls and facades, and with their poor soil, some urban wastelands provided the perfect conditions for meadows of wild flowers, which juxtaposed urban blight and natural beauty. Curiously, England’s fourth city seemed to replicate aspects of the Pennines from which I’d just come. Years later, when I had left Sheffield to live on the south coast of England, I was invited to participate in an artistic research project exploring the huge site of the former Spode ceramics works in Stoke-on-Trent: my investigations there, and the actual and critical

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distance generated by the geographical remove at which I then lived, prompted me to consider once more these in between, post-industrial places in the North of England. As a result, I found myself reflecting too on shifts I had discerned in their depiction in contemporary image making, from documentary photography showing large-scale dereliction towards more intimate viewpoints, and to think through how the North was articulated in such practices. Given the geographical focus of this publication and this current paper, I need first to consider what is meant by ‘the North’. There have been countless attempts to offer a definition, ranging from the blurb on the back of Simon Armitage’s collection All Points North, which suggests with poetic humour that it begins where the goalpost of the M1 meets the crossbar of the M62; to conceptualisations that it lies north of a line drawn from Severn to Wash (so that it then includes the Midlands); that the river Trent defines its southern boundary; or that the North ‘proper’ is the counties north from Yorkshire. Perhaps though, it is not a geographical designation at all, but something more cultural and political. For Richard Burns writing in 1991 “Northern England is full of towns and cities that have lost their purpose” and as the title of his essay on Sheffield suggests, there is a negative definition at work – The City as Not London. (Burns 1991: 63). In Ian Taylor, Karen Evans and Penny Fraser’s A Tale of Two Cities: A Study in Manchester and Sheffield the region is essentially to be “defined by its subordinate and residual relationship to London and the South East”, the places where real power is brokered (1996: 18). Its particular sense of identity and strong regional feeling has been shaped as a counter to this (not fully known and largely imagined) community elsewhere. As a result Miriam Hansen has noted how “a sense of reciprocity rooted in the experience of marginalization or expropriation” has developed (Hansen 1993: xxxvi). For Taylor, Evans and Fraser this marginalization from the centres of power is said to have generated what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge defined as a “counter-public” (18). In some accounts the North is a narrow, inward-looking enclave: Nigel Thrift has described it as a “culture that controlled itself” via the institutions of workplace, the Working Men’s Club, the chapel and the home (Thrift 1987: 32). For Raphael Samuel it was a culture whose values have been called into question, and where aspects that had once been viewed positively had come to be characterized much more negatively. As exemplars he refers to the associative life of the Working Men’s Club, which came to be seen as a space in which outsiders and newcomers were excluded; a tightknit workplace culture which was now recognized as having subordinated women; the once proud smokestack industries had come to be considered ecologically catastrophic; and attempts at innovative modern planning were designated as failures which must be torn down and replaced (Samuel 1998: 166). Robert Chesshyre saw the North as being where necessities such as coal, steel, cars, etc. were produced for the use and ultimate financial gain of those

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elsewhere (Chesshyre 1988: 47). As Stephan Kohl makes clear, as parts of the North were becoming ruined and post-industrial they were increasingly viewed as fallen landscapes. (Kohl 2007: 97) Even the rural North was frequently characterized as being bleak, harsh and unforgiving rather than bucolic; John Hillaby saw the peaty mud of the high Pennine Way as akin to a slurry of manure (Hillaby 1968: 134). Aesthetically, the word ugly often recurs: Paul Theroux talks of a “complex ugliness” (1983: 263) and George Orwell and J. B. Priestley both make comparisons to a lunar landscape. Priestly wrote of a slagheap in Sheffield looking as if it “might have been brought from another planet” (1968: 153) and thought of the north as half derelict, with people living in in the “queer ugly places” (410); for him Durham “did not seem an English landscape at all […] You could easily imagine that a piece had been lifted out of the dreary central region of Russia or America” (335). Whilst the images conjured are fairly negative, I am interested in this sense of the North being evocative of places elsewhere, for, just as Sheffield’s post-industrial landscape reprised for me the rural Pennines, aspects of its empty, in-betweeness gave a feeling of possibility, that it was susceptible to becoming other, according to the whims or intention of one’s imagination. I can recall conversations with other artists in Sheffield who felt the same way, and for whom this openness was a reason precisely to stay somewhere apparently devoid of creative opportunity; I see a similar outlook at work in the titular claim of Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson’s zine Preston is my Paris. There is something here, I think, of Francis Spufford’s sense that heading north is “a journey into abstraction” because “there’s so much room to bring to it whatever you want to put in…”, and that the very idea of the north is “an endless argument between the real… and the dreamed” (Spufford in Armitage 1999: 225-6). I want now to turn to the specific locations in Northern England upon which I am focusing, and which I will characterise as being a species of “terrain vague”. This name has been used by planners, architects, landscape designers and geographers to describe those empty border areas between nature and civilization. For Tim Edensor these are “scruffy areas behind advertising hoardings, rubbish dumps, undeveloped brownfield sites, culverts and canals, land underneath motorway flyovers, the surroundings of rail lines, junk and scrap yards, and many species of scrubland” (2005: 168). And for Marion Shoard, who uses the term “edgelands”, they include “rubbish tips and warehouses, superstores and derelict industrial plant, office parks and gypsy encampments, golf courses, allotments and fragmented, frequently scruffy farmland” (2002: 117). There are indeed many alternative names including such examples as junkscape, landscape of contempt, brownfield site, disturbed space, urban void, deadzone, urban interstice, trashscape, wasteground, vacant lot, leftover space, drosscape, urban common, no man’s land, terra nullis, and the acronym TOAD, standing for temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict.

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In recent years the term “edgelands” has been preferred, perhaps thanks to the impact of Marion Shoard’s essay, but due especially to the popularity of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ book-length hymn to these sites (2011). Whilst these places are often at the outer edge of towns and cities, where the urban fabric frays into countryside, it has been my contention that there are vaguer edges sited elsewhere: I have been alert to the many Sheffield locations bearing such a nomenclature, and the peripheries that lie at its very heart (the vague open space of Skye Edge forms the city’s very geographical centre) as well as the edges that lie so far out that they are within the entirely rural, as in my experience of the North Pennines’ post-industrial remains. Theorist of urban design Alan Berger has noted how such sites are “in a variety of ways in between” (2006: 35); and landscape designer Helen Armstrong has identified “an elusive, indeterminate landscape hovering over, under and in between” (2006: 117). It is with this in mind that I have come to prefer the term “terrain vague”, for its articulation of the very indeterminacy and in between-ness that characterizes these areas. The designation “terrain vague” first appeared in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables where it was used to describe an amphibian countryside existing somewhere between the urban and the rural. In the early twentieth century it is given as the title of Man Ray’s 1932 black and white photograph, an image which depicts a shapeless earthen bank into which steps have been roughly cut, set against a featureless sky and split by the strong black form of a narrow tree trunk. An indeterminate sort of object seems to have slid down the bank: much the sort of thing one might find abandoned in urban sites today, it is hard to pin down exactly what it might be – at first glance it looks somewhat like a damaged park bench, but the existence of what appears to be coils of wires beneath it trouble any easy designation. Photographic theorist Ian Walker has remarked upon the ambiguity of the object depicted and “the overall indecisiveness of the scene” (2002: 117). I want to remark here upon the link between photography and the noticing of such places, which is taken up by architectural writer Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió in an important and provocative essay from 1995. Solà-Morales Rubió claimed that his attention was first drawn to think about the “terrain vague” thanks to the work of John Davies, David Plowden, Thomas Struth, Jannes Linders, Manolo Laguillo and Olivo Barbieri, noting how for photographers it “assumes the status of fascination” (1995: 119). He goes on to say that “art’s reaction is to preserve these alternative, strange spaces, strangers to the productive efficiency of the city” whereas planners and architects strive to “dissolve the uncontaminated magic of the obsolete in the realism of efficacy”, wanting to colonize and transform “the uncivilized into the cultivated, the fallow into the productive, the void into the built.” (ibid: 122). He suggests finally that there is something to learn from attending to what he calls the “residual city”, which maintains a “contradictory complicity” and recognises “the flows,

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the energies, the rhythms established by the passing of time and the loss of limits” (ibid: 122-3). This attention to the creative possibilities of the terrain vague in Solà-Morales Rubió’s essay came to inform the artistic research pursued through the residency I undertook at the former Spode factory. The opportunity to spend time there emerged through Topographies of the Obsolete, an international project initiated by KHiB, Bergen Academy of Art and Design, which focused on post-industrial landscapes, the decline of craft skills and art making as an ‘archaeological’ method. As an artist I had spent the early part of my career making site-specific works in the UK and Europe, during which time I had become concerned about the propriety of responding to locations and histories to which I had no previous connection, and had gone on to make a decision that I would focus only on the places in which I lived and worked. I was troubled therefore about the ethics of my approach to this city and its ceramics industry with which I had little direct relationship. However, what happened when I got there was that the experience reawakened powerful memories of my arrival in Sheffield in the late 1980s, and the subsequent explorations I had made into the white, empty spaces on the A-Z city map. Several years before the residency I had started to think about these as a species of threshold, and had written an article exploring this idea; something about the form of the piece felt unsatisfactory – too creative for an academic journal, too academic for non-fiction – and as I couldn’t find the solution to this at the time, it lay fallow in my computer. This piece had begun to explore aspects of the in between urban and rural places I’d known: reenergized by the explorations of the Spode works and conversations with other artists there, I turned back to its content and found myself, from the south coast perspective of my then home in Brighton, remembering and reflecting on the quarries, lead mines, and spoil heaps of County Durham, the industrial blight of parts of Teesside, and the brownfield sites of Sheffield, and of Nottingham, where I travelled every week to teach Fine Art. This work developed into Vague terrain, issue 4 of an independent serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, which comprised a series of discrete but related written and photographic essays about the Spode site itself, about terrains vagues in Stoke and other places, about art’s fascination with the liminal, interstitial and in between, and about artistic research and the species of knowledge it might produce (Lee 2015). In practice, my engagement involved repeatedly walking the Spode buildings and exterior spaces; I had determined to respond to what I found rather than bringing a premeditated agenda so I allowed my camera to linger on surfaces in a way informed by Georges Perec’s conception of the “endotic”, that which is closest at hand, the very opposite of the exotic (1997: 210), along with historian Joseph Amato’s contention that in order to understand modernity and our present, we ought “to concentrate on surfaces” (2009: 2) and Yukio Mishima’s suggestion there is a “profundity of

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the surface itself” (2003: 23). The thousands of images I made were sorted so that patterns and connections were created, determining their editing into triptychs; these were placed into a temporal order to form Spode sequence, a 20 minute projection piece. My attention to surface produced photographs which depicted the stained carpeted floors of abandoned offices, dusty vertical blinds, the peeling and cracking of paint, sellotape turned golden in afternoon light, traces of now-vanished industrial processes and tools, rusting and mouldering, dead insects, windblown buddleja ‘drawing’ in the dirt of uncleaned windows, the patterns made by grazing slugs into algae-ed tabletops, and the series of hazard tape Xs that marked buildings too structurally dangerous to enter or where asbestos had been discovered, which seemed reminiscent of the doors of historical plague victims. Having made these photographs I started to look at the work by others who had pursued their fascinations with similar environments. Solà-Morales Rubió had listed photographers who had documented the terrain vague, and their images from the 1970s/80s tended to show quite epic visions of the landscapes pictured; for the most part the viewpoint was distant and the scene panoramic. John Davies is a case in point here: his black and white documentary work of the era depicts large tracts of muddled and sometimes spoiled land in the Durham coalfield, and in Sheffield’s industrial East End. In more recent times however there is an increasing sense of closeness in the depiction of these complicated topographies. John Darwell provides a useful example of this shift within his own practice, which has changed from the images of large-scale industrial dereliction in Sheffield and elsewhere, to a much more intimate relation with specific places. Darwell’s recent work pays attention to a personal and emotional landscape, looking carefully at much smaller sites: his project 1000 yards or so explores the local circuit around vague open land where he walked his dog every day. The resulting photographs reveal the very texture of this location, with their lingering gaze upon the littered material dumped in small streams or tangled in brambles, and the shattered, formless stuff lying underfoot. It is work at a human scale. This engagement with the very materiality of discarded or abandoned matter rather than an expansive survey of distant viewpoints, finds a relation in contemporary painting. Sheffield-based Sean Williams depicts piles of crushed brick through which weeds are beginning to grow. David Rayson, originally from Wolverhampton, shows the fly-tipped, graffiti-ed environs of rail lines. George Shaw (who studied Fine Art in Sheffield) focuses on the remnants of stolen and burnt out cars on vacant ground, and discovers the scattered pages of porn magazines and plastic caught up in trees in Coventry’s urban woodlands. Marguerite Heywood has an almost Baroque approach to the sensuous folds of discarded plastic caught on the razor-wired boundaries of a Bolton industrial estate. This fascination with the small scale and the sensuous detail is manifest

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in a great deal of current photography posted on popular websites such as Flickr and Instagram, where a fascination with vague places is revealed through tags such as “terrain vague”, “edgeland” or “wasteland”. Kevin Rudeforth, who goes by the username “krudeforth” and photographs in locations across the North of England, has accumulated folders of wire-snagged plastic billowing in the wind and the weathered surfaces of corroding metal and flaking ply. Such photography is present too in some of the urbex expeditions documented online by those active in the scene: the 2016 images by “Fragglehunter” of Sheffield’s Cornish Works, which record fractured paint, and items such as a newspaper or a kettle abandoned as the site went out of use, are not so different from the images I made in the Spode factory, though my exploration was of course sanctioned rather than illicit. Stepping back a little from this close-up detail, there is another photography, which seeks patterns in the vague terrain. Joshua Holt has, for example, considered the somewhat feral sites of Sheffield’s Neepsend, where he remarks the sexualisation of the areas through evidence of prostitution, signs for sex shops and massage parlours, and the presence of a discarded condom hanging from a tree. Holt worked for a time with Amanda Crawley Jackson, from the Department of French at the University of Sheffield, whose Occursus project was based in and around Furnace Park, a vacant lot in Netherthorpe, Sheffield. Crawley Jackson is determinedly not an artist or photographer, but uses photography as a tool for notation in her regular blogging; she has frequently worked in tandem with artists to investigate the city. When the Furnace Park location was finally to be redeveloped, she engaged artist David McLeavey to ‘save’ key artefacts (essentially littered remains of various sorts) as a result of which he translated these meagre finds into a series of bold print works. The exploration of place through walking and attending to the often overlooked – recorded and blogged through an informal sort of photography – is there too in the practice of Leeds academic/psychogeographer Tina Richardson, and in Morag Rose’s Manchester-based Loiterers’ Resistance Movement. I’m interested that methods familiar from art and photographic practices should be such a key part of the toolkit for those who do not seek to make their images for these contexts. The activities and approaches of these others has informed my continuing engagement with the terrain vague, now that I have moved north to live in Sheffield once more. Most recently I have been investigating Neepsend Lane, a part-pedestrian/part-vehicular route that runs parallel to Penistone Road, the main thoroughfare north out of the city. The path and its vicinity are used by walkers and cyclists, as well as those joyriding stolen cars and illicitly off-roading on scrambling bikes. It is extremely beautiful in parts, graced by stands of elegant silver birches, and is home to a range of wildlife, whilst also suffering the blight of vandalism and fly-tipping. Sections of light industry persist alongside the historic remains of an old waterwheel, and elsewhere large-scale earth

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moving is reshaping old sites ready for new development. Photographing repeatedly there, I have been attending to the ground underfoot and the surfaces beside the path, trying to remain alert to the marks made by those who have passed through – the tracks of cars spun in the gravel, the minutiae of littered fragments, the careful placing of small spheres of gum on a brick ledge by a sex worker waiting for clients… These images are, I think, aesthetically complex: they are neither ugly nor exactly beautiful, holding such categories in tension as they seek to represent the muddled reality of these places and my affective, emotional encounters there. Having been focused on the acute materiality of these vague locations, I have noted how much stuff there is and how long such matter persists. It strikes me that the artifacts and material in these post-industrial places of the North exist because this is where manufacture happened for so very many years, and because, as the economy stalled and incoming investment diminished, reclamation and redevelopment has been slow compared to the relentless churning colonization of sites in the South of England. In this coexistence of matter traces of very many time periods co-exist, and the experience of walking there is to feel temporally in between. This truly is the “residual city” identified by Solà-Morales Rubió, and its complexity offers many modes of interpretative investigation and creative response. This experience of the residual through acts of photography brings me back finally to the conceptions of the North underlying this paper. Whilst I have been based in and attending to the actual geographical North of England, increasingly I have come to consider the North in terms of its subordinate and peripheral relationship to the places (London and the South East) where power is brokered, and thus it is a designation that could be applied to sites far south – as in the post-industrial aspects of Portsmouth and Southampton, for example. For me the North – particularly in the manifestations of its vaguer terrains – is also therefore a critical position, somewhere quite other to and outside the dominant accounts emerging from the capital, the government and the City of London. Here we are perhaps also back to the idea of the edgelands, since this makes me recall artist/provocateur Bill Drummond’s suggestion that the proper position for artists to take was to stand on the edge looking further out (Drummond 2014). For me this conceptual North seems to be that edge, from which, importantly, we also have critical sight of the central power hubs against which we might offer our alternatives and counter-narratives. That the North is amenable to abstraction and yet is intensely material, that it can be real and imagined, actual and metaphorical, ugly and beautiful, of England and yet evocative of lands far away, offers a series of polarities that generate for me an intellectual and artistic ‘electricity’, more potent than the narrow corporate re-visioning of the so-called contemporary ‘Northern Powerhouse’. By investigating these ‘peripheral’, ‘residual’, ‘in between’ places, attending to

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locations that trouble categories, and – through photography – focusing at the level of intimate surfaces in order to discern overlooked details and curious patterns, different perspectives are revealed that offer imaginative alternatives to familiar narratives of large-scale urban redevelopment, whose broad brush misses the particularities of the very places it seeks to revive.

R eferences Amato, Joseph (2009): “A Superficial Evocation of Our Times.” In: Historically Speaking, 10/4, pp. 2-4. Armitage, Simon (1999): All Points North, London: Penguin. Armstrong, Helen (2006): “Time, Dereliction and Beauty: an argument for ‘Landscapes of Contempt’.” In: The Landscape Architect, International Federation of Landscape Architects Eastern Region Conference Papers, May 2006. Sydney: Darling Harbour, pp. 116-127. Berger, Alan (2006): Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Burns, Richard (1991): “The City as Not London.” In: Mark Fisher/Ursula Owen (eds.) Whose Cities? London: Penguin, pp. 62-70. Chesshyre, Robert (1988): The Return of a Native Reporter, London: Penguin. Drummond, Bill (2014): “Bill Drummond’s 10 Commandments of Art”, The Observer. Sunday 15 June. (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/ jun/15/bill-drummonds-10-commandments-of-art-klf) Edensor, Tim (2005): Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, Oxford: Berg. Farley, Paul/Symmons Roberts, Michael (2011): Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness. London: Jonathan Cape. Hansen, Miriam (1993): “Foreword.” In: Oskar Negt/Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. ix-xli. Hillaby, John (1968): Journey through Britain, London: Paladin. Kohl, Stephan (2007): “The ‘North’ of ‘England’: A Paradox.” In: Christoph Ehland (ed.) Thinking Northern: Textures of Identity in the North of England, Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, pp. 93-115. Lee, Joanne (2015): Vague terrain, Brighton/Sheffield: Pam Flett Press. Mishima, Yukio (2003): Sun and Steel, Tokyo: Kodansha International. Priestley, J. B. (1968 [1934]): English journey: being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the Autumn of the year 1933, London: Heinemann. Samuel, Raphael (1998): Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, London: Verso.

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Shoard, Marion (2002): “Edgelands.” In: Jennifer Jenkins (ed.) Remaking the Landscape: The Changing Face of Britain, London: Profile Books, pp. 117146. Solà-Morales Rubió, Ignasi (1995): “Terrain vague.” In: Cynthia. C. Davidson, (ed.) Anyplace, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 118-123. Taylor, Ian/Evans, Karen/Fraser, Penny (1996): A Tale of Two Cities: A Study in Manchester and Sheffield, London: Routledge. Thrift, Nigel (1987): “The Geography of Nineteenth Century Class Formation.” In: Nigel Thrift/Peter Williams (eds.) Class and Space: The Making of Urban Society, London: Routledge, pp 25-50. Walker, Ian (2002): City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris, Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

Landscape, documentary, and Northern England in the 1930s Chris Goldie It “is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there” (Said 1979: 8).

I ntroduction Landscape is always the product of forces outside of its field of depiction, the encoding of social and cultural relations rather than a direct representation of actuality. When formed through the agency of documentary in the 1930s, however, landscape is also the object of a crisis in the mode of representation and is conceived through the contradictory impulses within the documentary movement, tendencies most powerfully articulated in the configuration of the landscapes of northern England. The North becomes, through documentary, a site of “abnormal or paradoxical” displacement (Anderson 1968: 47), but also, it is suggested, the “weakest link” in the chain (Althusser 1979: 99-101) of the “national imaginary” (Matless 1998), the place where the totality of social relations can be apprehended, momentarily.

L andscape , people , nation David Matless argues, In Landscape and Englishness, that the “national imaginary” of Britain during the interwar years is not reducible to simple dichotomies, rather, that there was a “complex metaphoric situation amongst those promoting Englishness through landscape”, reflecting in part “the continuing operation of longstanding alternative metaphors for Englishness and Britishness, running on East-West rather than North-South lines, with the West associated with the spiritual, the mysterious and the Celtic, and the East with down-to-earth reason and the Anglo-Saxon” (17). In the case of northern England matters were also complex as the wild and bleak uplands of the North and

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the lowland “garden” scenery of the South did not signify “opposing values but variations within an overarching national landscape” (18). Matless’s argument has two implications for the following discussion. Firstly, that we cannot consider the landscape of northern England in isolation, outside of the context of “Englishness”, the “national imaginary” and national identity, and whilst it is conceivable that such concepts can signify diversity and inclusiveness, nations are more usually amalgamations based on hierarchy and subordination, the diminishing of some places and the promotion of others; if specific regional landscapes are understood as components of national space, they will, therefore, be the consequence of a cultural encoding of the prevailing relations of social and political power. Secondly, however, such an encoding does not result, necessarily, in simple, binary arrangements in which the geographical hierarchy is self-evident. During the 1930s different conceptions of the North of England coexisted and vied with each other, and some of its landscapes had their own sources of power; in certain circumstances there might even have been a contraflow of cultural meaning, from the North to the South, in others circumstances landscapes of northern England may have been invisible or illegible. It is important, therefore, to approach conceptions of the northern English landscape of the 1930s with some caution. A key argument for understanding this landscape as having a meaning determined from outside of its own field of depiction, as an encoding of relations of power centred elsewhere, is made by Edward Said in his conception of the “Orient”. Said argues that such a complex, persistent and durable concept as the “Orient” is far more than a description of a particular location’s geographical coordinates and material existence: It “is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there”. Said argues that the otherness of the Orient is conceived on the basis of exteriority, an occidental assertion of a rudimentary distinction between Occident and Orient. The obviousness of this division has become common sense, Said argues, and is “accepted by a very large mass of writers among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists”, who regard it as “the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social description, and political accounts concerning” the Orient, “its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so on” (2, 3). Said’s concept of the Orient, if applied to representations of the North in the 1930s, can show how these were similarly formed through asymmetric relations of power. It is important, however, to understand that Said conceived both Orient and Occident as components of a geographical imagination; neither were equivalent to place understood in an empirical sense. So, for example, in The Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell wrote about the North as a place to which he was external, to be visited and observed. The implication is that Orwell’s observation occurs from the perspective of the South, but the opposition of these two ‘places’ can also be interpreted as the product of a social and cultural

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relation rather than a mere physical separation. Shields suggests that Orwell derived the power of his observations from his place of origin: “being from the North would not give one the same authority to pronounce upon the character of the South” and that, furthermore, “the South is always left implicit, defined only by its being implicitly different from the description of the North being given” (213). Such a way of conceiving the North would, from Said’s perspective, be a “style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over…” (Said: 3). Such visions of the North are not just selective – not simply a choice of one landscape rather than another – but are a thoroughgoing framing, imagining and conceptualising of what these landscapes signify, in primarily relational terms, a procedure with roots in an earlier period. It was already apparent in the 19th century, in the wake of the industrial revolution, that a cultural vision of the North was developing around its dissimilarity to the South. In Sybil: The Two nations (1845) Disraeli contrasts the prosperity of the metropolis with the poverty of the industrial North. Mrs Gaskell wrote a series of novels in which there is a similar disparity between the two regions. The heroine of North and South (1855) has an idyllic life in a southern English village – “sleeping in the warm life of the pure sun” – before being transported to a mill town in the North of England, a grim, foul-smelling place populated by outlandish people and ugly houses, surrounded by a “wild and bleak country” (Shields: 210). Gaskell’s vision is palpably from a distant, observer’s perspective but is not without complexity, incorporating both the industrial towns and the “wild and bleak” uplands, two landscapes that might invite different types of response: the latter deriving from its associations with Romantic English poetry; the meaning of neither originating solely in direct observation based on the topographical characteristics of place. Indeed, the juxtaposition of these disparate landscapes was itself part of an ongoing process of rearranging the imaginative space of nation, which was in a state of constant reinvention, new elements continually appearing whilst pre-existing elements were either ignored or put into a new relation. The dissimilarities in the landscapes identified by Mrs Gaskell are the outcome of their encoding rather than their actuality, and this continued to be the case in the way place was imagined and configured in the 1930s. When exploring the dynamics of the northern landscape, therefore, there is little to be gained from identifying landscapes through a simple taxonomy in which there is too great an emphasis on the depiction of a place in contrast to its connotative meaning. This is not to argue that the actuality of place has no meaning, rather, that within a landscape image there is a relationship between the moment of the analogical recording of a material reality and the process of its signification. To focus, for example, on rural landscapes and what distinguishes these from representations of mill towns, ports, mining villages, industrial or commercial cities and seaside resorts, can only provide insights into the operating princi-

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ples of an hegemonic vision of nation If these are all understood as encoded depictions, the meaning of which is determined as much by agency, the social and cultural perspectives of the observer, as by the place observed. So far, the notion that a landscape is the consequence of the encoding of social and cultural relations has been treated somewhat abstractly, but the specificities of a landscape of documentary in the 1930s now need to be given some substance. Documentary was, in a purely descriptive sense, progressive, the reforming and liberalising nature of its social, political and aesthetic ethos unquestionable, especially when contrasted with the conservative orthodoxies of the era. It was also more than just factual film, encompassing photography, ethnography, reportage and some aspects of fiction cinema. Broadly, across this whole range, there was a commitment to the recording of actuality and bearing witness, motivated by ethical concerns regarding the pressing need to represent social, economic and cultural deprivation, but also by the desire for contact, even intimacy, with ordinary people. Documentary embraced a socially reformist agenda, linked to nascent social democratic ideas regarding the role of the state, public education and citizenship. The style of documentary film was somewhat unstable, sometimes embracing facts in a modernist, experimental, poetic fashion, at other times giving voice to ordinary people. The most controversial aspects of its legacy are its “anthropological gaze”, the tendency to primitivise its working-class subject, and its apparently naïve faith in the power of pure observation. Documentary’s distinctive characteristics were not an arbitrary combination of different practices and approaches, however, but related to the social and cultural position of those who were its advocates. From the late 19th century onwards the status of Britain’s intelligentsia began to change significantly. By the interwar years it was no longer a minority fraction of the ruling class, with a considerable authority within its own distinct sphere, but a substantially larger and more differentiated group, some of its members dependent on state employment, others forced to exist as cultural producers reliant upon the vagaries and indignities of a mass-market. There were various responses to this situation: some intellectuals retreated into cultural pessimism, as was the case with F.R. Leavis and his milieu; others joined institutions such as the BBC; but there was also a substantial radicalisation, ranging from political commitment in the form of membership of the Communist Party to an engagement with the documentary movement in its various manifestations. Britain in the 1930s was a fractured nation but a relatively stable one, because the reality of its economic depression was its unevenness: many regions, particularly the North East, were devastated whilst southern England remained relatively prosperous and the Midlands was an area of vigorous growth, through the development of new industries such as chemicals, electronics, and consumer goods. The labour movement was defeated in 1926, the Labour Party had

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split in 1931 and the continued rule of the National Government, dominated by the Conservatives, was unchallenged for the rest of the decade. Nevertheless, the short term impregnability of this Conservative parliamentary hegemony notwithstanding, the system of rule in the 1930s was vulnerable in terms of broader strategies of managing consent, including the necessity of maintaining the support of social groups allied to the ruling class itself. These weaknesses and vulnerabilities underpinned the organic crisis of hegemony in the 1930s, manifest in the emergence of the new cultural forms with which the advocates of documentary were associated. The crisis occurred, therefore, “not just in the society that was being represented, but even more so in the status of those who were doing the representing” (Baxendale and Pawling: 3), a group who were driven by immediate events and experiences but also by the effects of longer term changes in “the relations of cultural production and the position of intellectuals” (5), with an inevitable impact on the mode of representation. This crisis in the mode of representation could, in certain instances, lead to an entirely new way of looking at the world. Stuart Hall argues that there was an evident determination on the part of some writers, film-makers and photographers “to look hard and record” and “to present people to themselves in wholly recognisable terms”: terms acknowledging “their commonness, their variety, their individuality, their representativeness” (9). On the other hand, this desire for transparency also signified documentary’s commitment to a certain form of observation, originating not in the technical characteristics of film or photographic media but in anthropology, developed in the wake of British imperialism’s need for precise and objective information about its colonised subjects. The meanings documentary attached to the places it visited and observed were shaped, therefore, by the social and cultural biases of observers still inhabiting, mentally, the imperial metropolis. The North of England, from John Grierson’s perspective, had a distinctly Oriental character, demonstrated in his statement that the documentary film-maker would need to “travel dangerously into the jungles of Middlesbrough and the Clyde” (Hood: 107), emphasising the otherness of these locations through a trope of late Victorian imperial exploration. To ask whether 1930s documentary was progressive or reactionary is an erroneous approach to the question of its character; that it oscillated between these two possibilities is demonstrated by both Hall’s analysis – which will be developed further below – and the imperialist ideology underpinning Grierson’s ideas. Documentary was contradictory. An extension of Edward Said’s argument about Orientalism can further illuminate this paradox. As indicated above, Said characterises Orientalism as a “style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over…” (3); later, however, he argues that “one ought never to assume that” it is “nothing more than a structure of lies and myths which, were the truth to be told, would simply blow away.” (6); in fact “the persistence and durability of saturating hegemonic systems” needed to be understood in

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their positive as well as negative aspects, because “their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting” (14). Dominating and claiming authority over its subject, yet also productive and not “unilaterally inhibiting”, these contradictory tendencies within documentary can be discerned in relation to several films made during the 1930s, all of which are an attempt, through a new mode of representation, to reconfigure the landscape in a more inclusive and democratic way. The landscape of film is realised not just through the selection and editing of images but their accompaniment by a wide range of non-visual material, including narration, sound, voice and music. This rich combination of aural and visual material gave documentary landscape in the 1930s its particular social and cultural inflection, in relation to the class and the regional identity of those occupying or commenting upon the spaces depicted, as well as through its interpellation of the audience. David Matless discusses a documentary produced by the GPO Film Unit, The Horsey Mail (1938), an account of the 1938 Norfolk sea floods, which is notable for the range of “voices” and “accents” deployed. The film commences by presenting “a distanced, surveying, outsider’s view of the landscape”, itemising the effects of the flood from an authoritative, geographer’s perspective, then following this with a representation of the landscape from the viewpoint of the people it contained (59). Matless uses the terms “voice” and “accent” in a comparable way to Bill Nichols in his article “The Voice of Documentary”, to indicate the strategies and styles deployed in a film and their relationship to particular points of view or perspective, although for both Matless and Nichols the actuality of human voice and accent is also significant. Key features in assessing the extent to which the landscape of documentary inhibits or facilitates a renegotiation of national identity are the “modes of authority enacted in film, and the voices permitted to narrate landscape” (60). The Horsey Mail incorporates vernacular and local as well as authoritative voices, which commentators at the time considered to be a refreshing addition of “human incident”. In a similar vein to Housing Problems (1935), the film is introduced through Received Pronunciation narration, another RP narrator begins to outline the unfolding events, but then a Norfolk-accented postman intervenes to tell the story, which subsequently takes on a brighter mood, presenting the two postal workers – ‘Bob’ and ‘Claude’ – as sturdy, cheerful, resourceful characters making light of the difficulties of delivering the post in a flooded landscape. These representations of ‘ordinary people’ may lack “the kind of naturalistic spontaneity” now expected of documentary (Corner: 68), but they occurred in an era when it was more typical for members of the working class to be depicted as servants, fools, or figures to be ridiculed; according to Grierson, these new forms of representation had a powerful impact on audiences, which sometimes erupted in “spontaneous applause when workers appeared” on the

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screen (Hood: 108). The introduction of working-class or regional accents, or the presentation of vernacular or popular culture, was a typical strategy in 1930s and 1940s documentary, reaching its pinnacle in Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain (1941). These popular voices were generally framed by and subordinate to official or high culture, which isn’t to argue that the presence of the former was insignificant, rather that a truly democratic national culture in which the different realities of region and class were given equal representation was sometimes elusive. Documentary also took a different approach, forsaking any direct engagement with its human subjects, adopting a distant, anthropological view. These different strategies are evident in the two documentaries discussed below, Night Mail (1936), and Coal Face (1935), whilst both use a full range of sound, music and voice in order to give the visual representations of place its meaning. Night Mail – a popular success, given the limited audience for documentary in the 1930s – encapsulates many of the social, political and aesthetic tendencies in British documentary and is an interesting example of its reforming, modernising agenda. It was produced by the GPO Film Unit, which had been established by the Post Office for marketing purposes but whose films frequently exceeded the latter’s narrow business interests, offering a vision of reform and national renovation. The film charts the London to Glasgow postal train’s journey across the West Midlands and North West of England, in the course of which it traverses various landscapes. The film’s relationship to national identity is communicated through a conception of the Post Office as a modern institution, binding the different parts of Britain together. The different voices and accents of the postal workers who feature in the film, the occasional awkwardness of expression in the non-professional recreation of their roles, have a powerful immediacy, although the regions from which they come are presented haphazardly in the film (Anthony: 27). The film is successful in its entirely new form of representing the ordinary and the everyday, of allowing people to speak in a relatively unmediated way. There is also a noticeably modernist style to the film, with “close-ups of wheels, pistons and machinery” contributing to the urgency of the narrative (40), whilst Benjamin Britten’s soundtrack and Auden’s poetry are notably experimental. Whilst the film’s embrace of modernity and its unpatronizing and dignified representation of ordinary people contributed to its progressive vision of the future, Night Mail’s landscape sequences are the most powerful aspect of the film, particularly as the train travels through Cumbria and the border country and the soundtrack becomes more insistent. Their strength may lie in the widespread appeal of images of sublime beauty, that such scenery when accompanied by the right kind of music can interpellate the audience, providing the glue to hold it together despite all of its variations; and yet, the sheer effectiveness of these images of landscape warrants some further consideration. A plau-

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sible reading of the film suggests that it offers a unifying vision of the nation, not on the basis of traditional and conservative conceptions of a ‘deep England’ with a shared past, but a social democratic nation in waiting, united through modern technology, the skill, dedication and humanity of its workers, and the efficiency of the Post Office as a public institution. Thus, social democracy is anticipated as providing modern, efficient industries, an expanded and more inclusive conception of citizenship, and, on the film’s most symbolic level, the uniting of a fractured nation currently divided between metropolis and region. This latter aspect of the social democratic project is the most allusive and is also most dependent on the representation of landscape. The vision of the social democratic future as open space and light, signified through romantic images of the wild, upland landscape of Cumbria and beyond, is very powerful. If, however, we follow Matless’s argument, a landscape occupies its position within the national imaginary not on the basis of a simple dichotomy between North and South, but through a more complex range of longstanding metaphors providing for alternative configurations of the nation. The mountainous landscape of the North West was so effective in this respect because it was already a durable myth, a vision of the North which was not oppositional but conformed to a minority but established variation within the national imaginary, given legitimacy through the social and cultural importance of its accrued layers of signification. That Night Mail advocates a social democratic project is indisputable, but its representation of landscape shows the extent to which its symbolic forms were a negotiation between the desire for social transparency and the continuation of established cultural predispositions. These were not the smug, complacent images of England to be found in H.V. Morton’s travel guides, but nor were Night Mail’s landscapes of the North West universal in their meaning. Coal Face (1935), made in the year prior to Night Mail, also emerged from the GPO Film Unit and, in contrast, is on occasions harsh and disquieting, particularly through the effects of its framing devices, style of narration, choice of subjects and use of music and sound, producing a quite eccentric view of industrial Britain. Much more than is the case with Night Mail, it is conspicuously experimental, including a score by Britten, poetry by Auden and a Brechtian, choral soundtrack. The film provides statistics about the mining industry in an expressive and poetic form, at great speed and uttered in a stern, emphatic voice, the purpose of which is to achieve an aesthetic effect rather than to deliver information. Miners are depicted in the film at an anthropological distance, in a distinctly exotic, primitivist, fascinated manner, as occupying a place of otherness. The “human and mechanical energy needed to win coal” is, Corner argues, treated by the film with a good deal of excitement, whilst there is “a ‘mechanisation’ of the miner in sequences whose composition and rhythm, together with orchestral sound accompaniment, suggest a blurring of the di-

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vision between man and tool, man and machine” (61, 62). There is a public informational aspect to the film, which is somewhat overawed by its insistent, expressive handling of its subject, but the message – a declaration verging on celebration, of the necessity of coalmining to the development of the national economy – is in keeping with the film’s self-consciously Stakhanovite treatment of the labouring body, as though commitment, sacrifice and heroism were an urgent requirement in the march towards a modern, progressive future. The opening sequence of the film delivers a conventional landscape view with the pit and the winding gear in the foreground, against a cloudy sky at dawn or dusk, Britten’s harsh score encoding an already bleak image with “a sense of dislocation, dissonance and the sheer power of the machine” (62). One reading of the quite distinct treatment of landscapes by these two films is that it is a consequence not of topographical differences in the places to which they refer but of the possibilities for film-makers still operating within a landscape tradition. Certain meanings could be mobilised through their association with places already encoded into a national imaginary, but urban and industrial locations offered a narrower range of possibilities. Grierson had considered that “aesthetic design, including pleasingness of rhythm and beauty of composition, could enhance viewer’s awareness of the real world and of working processes” (Corner: 63), but in Coal Face the informational or educational element is contained within the film’s chosen form of modernist experimentation, which is very pronounced, giving it a discordant, alienating texture, emphasising its artistic self-consciousness. Coal Face eschews the lyrical, romantic landscape presented in Night Mail the following year, not because such beauty was unavailable in its chosen location but because it was restricted in its range of aesthetic strategies, as a consequence of the dominant modes of looking at industrial locations in northern Britain; in such places a version of the sublime was possible but only in a harsh, dissonant, alienating form. There is, however, another interpretation possible. The political element of Coal Face is not overt, but it does draw quite explicitly on the style of the Soviet avant-garde in film – the work of Vertov, for example – as well as Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, the ‘estrangement effect’: a technique through which the audience is prevented from identifying emotionally with the subjects of a film or drama but is encouraged to empathise intellectually, leading to its political empowerment. Within the social democratic culture of documentary in the 1930s there were distinct elements, some promoting national unity around longstanding albeit minority conceptions of nation, others envisioning national renovation as if this was a march to war. In the case of the former, landscapes were already available but with the latter they had to be invented, and were not necessarily comforting images. Transparency also has its limits, as when mountainous northern English landscapes are depicted through forms of social and cultural encoding differ-

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ent to those accrued through the predominant national imagination, at which point they become almost invisible. This was the case with the rural North signified through the Communist Party led mass trespasses in the late 1930s. These were mass gatherings as well as illegal incursions onto land, quite out of keeping with the ethos of the mainstream outdoor leisure movement, which aimed, like documentary film, to provide people, often the young, with the skills and knowledge appropriate to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and which encouraged a quiet, modest engagement with the rural landscape. Mass Trespass, rooted in communism and the steel mills and factories of Sheffield and Manchester, was hard to accommodate within a project for citizenship, as a consequence of its militant politics, its noisy, disquieting protest songs, and because the scale at which it entered the landscape was so large (Matless 1998: 71). Photographs, taken by activists and appearing in locally published books, show rural spaces so crowded – giving the appearance of a protest march rather than an unobtrusive group of hikers – as to be illegible within conventional landscape discourse (Barnes; Rothman). Readings of the landscape of northern England as represented in Coal Face and Night Mail suggest that there is no simple route into a reality not inextricably connected to the process of its encoding. Even though it is recognised that the North that is represented is one conceived from a perspective lying outside of the field of depiction; there is no place to be uncovered through a stripping away of myth. The key to interpretation is not to search for a supressed reality but to explore the power relations within the representation. As the interpretation of these films suggest, documentary in the 1930s inhabited a complex terrain, within which social democracy in terms of its goals, its points of application and its symbolic forms was evolving, producing a negotiation rather than a negation of the existing field of representation. Such has been the approach taken so far.

I nde xicalit y, encoding , displ acement In the foregoing approach, landscape is understood as something other than mere depiction and the interpretive emphasis is placed, therefore, on the procedures of secondary signification; the question of how much denotation survives this process is suspended, because it is either unanswerable or unhelpful to be posed in such a manner. The paradox of documentary in the 1930s, however, lay in its embrace of the notion of transparency and the possibility of pure observation, its tendency to efface the relationship between an image’s indexicality and its signification. Pure observation implies that the meaning of an image arises from the fidelity of the depiction alone. The tendency for an image’s object to take precedence over its representation is very evident in the reception

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of landscape. Liz Wells has argued that landscape is shaped by conventions and aesthetic codes but it tends nevertheless to encourage viewers to look through the representation to what is depicted (Wells: 7). Even for viewers aware of the encoded nature of images, place has an ability to signify its own reality. The authority of documentary lay in the status of its indexical fidelity rather than in its ability to introduce abstract propositions into its image field, in the eliding of the distinction between the two, in the slippage between denotation and revelation, between registering fact and revealing truth. The porousness of the boundary separating recorded reality and abstract truth claims continues to be a factor in documentary’s significance. Corner argues, in his discussion of the continued influence of Grierson’s legacy and of British factual film from the 1930s, that the “warrant” upon which “most documentaries base their discursive status” or claim to truth is the raw material of actuality (Corner: 18). The problem with placing such an emphasis on documentary’s embrace of transparency is that its truth claims begin to look suspect. Corner is aware of this problem and argues that a more nuanced approach is necessary. The realism to which John Grierson, documentary’s principal founder, subscribed was somewhat misunderstood in the 1970s, Corner argues, when structuralist film theory contested the status of “documentary evidentiality”, in particular the notion that film was capable of pure observation (10). Whilst this conclusion was reasonable it tended to misinterpret the nature of the realism promoted by documentary in the 1930s. Grierson is often taken as the theorist whose ideas underpin unjustifiable assumptions regarding the transparency of depiction, but he did not hold the view that the final arbiter of documentary truth was the recorded image’s indexical fidelity. Grierson sometimes appears inconsistent in relation to this, because the public informational purposes of documentary required him to place a polemical emphasis on its capacity to record social conditions and to look at the world in a direct way. Grierson’s ideas had formed, however, under the influence of British Hegelianism and he had a complex understanding of the relationship between the artistic work and totality: when discussing reality or truth he adopts a philosophical attitude, interpreting these as essences accessible only through creative and expressive practice. Documentary was: “the creative treatment of actuality”. It isn’t credible, Corner argues, to represent Grierson as “in the grip of a naïve realism” (13). Corner’s reassessment of Grierson depends somewhat on the latter’s own, dubious bifurcation of the field of representation, and on his equally questionable notion of artistic practice as the means of accessing truth. Baxendale and Pawling also address the problem within 1930s documentary of its claims to transparency, but their conception of the mode of representation does not involve accepting the ontological possibility of a division between image fidelity and worldview. Following Anderson, they argue that documentary’s form of observation is capable of providing, in some respects, a fresh and relatively un-

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constrained view of the world, despite the limitations of its imperialist, ‘anthropological gaze’. This is explained through the concept of displacement. Perry Anderson, discussing the rise of anthropology, argues that Britain’s intellectuals had been hindered from developing a theory able to comprehend society’s total structure – the social totality – but that their efforts were “displaced into abnormal or paradoxical sectors” (47). Baxendale and Pawling argue that documentary’s attempt to explain society in its complexity was channelled into empiricist forms and the totalising discourses of anthropology (38). Displacement suggests suppression or removal from its appropriate place, but not eradication, with the implication that aspects of reality can be apprehended even within degraded and distorted forms of knowledge. There is a much earlier discussion about the issue of displacement, which has not been addressed to any extent, contained in a paper written by Stuart Hall in the early 1970s. Hall’s paper is notable because of its engagement with Roland Barthes’ ideas about the ontology of the photographic image. Barthes had argued that the photograph is itself a medium which can, in certain circumstances, resist encoding. Whilst Hall draws upon Barthes’ formulation of the issue in Image, Music, Text, this discussion will also refer to comparable ideas regarding photographic indexicality contained in Camera Lucida. Hall’s 1972 paper could not have referred to Barthes’ yet to be written final book, but to the extent that all of the latter’s writing on photography is based on similar theoretical foundations it is useful to discuss it here. It is also noted that Barthes’ ideas about the ontology of the photographic image were quite specific to the form itself, so there is a potential problem in importing these into discussions around cinematic realism and other documentary forms. The interpretation of 1930s documentary as both representing reality – albeit of a special kind – and deeply and complexly encoded is the subject of Hall’s paper, which draws on Barthes’ discussions around the ontology of the photograph and the prospect raised by the latter that under certain circumstances an image’s analogical element can resist myth. The relationship between the denotation of a material reality and its cultural representation is central to Barthes’ hypothesis – In Camera Lucida – that in certain photographic images the reality captured by the camera can defy signification: “that the Photograph [is] an image without code – even if, obviously, certain codes do inflect our reading of it..” (Barthes 1993: 88). As Barthes had already stated in “The Photographic Message”, this could occur in circumstances of emotional trauma: “the trauma is a suspension of language, the blockage of meaning… One could imagine a kind of law: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult is connotation; or again, the ‘mythological’ effect of a photograph is inversely proportional to its traumatic effect” (Barthes 1977: 31). Given Barthes’ obvious preoccupation throughout his career with myth and the process of signification his statement in Camera Lucida that he was and al-

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ways had been a ‘realist’ is difficult to take seriously without some qualification. Martin Jay argues that Barthes’ interest in the ontological status of the photographic image and his notion that a photograph is a ‘message without a code’ can be explained as a consequence of his early exposure to phenomenology; the influence of the latter remained but was supplemented with other approaches, thus creating a tension in his work between structuralist and phenomenological modes of interpretation (Jay 1994: 442). Because of this tension – his declaration that he was “a realist” notwithstanding – it is difficult to imagine Barthes advocating naïve photographic realism in the manner of Pier Paulo Pasolini or Andre Bazin: Pasolini argued that “cinema represent[ed] reality with reality” whilst Bazin suggested that a photograph was a “moulding, the taking of an impression by the manipulation of light” (Hall 1972: 5) That the camera is able to show an unmediated reality is obviously highly debatable: the scene recorded on a light sensitive film is real enough but doesn’t exhaust the meaning of the image; the ‘reality’ revealed by a photograph is more complex than the registering of the physical world in front of the camera. Barthes does not capitulate to simplistic conceptions of realism, however, and rather than arguing that a photograph is a ‘copy of reality’, suggests, in “The Rhetoric of the Image”, that the reality to which it refers is displaced from the present to the past: a photograph produces “not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing… but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then” (Barthes 1977: 44). And the temporal anteriority, with its indication of memory and loss, also points towards the harsh, painful reality to which Barthes subscribes, distinctly individual in form, in this instance of personal bereavement. Hall’s “The Social Eye of Picture Post” is an exploration of the ‘moment’ of documentary in 1930s Britain. It is not an account of documentary’s institutional, technical and aesthetic evolution but places the movement within an historical conjuncture, where the desire for immediacy, transparency, etc., had a wider social and cultural significance. Whilst the focus of Hall’s essay is the photography of the illustrated magazine Picture Post, the thrust of the discussion is to place this in the context of the broader documentary movement, which was characterised by a new “way of seeing” (3-12). During the 1930s, documentary’s practitioners were determined to look closely at reality and record what they saw, to give people an image of themselves that they would recognise. This was explicable not because of particular developments in photography or journalism but because of transformations in society occurring under the impact of economic crisis and war, causing ‘social experience’ to become transparent. At times, here, Hall seems to sanction a radical reading of the documentary project:

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Chris Goldie … ordinary people enter the stage of human action in their own person, the society is revealed to itself in its connectedness. Picture Post was one of the means – the medium – by which this social transparency was transformed into a visual and symbolic transparency: for a moment, the conditions were created which enabled an historical experience directly to inform a style (13).

This moving and powerful declaration, evocative of Lukácsian notions of totality, is nevertheless framed in Hall’s essay with an intriguing reading of Barthes’ suppositions in regard to the ontology of the photograph; intriguing because Hall doesn’t endorse Barthes’ argument but nor does he reject it categorically. There is an initial statement that, contrary to Barthes’ thesis, the Picture Post photograph is “complexly coded” and “in this, precisely, lies its cultural and historical significance”, which is directly followed by an acknowledgment that the power of the magazine’s images flowed from a capacity to represent their subject “immediately and apparently untransformed”. Hall argues that “what impresses us, at first glance, about these photographs is their ability to bring the world of real events massively to our attention, apparently without the intervention of a code”; and that “it is as if the significance of the events themselves lends a sort of transferred power directly to the images of them on the page” (4). Hall’s use of adverbs –“seemingly”, “apparently” – to modify statements sanctioning the reality of the photographs, and the range of verbs used to describe the activity of that reality – reality “lends” its power to the image – suggests the provisional nature of his conclusions. Hall recognises the force of history in shaping the realism of the image, but the apprehension of reality also occurs by virtue of Barthes’ temporal anteriority: “in every photograph there is the stupefying evidence of this-is-what-happened-and-how” (4). Hall rejects the idea that denotation can resist codification, whilst at the same time suggesting – pace Barthes – that in some circumstances an image can capture reality, although through this capturing there is also a displacement “into another dimension: the dimension of augmented or represented reality” (8). Thus, realism is entirely possible and its association with the image is an attribute of the latter’s power, but the reality apprehended is one that is displaced, postponed, enhanced, augmented or in some way transformed as a consequence of the encoding procedure.

B l ackpool’s l andscape : an overde termined contradiction Blackpool and Bolton were the sites of the northern branch of Mass Observation’s activities in 1937. Whilst MO’s work primarily involved the gathering of ethnographic data through the note-taking of observers, the northern project employed two photographers: Julian Trevelyan and Humphrey Spender. In the

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foregoing discussion it was argued that a photograph – but potentially other forms of documentary media – could, through encoding, apprehend reality in a displaced or augmented form. Hall drew from Barthes’ idea about the indexicality of the image whilst only giving the latter’s idea provisional support. The basis of the dialogue really lay in Barthes’ proposition that a photograph could resist myth in ‘certain circumstances’, and in the idea that the realism of such an image lay in its temporal anteriority, a type of displacement. The extent to which Hall’s particular conception of displacement can be applied to the landscape of Blackpool will be considered presently, but Barthes’ ideas, whilst not directly referred to, tend to surface in a purer form in some discussions about MO’s photographic work. This occurs in an article by Annette Joy Jemison: “Barrenness and Abjection?: The Iconography of the Wasteland in the Photographs and Collages of, 1937-1938”. Jemison argues that Trevelyan’s images of Bolton, produced in 1937 under the auspices of MO, represent northern England as in a state of trauma, supressed memories of the First World War and the current effects of the economic depression, causing him to depict the North as a devastated wasteland or battlefield. Trevelyan’s photographs of abandoned places have a powerful symbolic content, but a key theme in Jemison’s discussion is to place the photographer within the surrealist movement, and to, therefore, place the emphasis on the photograph’s powers of depiction underlying its symbolism, on its capacity to reach towards a primary reality. MO and Blackpool are the focus of Lucy Curzon’s discussion of Humphrey Spender’s work in the late 1930s. MO shared with other documentary forms an interest in the everyday, which it aimed to record through the agency of the ‘unobserved observer’, a technique more easily employed by MO’s reporters taking notes on the behaviour of the occupants of pubs and boarding houses than by a street photographer using the obtrusive and cumbersome apparatus of the era (Spender 1982: 16, 19). This emphasis on the issue of method did of course ignore a central problem with the notion of pure observation, which was its inseparability from the social and cultural preconceptions of documentary’s promoters. Curzon notes that MO’s stated purpose was to present ‘a true picture of the nation itself’ (Curzon 2011: 314), but this was informed by “a vision of English society” in which “few meaningful differences” existed “between classes, sexes and races” (325). Tom Harrison, one of MO’s founders, had a benign attitude towards the prevailing forms of national identity during the 1930s and conceived of the project to record the “topography of everyday lives” as a way to “provide a new basis for social democracy” (315). Whatever the reality captured by MO, therefore, it would still be encoded and framed through this quite familiar documentary ethos, one which sought to reconcile regional, social, and cultural differences within a reformed nation.

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Curzon’s interpretation of MO is rather one-sided, in that it contains the assumption that social democratic ideas were fully-formed and that, furthermore, their main purpose was to contain class differences within a unified nation. MO and documentary more broadly conceived are similarly regarded by Curzon as lacking in contradictions, except in the case of individuals operating within particular forms. In fact it is the form itself from which an authentic, stubborn reality arises. Curzon argues that, because of the indexical power of the photograph, a project such as MO was not without tension: “to frame a photograph is always an exercise in futility” because “the image will always, eventually, resist its capture”. Curzon’s discussion concerns Humphrey Spender’s photographic work for MO in 1937. Few of Spender’s photographs were published by MO, most only surfacing decades later, a prolonged absence attributed by Curzon to the fact that “these photographs defy the ability of Harrison’s text to control them: their meaning, in other words, exceeds the narrative that was meant to hold them in place”; Spender’s photographs of Blackpool “leak reality” (325). These unsettling, defamiliarising photographs expose the contradictions in the town’s image as Utopia or dreamland, emphasising in contrast: the dull familiarity of its infrastructure, the shallowness of its much-vaunted modernity, the mundanity of its interiors, the apathy or unease of workers in its entertainment industries, and the anxiety and boredom of visitors, aware of the continued realities of their working lives, despite their currently exotic surroundings. There is a definite surrealist edge to Curzon’s reading of Spender’s photographs, not unreasonably since he had been inspired by Cartier-Bresson; under such an influence Spender’s photographs of Blackpool attempt to show what lay behind “the more rigid structures of everyday behaviour and assumptions” and to explore “lives lived and events experienced beyond surface appearance or expectation” (319). Nevertheless, surrealism’s methods and preoccupations also push Curzon’s analysis in a particular direction. Whereas the Blackpool represented in the MO project was a dreamland, a place of liberation from the time discipline and enforced routines of everyday life, Curzon argues that Spender’s photographs “reveal the nature of life experienced not as a holidaymaker but as a wage-earner and as a cog in the wheels of industrial capitalism” (325). To the extent that these images refused timelessness and constituted the return of a displaced, painful immediacy they might be understood through the terms Barthes uses to discuss certain aspects of the photograph’s connotative and denotative functions: the “studium” and the “punctum”. If the studium offered obvious meanings which could easily be decoded through semiotic analysis, the punctum “was that unexpected prick, sting, or cut that disturbed the intelligibility of the culturally connotated meaning… impossible to generalise for all viewers, it defied reduction to a code… [and] could produce a higher order of emotional intensity” (Jay: 453).

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Not all of Spender’s photographs work quite like this, however. Many are street photographs or shots of interiors rather than landscape images, and these do tend to be the most effective in disturbing “the intelligibility of the culturally connotated meaning”, as Barthes would have it. Some, though, show their subjects in familiar landscapes, where the effect, deliberately sought after or otherwise, is to encourage in the viewer a landscape gaze, as Martin Lefebvre defines it in Landscape and Film, a way of looking in which the image is connected to “themes or symbolic concerns that go beyond ‘their narrative function as setting” (49). Lefebvre is referring to film rather than documentary photography, but the everyday and the familiar invested with emotional and symbolic value is a feature of Spender’s landscape images. Many of Spender’s photographs capture something obvious but fundamental about the town, which is its relationship to the sea. One aspect of Blackpool’s self-promotion was to emphasise its progress and modernity – the first town in Britain with electric street lighting (1879) and the first in the world to have a permanent electric street tramway (1885) – another was to publicise the variety and sophistication of its entertainments. Blackpool’s spatial organisation, however, has always been determined by its relationship to the sea, and to the beach as the boundary between sea and land. The main axes of movement in Blackpool are in relation to the sea: on the one hand the east/west journey between hotel or guest house and the beach; on the other hand the north/south axis of the promenade. From 1894 there was the introduction of a third dimension, with the opening of the Tower – which is both part of the landscape and a vantage point from which the landscape can be viewed (Thompson 1983: 126). The spatial configuration of Blackpool – the forms of movement it facilitated, familiar locations from which it could be viewed – is an aspect of Spender’s photography but is also a feature of Sing As We Go (1934), an important film of the period featuring a lengthy Blackpool sequence. Sing As We Go is a fictional drama, a musical, and any comparisons between it and the work of Mass Observation has to be highly qualified. J.B. Priestley, who wrote the script for the film, was a popular novelist who still maintained his northern identity and a connection to his native Bradford, and was very different in origins and aesthetic concerns to many of the middle-class intellectuals associated with the documentary movement, with their periodic forays into modernist experimentation and their tendency towards a distanced, anthropological view of ‘the people’. Nevertheless, Priestley was “part of the same cultural and political current” as documentary and shared similar objectives: “to re-unite a fractured nation around a more inclusive conception of itself, one which rested above all on defining and constructing ‘the people’ as the real Britain” (Baxendale and Pawling: 46). In the light of Priestley’s connection to the ethos of documentary, his outlook and, by extension, the themes represented in Sing As We Go, are susceptible to the type of critique of Mass Observation mounted by Curzon.

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Alternatively, a nuanced reading of the film might provide for a different interpretation of documentary, taking into account its contradictions, particularly as these became manifest in depictions of northern England. Some superficial readings of Sing As We Go support the notion that its purpose was to maintain social cohesion and reproduce consensus, because of the way in which the film’s narrative offers resolutions to the problems of everyday life but fails to explore the roots of these in capitalist social relations, rather like Blackpool itself, it might be suggested. A significant problem in this argument is its approach to the interpretation of popular cinema. Baxendale and Pawling argue that such a reading is faulty because it misinterprets the nature of the Utopianism of popular entertainment and musicals in particular. Drawing on Richard Dyer’s discussion of this they argue that the utopianism of the musical “satisfies because it resolves the problems of everyday life on an imaginary level: replacing scarcity with abundance, exhaustion with energy, dreariness with intensity, manipulation with transparency and fragmentation with community” (73). Popular entertainment’s imaginary solutions are therefore a response to real deficiencies and real needs, but these are displaced and configured in an uneven and contradictory way: direct references to the exploitation integral to social relations of production are impermissible, but the needs that capitalism promises to deliver, which it may fail to do or which are offered in a distorted, impoverished and unsatisfying form – the consequence of reification, commodity fetishism – are addressed. Sing As We Go’s representation of landscape is significant in its relationship to the film’s narrative, themes and underlying meaning. The film can be read in terms of an imaginary resolution of actual problems, through their displacement onto the binary oppositions referred to above: scarcity and abundance, dreariness and intensity, fragmentation and community, etc, but these abstractions are also anchored in social experience and the depiction of real places. The film’s documentary elements such as the use of locations and montage give it a purchase on actuality, which is encoded through existing notions of Blackpool, in particular the awareness that the town penetrated deeply into the habits, lifestyles and customs of Lancashire’s weaving communities. As would be expected, the film doesn’t deal in class conflict and tends, as Priestley himself did, to imagine ‘the people’ rather than to represent the working class, but its emphasis is nevertheless on collective experience and similarly collective solutions to social problems. The film’s landscapes tend, therefore, to be full of people, recognisable as members of communities, seamlessly woven into the familiar landscape of the promenade and the beach and sea beyond; a final montage of landscape shots, accompanied by a rich orchestral score, begins with a view from the Tower, with a long shot of an unusually peaceful, sublime Irish Sea at dusk, signifying Blackpool itself. A somewhat different configuration of these elements – the

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Tower, the sea, a visual yet aurally augmented sense of the sublime – is incorporated into Humphrey Jennings’ wartime documentary Listen to Britain (1941), which opens with a landscape shot over the Irish Sea, then moves to a scene in the Tower Ballroom, the film itself concluding, after its journey around Britain, with a concert in the National Gallery. Jennings was also one of the founders of MO and had, himself, a particular interest in surrealism. The significance of these different images of the Tower and the Irish Sea are of course open to interpretation; as Lefebvre indicates, the meaning of such a landscape in film would far exceed the preceding narrative; or, as Curzon states in relation to photography: its actuality can’t be pinned down: “a photograph can never, over time, be held to a single meaning”, it can never be reduced to “a sustainable definition” (325). In contrast to approaches where the stubborn indexicality of the image sanctions its representation of a harsh reality, the concept of displacement suggests that actuality can be apprehended in a more allusive way; but not through a depiction being isolated from its encoding. This is not to argue that the totality of social relations is beyond representation, but that representations themselves have distinct modalities. Louis Althusser’s essay, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” can illuminate this form of displacement. Althusser argues that the contradiction inherent within a capitalist society, which in its essence is embodied in the antagonism between classes, is never “active” in this pure form. Furthermore, when an historical conjuncture arises within which antagonisms threaten to disrupt the prevailing social relations, this will be because “a vast accumulation of contradictions” have “come into play”, “some of which are radically heterogeneous – of different origins, different sense, different levels and points of application – but which nevertheless merge into a ruptural unity”. Each of these “instances”, moreover, has its own “specific modalities” of “action” and is effective within its own region or sphere; it is not autonomous but is “determining as well as determined” in relation to the “various levels and instances of the social formation it animates”. This is what Althusser means by “overdetermination” (Althusser 1979: 99-101). The formal distance between a representation and the social totality to which it points may not, therefore, be an issue. Indeed, the aforementioned example of Sing As We Go, which is a kind of hybrid form, encompassing both utopian elements drawn from the musical and popular entertainment and documentary modes of observation, might be considered as an exemplary instance of an “overdetermined contradiction”; or, to revert to Anderson’s terminology, a phenomenon within which the totality of social relations are observed not in a pure and direct form but through their displacement “into abnormal or paradoxical sectors”. It should be apparent that the landscape of Blackpool – a specific place in the North of England – is not being discussed here with the intention of suggesting

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that this is finally the reality that has proved so elusive, nor that its actuality will shortly be revealed through the stripping away of myth. Nevertheless, whilst the actuality of place has not figured much in this discussion it remains an active element, something postponed and displaced but never eradicated. This can be appreciated by returning to a discussion of Blackpool’s utopian aspect, which is also bound up with an interpretation of the sublime. Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space reaches its conclusion with a sequence filmed in Blackpool. Discussing some aspects of the film in his essay “The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape”, Keiller considers how the desire to change the world through poetic experience and an engagement with the everyday was associated with the activities of various artistic and political avant-gardes – from Poe and Baudelaire, through Surrealism to the Lettrists and the Situationist International – concluding that transformations of everyday space may be subjective but they are not delusions; at “moments of intense collectivity, during demonstrations, revolutions and wars” the landscape does change dramatically, he argues (Keiller 2013: 22). In Robinson in Space the film’s eponymous protagonist is reported to believe that “Blackpool holds the key to his Utopia”. Utopia is also addressed by Tony Bennett, who looks at Blackpool through early Soviet critic Mikail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque as transgression: not in itself a realisation of Utopia but pointing towards the people as “a boundless, unstoppable material force, a vast self-regenerating and undifferentiated body surmounting all obstacles placed in its path”. Similarly, Bennett consider that, because of its communal and collective character, Blackpool’s licenced transgression has an unrealised potential, indicating a possible route towards the boundlessness alluded to by Bakhtin (Bennett 1986: 148). And this might be the meaning of Robinson’s enigmatic reference in Keiller’s film to the politics of everyday life, that “Blackpool stands between us and revolution”. In the aforementioned essay Keiller remarks that this was originally said by an unidentified Lancashire businessman who was subsequently quoted by Thomas Mawson, the person who designed and built Stanley Park in the 1920s. Keiller offers no further interpretation, but the statement in the film in conjunction with the landscape shots it accompanies provokes a dialectical image: Blackpool as the site of subordination and the dispersal of radical zeal, but in its offer of abundance and its proximity to everyday life the site also of revolutionary transformation. These allusions to Utopia and revolution initiate the most unsettling of Keiller’s views of Blackpool, showing the Irish Sea in all of its ferocity; in particular through a long shot of the sea battering the promenade and a sustained image of the ferris wheel on the Central Pier, waves crashing beneath it. One might imagine that for a landscape to have the potential for Utopia or revolution that it would have to contain people, but Keiller’s own practice has often involved the depiction of “places that are nearly or altogether devoid of human

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presence and activity, but which because of this absence are suggestive of what could happen, or what might have happened” (Keiller 2013: 11). This is similar to the European surrealist treatment of emptiness: intense images of the ordinary and the everyday offering the promise of something marvellous or extraordinary about to occur (Walker: 55; Jemison: 173). As with surrealist photographs that appear to be empty of people but derive their power from human traces, so it is with the Central Pier’s ferris wheel: its terrifying fragility, the vulnerability of its human passengers, imagined if not seen, suspended above the waves. We are in the presence of the sublime. Keiller’s surrealist image of Blackpool focuses upon the sublime force of nature, but if the landscape is without people this is, nevertheless, a provisional absence; the lack of an obvious human presence is a postponement, a displacement. These images derive their intensity from an indirect representation of human activity, presenting landscapes in which the absence of people is a momentary exclusion, a deferment of the wonderful, astonishing events occurring just outside of the frame. This is borne out in John Walton’s social and cultural history of Blackpool, which suggests that the communal dimension of working-class experience involves a harnessing of the terrifying force of nature – the typical focus of the sublime image – to collective social energies. Walton argues that because the town lacked any nearby “picturesque or dramatic scenery” there was an early emphasis on its compelling seascapes, on the terrifying grandeur of the Irish Sea, and on the ferociousness of the weather. There were always, he suggests, attempts to draw upon more refined, romantic sensibilities – such as “relatively up-market seafront boarding houses” claiming to offer “distant views of Snowdonia and the Lake District” – but these were minority tastes. More usual was a collective experience of the sublime, associated with “the sea in a boisterous mood”: waves coming right up to the promenade; the “transgressing boundaries”, and people indulging “in games of chasing and dodging with the water, playing with sensations” of being endangered. “Special trains were put on when this kind of experience was on offer” (Walton 1998: 56); this was an acknowledged aspect of Blackpool not available to its rivals.

C onclusion Stuart Hall argues that documentary in the 1930s was part of the process whereby dominant “ways of seeing” – ways through which social relations operated culturally – began to unravel. The images produced through the photojournalism of Picture Post were not of an unmediated reality, they did not depict the exploitation inherent within a capitalist society, but they did, nevertheless, represent that reality in a displaced form. Documentary enabled the “social transparency” that was beginning to erupt at the end of the 1930s to be “transformed

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into a visual and symbolic transparency” (Hall 1972: 13). The notion of totality to which Hall alludes is also discussed by Anderson, who introduces the concept of “abnormal or paradoxical” displacement (Anderson 1968: 47) to indicate that even in distorted forms of knowledge it is nevertheless possible to glimpse the totality of social relations. Displacement is also a key aspect of Althusser’s concept of the “overdetermined contradiction”, which posits that social contradictions can accumulate within particular regions or spheres operating according to their own “specific modalities” of “action” and that a general social crisis might erupt here, at a social formation’s “weakest link” (Althusser 1979: 99-101). It has been argued, following Baxendale and Pawling (1996), that there was a crisis in the mode of representation in 1930s Britain, which gave shape to the novel forms of documentary, in particular the latter’s representation of northern English landscapes. In some instances such representations remained part of a landscape tradition, still governed by the latter’s specific modalities and particular ways of seeing. This was the case with Night Mail and its familiar northern upland landscapes, representing social democracy in its emergent cultural forms. The landscapes of Blackpool, on the other hand, were subject to more complex and contested readings, as the debate over Humphrey Spender’s photography and the activities of Mass Observation would suggest. Here might be found the crisis in representation at its most developed, the site of “abnormal or paradoxical” displacement: encompassing the potential of Bakhtin’s notion of the people as “a boundless, unstoppable material force, a vast self-regenerating and undifferentiated body surmounting all obstacles placed in its path” (Bennett 1986: 148); the place where “… ordinary people enter the stage of human action in their own person”, and where a society is “revealed to itself in its connectedness” (Hall 1972: 13). To glimpse the social totality is not a simple procedure, therefore; it involves a displacement, not the erasure of reality but its removal to a location outside of the frame, where it nevertheless remains active. The argument throughout has suggested that the potential of a landscape’s actuality, the possibility of its momentary apprehension can be found within the circumstances of its encoding; and yet, there still seems to be a need to grasp hold of the actual in more direct and unmediated terms. This grasping hold of actuality is often seen as a necessarily painful experience. Barthes’ concept of the punctum, the bringing of the trauma of loss or mourning to the surface of a photographic image, can be applied to the images produced by Julian Trevelyan during the 1930s. Similarly, Lucy Curzon finds value in the idea of Humphrey Spender’s photographs of Blackpool capturing the temporality of social experience, the relentless boredom and suffering of everyday life, rather than succumbing to the shallow, glittering, surface appearances of the seaside town. This desire for actuality is a powerful one, and surely accounts for the basic appeal of documentary, that it reminds us of the real world. This was an era

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marked by war, genocide, revolution, dislocation, economic and social collapse, catastrophe on an epic scale, an historical conjuncture within which conventional modes of representation were shattered. Barthes conceived of a photographic realism born of personal suffering but it is surely plausible that the collective trauma of nation in the 20th century facilitated a greater immediacy and gave shape to a certain kind of realism during one of its pivotal decades. It may be, however, that the most powerful forms of realism are those able to hold actuality and its signification in a state of productive tension. Approaches based on the notion that photography can give direct access to reality tend to pull these terms apart, affecting a closure around the capacity of the indexical image to resist myth. The landscape of documentary, however, keeps these two elements in play. Why this can happen has been reasonably evident throughout the discussion: landscapes represented in films such as The Horsey Mail, Coal Face, Night Mail, and Sing As We Go all contain socially recognisable people, or their framing, narration, and editing give the films a distinctive social dimension. This tension within an image is dramatised in Keiller’s representation of Blackpool because the emptiness of the landscapes in specific shots has the paradoxical effect of reminding the viewer of a human, social presence, hidden from view or outside of the frame. The impact is further intensified, however, because Keiller’s landscapes call forth notions of the sublime, which is now no longer individual in form but reconfigured around social energies. Keiller’s sublime vision of Blackpool as having the potential for a communal transformation is reinforced by John Walton in a similar but more prosaic fashion, through his notion of the working-class experience of Blackpool as a collective sublime: an experience based not on romantic, distant views and common ideas about awe-inspiring scenery, but in a tangible, embodied, exciting, occasionally terrifying experience of sea, wind and rain; this is a physical experience comparable to the encounter with the harsh and changeable climate of mountainous regions but vastly different as a consequence of its collective dimension. If the focus of the last section of the chapter and much of the conclusion has been concerned less with documentary in its most familiar and mainstream modes than with its more unusual or aberrant forms, this has been done in order to explore one of the initial arguments: specific regional landscapes cannot be understood other than as components of national space, as mainstream, minority, invisible or illegible aspects of the “national imaginary”, as Matless would have it. These disparate landscapes are the consequence of the encoding of the prevailing relations of social and political power, but this procedure does not result in simple, binary arrangements of geographical hierarchy. Occasionally there can be a contraflow of cultural power, as is the case with the landscapes of the North West represented in Night Mail. There can also exist less assimilable and recognisable landscape images, but this does not indicate

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that they have nothing critical to say about nation, its complex arrangements of hierarchy and subordination; indeed, it may be the case that where “abnormal and paradoxical” displacements are most active, in such locations can be apprehended the social totality, not, perhaps, through one, lucid, circumscribing glance, but allusively. As a consequence of the crisis in the mode of representation of which documentary was the bearer, Blackpool in the 1930s may indeed have been the “weakest link” in the chain articulating the “national imaginary”.

R eferences Aitken, Ian (1990): Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement, London: Routledge. Althusser, Louis (1979) [1965]: “Contradiction and Overdetermination.” In: For Marx, London: Verso. Anderson, Perry (1968) “Components of the National Culture.” In: New Left Review 1/50. Anthony, Scott (2007): Night Mail, London: British Film Institute. Barnes, Phil (1934): Trespassers will be Prosecuted: Views of the Forbidden Moorlands of the Peak District, Sheffield: P.A. Barnes. Barthes, Roland (1977): “The Photographic Message” and “The Rhetoric of the Image.” In: Image, Music, Text, Glasgow: Fontana. Barthes, Roland (1993) [1980]: Camera Lucida, London: Vintage. Baxendale, John and Pawling, Christopher (1996): Narrating the Thirties, Houndmills: Macmillan Press. Bennett, Tony (1986): “Hegemony, Ideology, Pleasure: Blackpool.” In: Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Jane Wollacott (eds.), Popular Culture and Social Relations, Buckingham: Open University Press. Coal Face. Film directed by Alberto Cavalcanti [1935]. In: The GPO Film Unit Collection: Volume 1 – Addressing The Nation, DVD (2008), London: British Film Institute. Corner, John (1996): The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cross, Gary (1990): Worktowners at Blackpool, London: Routledge. Curzon, Lucy (2011): “Another Place in Time: Documenting Blackpool for Mass Observation in the 1930s.” In: History of Photography 35/3. Hall, Stuart (1972): “The Social Eye of Picture Post.” In: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: University of Birmingham.

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Hood, Stuart (1983): “The Documentary Film Movement.” In: James Curran and Vincent Porter, (eds.), British Cinema History, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson. The Horsey Mail. Film directed by Pat Jackson [1938]. In: The General Post Office Film Unit Collection Vol. 2 – We Live In Two Worlds, DVD (2009), London: British Film Institute. Housing Problems. Film directed by Arthur Elton and E. H. Anstey [1935]. In: Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930-1950, DVD (2013), London: British Film Institute. Jay, Martin (1994): Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought, Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jemison, Annette Joy (2009): “Barrenness and Abjection?: The Iconography of the Wasteland in the Photographs and Collages of Julian Trevelyan, 19371938.” In: Visual Resources 25/3. Keiller, Patrick (2013): “The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape.” In: The View From the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes, London: Verso. Lefebvre, Martin (2006): Landscape and Film, London: Routledge. Listen to Britain. Film directed by Humphrey Jennings [1941]. In: The Complete Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume Two: Fires Were Started, DVD, (2012), London: British Film Institute. Matless, David (1998): Landscape and Englishness, London: Reaktion Books. Matless, David (2012): “Accents of Landscape in GPO Country: The Horsey Mail, 1938.” In: Twentieth Century British History 23/1. Nichols, Bill (1983): “The Voice of Documentary.” In: Film Quarterly 36/3. Night Mail. Film directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright [1936], DVD (2007), London: British Film Institute. Robinson in Space. Film directed by Patrick Keiller [1997]. In: London and Robinson in Space, DVD (2012), London: British Film Institute. Rothman, Benny (1982): 1932 Kinder Trespass: A Personal View of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, Timperley: Willow Publishing. Said, Edward W. (1979): Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Shields, Rob (1991): Places on the Margins: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, London: Routledge. Sing as We Go. Film directed by Basil Dean [1934]. In: Love Life And Laughter/ Sing As We Go, DVD (2011), London: Optimum Home Entertainment. Spender, Stephen (1982): Worktown people: photographs from northern England, 1937-38, Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Thompson, Grahame (1983): “Carnival and Calculable: Consumption and Play at Blackpool.” In: Tony Bennet, Fredric Jameson, Cora Kaplan, et al (eds.), Formations of Pleasure, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Walker, Ian (2002): City Gorged With Dreams: Surrealism and documentary photography in interwar Paris, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Walton, John K. (1998): Blackpool, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wells, Liz (2011): Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, London: I.B. Tauris.

Illustrations In Aileen Harvey’s essay: fig 1. Scarasta 000004062010, from the series West from here, 2010; fig 2. Luskentyre 000003062010, from the series West from here, 2010; fig 3. Tarbet (Sutherland), 2013; fig 4. Howmore 000010062010, from the series West from here, 2010; fig 5. Berneray 000005062010, from the series West from here, 2010; fig 6. Smeircleit 000011062010, from the series West from here, 2010. All photographs by Aileen Harvey. In Julia Peck’s essay. All images by Olaf Otto Becker: fig 1. River 2, 07/2008, Position 16 69°46’33”N, 49°42’20”W, Altitude 870m. From: Becker (2009) Above Zero, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. fig 2. Armin and Yanti Petani building their new home, Riau area, Sumatra, Indonesia 10/2013. From: Becker (2014) Reading the Landscape, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; fig 3. Business Building, Singapore 11/2013. From: Becker (2014) Reading the Landscape, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; fig 4. Greenhouse, Munich Botanical Garden, 05/2014. From: Becker (2014) Reading the Landscape, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. All photographs courtesy of Olaf Otto Becker. In Susan Brind and Jim Harold’s essay: fig 1. Interior of the Old Church tower, Tornio, built in 1686, and dedicated to Queen Eleonora of Sweden, 2000; fig 2. The Tornio River, Kukkola, 2000; fig 3. View above the tree line from Saana Fell across Kilpisjärvi towards Sweden, 2000; fig 4. World War II German military road across Saana Fell, 2000; fig. 5 Raja-Jooseppi, Border Point, 2002; fig 6. Raja-Jooseppi, Joseph’s farm, looking towards the Russian border, 2002; fig 7. Raja-Jooseppi border zone, 2002. All photographs by Susan Brind and Jim Harold.

Biographies of contributors Susan Brind is a Reader in Contemporary Art based in the Department of Sculpture & Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art (GSA). Her independent and collaborative works have been widely exhibited in Europe and the UK, and her praxis embraces curatorial and publishing projects. Published works include The State of the Real: Aesthetics in the Digital Age (co-edited with Sutton and McKenzie, IB Tauris, 2007). She co-leads, GSA’s Reading Landscape Research Group with Dr Nicky Bird. Susan Brind & Jim Harold are members of the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories: People, Places, Processes (formed in 2016) comprising inter-disciplinary practitioners and theorists from England, Scotland, Norway and South Cyprus, whose research, individually and collectively, seeks to consider the nature and value of space and place, public as well as marginal, across Europe. Chris Goldie is formerly Senior Lecturer, currently Honorary Research Fellow, in the Department of Media Arts and Communication, Sheffield Hallam University. He has a BA in history and an MA in cultural studies. His PhD thesis explored the culture and politics of space in 1960s Britain. Chris has taught at Sheffield City Polytechnic/ Sheffield Hallam University since 1985. His teaching and research focus has been interdisciplinary, working with students in the fields of history, fine art and design, art history, film and media. His most recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Design History (2011) and The Journal of International Relations, Peace Studies and Development (2017). Jim Harold  is an artist based in Glasgow. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has work in public collections, including the V&A and the Arts Council of England. Published works include: ‘Caesura: Cyprus–Kibris– Kypros’,  Interstices, ‘The Drouth’, Issue 54, Winter/Spring 2016; ‘Witnessing the Momentous:  Crowds, Stones and Images, Silent Witnesses’: Leighton & Büchler (eds.),  Saving the Image: Art after film, CCA, Glasgow/MMU, Manchester 2003. He completed a PhD at Glasgow University in 2013, entitled Lovers Adrift in the Desert: An Analysis and Comparative Study of the Poetics of the

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Desert in Arab and European Travel Writings. This research explored the desert landscape as a poetic space in both Arab and Western literature. Aileen Harvey is an artist whose work engages with the experience of place. Her processes of walking, photography, drawing, and writing are used to inter-relate location, time and the body. Born in London, Aileen studied philosophy at Edinburgh (1998) and Cambridge (2000), and then sculpture at Wimbledon College of Art (2008); the one subject informing the other. Exhibitions include: Bernard Leach Gallery, St Ives; Customs House Gallery, Sunderland; Karussell, Zürich; An Lanntair, Stornoway; The Photographers’. Joanne Lee is Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. She is an artist, photographer and writer whose work emerges through the Pam Flett Press, an independent serial publication essaying aspects of everyday life. Her research on place explores specific sites in the (post)industrial North through which she considers urban and rural ‘terrains vagues’ (edgelands), issues of home and belonging, and the resonances of littered landscapes. This work also informs her investigation of spatial metaphors within practice based research. She has published journal articles and an artist’s book. Fiona MacLaren is Senior Lecturer in Photography at Nottingham Trent University and a practising artist, researcher and curator. She is interested in how the cultural, social and political compose and constitute contexts of ‘landscape’ and meanings of place. She was co-curator of the exhibition In Place of Architecture and a contributing author to Territories of Identity: Architecture in the Age of Evolving Globalization which examines the agency of memory in the post conflict landscape. Julia Peck is a photographer, writer and academic based at the University of Gloucestershire. Her doctoral thesis examined the visual construction of the Australian landscape in commercial photographic practices and she has an interest in the representation of nature more broadly. Her photographic work has been exhibited in the UK and she has contributed images, articles and reviews to Next Level, Dandelion, Source, Visual Studies, History of Photography, Photographies and Journal of Australian Studies; she has also co-edited the Photography, Archive and Memory special issue of Photographies (2010). Darcy White is Principal Lecturer in Visual Culture in the Department of Media Arts and Communication, Sheffield Hallam University. She began her interest in art as a landscape painter and printmaker. Initially studying fine art, she later gained her BA and MA in the history of art and spent 5 years teaching with the Workers Education Association, before taking up an academic post at

Biographies of contributors

Sheffield Hallam University, where she teaches the history and theory of photography. She has a particular interest in land / landscape, and runs landscape photography residential field trips for students. Her most recent publication, written with Elizabeth Norman and published by Liverpool University Press, is Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire (2015). Darcy is currently conducting research in landscape theory.

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Social Sciences and Cultural Studies Carlo Bordoni

Interregnum Beyond Liquid Modernity 2016, 136 p., pb. 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3515-7 E-Book PDF: 17,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3515-1 EPUB: 17,99€ (DE), ISBN 978-3-7328-3515-7

Alexander Schellinger, Philipp Steinberg (eds.)

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European Alternatives, Daphne Büllesbach, Marta Cillero, Lukas Stolz (eds.)

Shifting Baselines of Europe New Perspectives beyond Neoliberalism and Nationalism May 2017, 212 p., pb. 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3954-4 E-Book: available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3954-8

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