Photography, Curation, Criticism: An Anthology 9781032407739, 9781032407722, 9781003354680

Citation preview

PHOTOGRAPHY, CURATION, CRITICISM

This unique collection brings together the work of photography writer, curator, and lecturer, Liz Wells, reflecting on key themes of landscape, place, nationhood, and environmental concerns. A newly written introductory chapter contextualizes the collection. This is followed by an ‘in conversation’ with Martha Langford, Concordia University, Montreal, that brings together two leading figures in the field to respond to Wells’ thought and the themes that emerge in her writings. The essays included in this anthology draw on work from a variety of sources including artists’ photobooks, exhibition catalogues, magazines, academic books, and journals. Seventeen previously published articles, organized thematically in relation to Curation and Residency, Phenomena, Place, and Critical Reflections, demonstrate Wells’ critical and curatorial approach to research through photographic practices, reflecting a core view of art (at its best) operating to convey the implications of what is being explored and to evoke responses that are simultaneously sensory and intellectual. This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of photography, visual culture, and art history, especially those examining landscape and environmental photography. Liz Wells, writer, curator, and lecturer, edited The Photography Reader and The Photography Culture Reader (2019; 2003, 1st ed.) and Photography: A Critical Introduction (2021, 6th ed.; trans, Greek, 2008; Chinese, 2012; Korean, 2016) and is a co-editor for photographies, Routledge journals. She has contributed many essays within artist books, exhibition catalogues, journals, and other edited collections, some of which form part of this anthology of her (dispersed) writings. She is series editor for Photography, Place, Environment published by Routledge.

PHOTOGRAPHY, CURATION, CRITICISM An Anthology

Liz Wells

Designed cover image: Speaking House #6, 2006 © Marja Pirilä First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Liz Wells The right of Liz Wells to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-40773-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-40772-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35468-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii Chapter Credits ix Prologue – Liz Wells xi Acknowledgements xiv PART I

Critical Reflections

1

1 Photography, Curation, Criticism

3

2 Speaking of This Collection: A Conversation Between Martha Langford and Liz Wells

18

PART II

On Curation and Residency

31

3 Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention: The Genesis of Facing East 33 4 Landscapes of Exploration

48

5 On Being Out of Place

64

vi  Contents

PART III

Phenomena 69 6 Icy Prospects

71

7 Light Touch

85

8 No Man’s Land: Antarctica and the Contemporary Sublime

95

PART IV

Place 105 9 Points of Departure: Currencies of the Post-Industrial Sublime

107

10 Questions of Distance

124

11 Photography, Nation, Nature

132

12 A Man of the North

147

13 Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas

158

14 Histories and Imagination: Narrative and Metaphor in the Work of John Kippin

172

15 Silent Witness

185

PART V

Critical Spaces

191

16 Seeing Beyond Belief: Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analysing the Visual Co-author, Martin Lister 193 17 The Critical Forum

226

18 Then and Now: Some Notes on Photography and Theory

232

19 Modes of Investigation: On Photography and Environment

237

About the Author 255 Index 257

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Chrystel Lebas, Études, Bel-Val, 6 Mars 2009, Soir I; Études, Bel-Val, 6 Mars 2009, Soir II; Études, Bel-Val, 6 Mars 2009, Soir III 3 3.1 Petter Magnussen, ‘Explosion No. 1’, 2002 37 3.2 Māra Brašmane, from Waters, 1999–2001 39 3.3 Joakim Eskildsen, from Requiem, 2000 42 3.4 Margaretta Klingberg, ‘Lövsjöhöjden’ from From Home, 2001–2002 42 3.5 Juha Suonpää, from Wilderness, 1990s 43 3.6 Riitta Päiväläinen, ‘Portrait’, 2001, from Vestige – ice series 45 4.1 Map produced by the British Antarctic Survey with data from the SCAR Antarctic Digital Database, accessed 2022 48 4.2 Herbert Ponting, ‘Terra Nova Icebound’, 13 December 1910 52 6.1 Jorma Puranen, ‘Terra Incognita’, 1997, from Curiosus Naturae Spectator 71 6.2 Jorma Puranen, from imaginary Homecoming, 1991 76 6.3 Jorma Puranen, ‘Terra Exagitatorum’, 1995, from Curiosus Naturae Spectator 79 9.1 John Kippin, ‘Monument’, 2010/12 107 9.2 John Martin, ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’, 1857. Print made by engraver Thomas Maclean for John Martin 112 9.3 Chris Wainwright, ‘Error, Sunderland, UK’, 2012 121 12.1 Esko Männikkö ‘Untitled’ from Harmony Sisters, 2007 147 12.2 Esko Männikkö ‘Untitled’ from Organised Freedom, 2001 150 12.3 Esko Männikkö, Installation. Time Flies, Kunsthalle Helsinki, 2014 154 13.1 Anthony Haughey, ‘Shotgun cartridges, Armagh/Louth Border’ from the series Disputed Territory, 2006 159

viii  Illustrations

13.2 Maria Bleda & José Maria Rosa, Calatañazor, en torno al año 1000, from Campos de batalla, España, 1994–96 160 13.3 Maria Bleda & José Maria, Installation, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, MARCO. Vigo, 2005 162 13.4 Chloe Dewe Mathews, ‘Private William Smith 06:30/14.11.1917 Primary school, Reningelst, West-Vlaanderen’, from Shot at Dawn, 2013 163 13.5 David Farrell, Innocent Landscapes, Oristown (Twilight), 1999 165 13.6 Bart Michiels, ‘Passchendaele, 1917, Goudberg Copse, 2005’, from The Course of History 167 13.7 Ori Gersht, stills from The Clearing: The Forest, 2005 168 14.1 John Kippin, ‘Nostalgia for the Future’, 1988 172 14.2 John Kippin, ‘Beauty’, from Compton Verney, 2003–2004 180 15.1 Oscar Palacio, ‘White Fence’, 2002 185 16.1 Marlboro cigarette advert, c.1995 198 16.2 Robert Doisneau, ‘An Oblique glance’, 1948/49 200 16.3 Bartolo da Sassoferrato. De Fluminibus, Woodcut, Rome 1483 203 16.4 Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘Clifton’, 1981 207 16.5 David Hampshire/Martin Lister. Photograph of schoolboys, circa 1986 209 16.6 New Year’s Day, Korem camp, Wallo province, Ethiopia, 1985 211 16.7 Mike Goldwater. Drought migrant, Zalazele transit centre, Tigray, 1983 211 16.8 Chris Steele-Perkins. USAid, Sudan, 1985 214 16.9 Mike Wells, A food convoy passing through Korem Refugee Camp on its way to Mekele Camp in Tigray, February 1985 215 16.10 Carl Lewis photograph for a Pirelli advertisement, 1994 220 16.11 Sean Bonnell. ‘Chalk Down’, from the series Groundings, 1996 221 19.1 Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo, ‘Yard Tree, Spruce’, 1997, from Puiden Kansa (Tree People) 239 19.2 SofijaSilvia, Silent Islands, Brijuni – Imaginary Landscape, No. 01, Idyl, 2009 241 19.3 Chrystel Lebas, Presence – Untitled n.30 – Risnjak – Kupa, 2010 242 19.4 Mandy Barker, from SOUP: Refused, 2013 244 19.5 Andreas Müller-Pohle, ‘Budapest, 2005’ from The Danube River Project 245 19.6 John Ganis, ‘Chrysler Technology Center Construction, Auburn Hills, Michigan, 1987’ from the series, Consuming the American Landscape, 2003 246 19.7 Isabelle Pateer, ‘Kirsten’ from Unsettled, 2012 249 19.8 Marie-José Jongerius, from the series, Lunar Landscapes, 2012 250 19.9 John Kippin, ‘QE2 entering Harbour’, billboard, from FUTURELAND NOW, 2012 252

CHAPTER CREDITS

1 ‘Photography, Curation, Criticism’, Liz Wells, 2022

3

2 ‘Speaking of this Collection: A Conversation Between Martha Langford and Liz Wells’, 2022

18

3 ‘Curatorial strategy as critical intervention: The Genesis of Facing East’ in Judith Rugg, ed. Issues in Curating, Contemporary Art and Performance, Bristol: Intellect, 2007

33

4 ‘Landscapes of Exploration’ in Liz Wells Ed. Landscapes of Exploration, British Art from Antarctica. Plymouth: UPP, 2012

48

5 ‘On Being Out of Place’ in Liz Wells Ed. Layers of Visibility, Plymouth: UPP, 2018

64

6 ‘Icy Prospects’, in Malcolm Miles and Nicola Kirkham, Eds. Cultures and Settlements, Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003

71

7 ‘Light Touch’, in Liz Wells Ed. Light Touch, @ Baltimore: Maryland Arts Place, 2014. https://issuu.com/ marylandartplace/docs/light_touch_catalog 85 8 ‘No Man’s Land: Antarctica and the Contemporary Sublime’, Unpublished symposium paper. Land/Water and the Visual Arts, University of Plymouth, 2011

95

x  Chapter Credits

9 ‘Points of Departure: currencies of the post-industrial sublime’ in John Kippin and Chris Wainwright, Futureland Now. Plymouth: UPP, 2012

107

10 ‘Questions of Distance’ in Yiannis Toumazis Ed. Temporary Taxonomy. 124 Nicosia: Republic of Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture for Cyprus Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011

11 ‘Photography, Nation, Nature’ in Sense of Place: European Landscape Photography (exh. cat. Bozar – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels), Bozar Books & Prestel, 2012

132

12 ‘A Man of the North’, in Esko Männikkö Time Flies, Helsinki Taidehalli/Finnish Art Society, 2014

147

13 ‘Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas’ in photographies 12.2, Summer 2019

158

14 ‘Histories and Imagination: narrative and metaphor in the work of John Kippin’ in John Kippin, Based on a True Story, New York: Kerber, 2018

172

15 ‘Silent Witness’ in Oscar Palacio, American Places. San Francisco: California Institute of Integrated Studies, 2013

185

16 ‘Seeing Beyond Belief: Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analysing the Visual’, in Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt eds. Handbook of Visual Analysis, 2001. London: Sage

193

17 ‘The Critical Forum’, in The Journal of Media Practice, Vol 1:2, 2000. Bristol: Intellect

226

18 ‘Then and Now, some notes on photography and theory’, Source 33, Winter 2002

232

19 ‘Modes of Investigation: on photography and environment’ in Hedberg et al, Broken –Environmental Photography. Valand Academy, and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, 2014

237

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders, but this has not been possible in every case. The publishers would be pleased to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged here so that this section may be amended at the earliest opportunity.

PROLOGUE

As a writer and curator, I deal in and reflect on the power of images as a means of communication. For me, this is not new. My first interest was in theatre. I worked for several years (late 1960s/early 1970s) as a lighting assistant or designer in independent, experimental, and more mainstream theatre. My interest in the power of light, its effects and affects, have not diminished, whether thinking about and experiencing natural light, or reflecting on the pictorial inter-relation of theme, form, and aesthetics. In the pre-digital era, when I first started writing about still images, photography was still chemically premised on ‘writing with light’ and mobilization of light for image emotion as well as clarity was one point of fascination. Nowadays, digital manipulations can fake effects of natural or artificial light, but in terms of image-meaning and evocations, light, shade, highlights, tonal contrast, and mutability remain central to my interest in the medium. As a feminist, an environmentalist, and the daughter of a politically active father, it is impossible for me to critically engage with photography and related media without considering the whys and wherefores of what is being communicated. There is little purpose in utterance unless something is worth conveying. The content may be elliptical – a good morning to a neighbour is a mini-expression of community; an emailed photo of an event is not only a statement of ‘I was there’ but also reaffirms contact or friendship. Of course, this is to over-simplify, but my point is that visual communications matter, they have significance. This is the key reason for interrogating visual culture. This collection has had a long gestation. It results in part from professional colleagues, often women academics, asking where they can track my writings which, indeed, are dispersed across a range of types of publication from conference collections, journals, and artist monographs to exhibition catalogues and academic textbooks. Since 1985, when I had a brief tenure as editor of Camerawork, East London,

xii  Prologue

I have reviewed exhibitions and written about photographic culture on a regular basis. Writing from critical and politically radical perspectives, Berthold Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and, in the UK, Victor Burgin (photographer and academic) and Stuart Hall (British cultural philosopher and multi-cultural advocate) were key influences in the 1980s, the era in which I turned my attention to photography. I had become interested in visual culture, and throughout the 1980s worked as a part-time tutor for the Open University U203 Popular Culture course which offered a steep and challenging learning curve since, as an inter-disciplinary programme, some of the material was previously unfamiliar to everyone involved. The strength of the study programme derived from collaboration, teamwork, and trust in the expertise of fellow academics. The various writings included in this selection are drawn from different types of publication, including artists’ photobooks, exhibition catalogues, magazines, academic books, and journals. Themes have been diverse, ranging from semiotic readings of imagery and fostering spaces for critical debates, to questions of gender, representation, and identity, or of land, landscape, territory, and place, and, especially recently, environmental issues, politics, policies, and practices. Yet, taking account of ways in which essays are formulated to operate within differing types of publication, a few common threads emerge more-or-less explicitly. They include: first, not taking imagery at face value and, it follows, fostering supportive contexts for testing ideas and exchanging responses. Several essays emphasize creating opportunities for critical reflection on projects as they develop and on the photographic practices of others. Second, I repeatedly reference thinking through practice, reflecting a core view of art (at its best) evoking responses that are simultaneously sensory and intellectual. I had the good fortune to attend a Montessori primary school where the emphasis was on learning through doing (‘playing’, as it seemed then). For me, this has morphed into thinking through writing and curating. ‘Essay’ is derived from the French, ‘essayer’, to try. Both within my own projects, and when involved in advising doctoral students, I continue to advocate testing ideas, images, and methods. I enjoy the challenge of extending ideas through writing, curatorial assemblage, and critical reflection on conceptual endeavours, artistic and philosophical. Third, that visual communications matter anchors my interest in photography as a means of broader political and environmental interrogation; it follows that I have often worked with or written about images and series anchored in some arena of engagement within which a critical – radical – eye is brought into play. Nowadays this often – but not quite always – relates to land, place, environment, and sustainability. That many essays are for photobooks or catalogues reflects a core view of the purpose of art that – at its most interesting – operates to convey ideas and values, and to invoke emotions, in other words, to evoke responses that are simultaneously sensory and intellectual. It is not possible to include all the articles that I have written over the last 35 years within this anthology. In some cases, they are simply out of date or, if from

Prologue  xiii

earlier years, not as well informed as I would expect of myself now. In others, for instance, contributions to textbooks (edited by me, or by others), they are easily accessed. In addition, sometimes it is inappropriate to extract essays commissioned for artist photobooks or exhibition catalogues as images are extensively cross-­ referenced. In such publications, images lead and texts offer support, complementing picture series through extending references and contextualization; texts may be too ­context-specific to stand alone. In selecting essays for this collection, I have chosen articles that are less easily accessed (for instance, hidden in journals or conference editions) along with some longer pieces published in catalogues or monographs that, by dint of length, open more substantial questions alongside critical discussion of the contribution of the photographer whose work, in effect, offered a springboard for thinking about and situating photographic practices more broadly. Liz Wells November 2022.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A huge thank you to Martha Langford, Research Professor in the Department of Art History, Concordia University (Montreal), for encouraging and supporting this project from the outset, and, specifically, for agreeing to conduct the ‘in conversation’ that forms Chapter 2 of this anthology. It was an enjoyable – ­occasionally challenging – discussion. I am also grateful to Professor Barbara Jo Revelle, ­ University of Florida, Gainesville, who, in 2017, bought me a coffee and persuaded me to consider assembling a collection of my writings. I owe a debt to colleagues internationally in North America and Europe, but also in Singapore, Bangladesh, and Mexico, for repeated invitations to teach, and to participate in events that, collaterally, have ensured that I reflect on the circumstances and import of photography in different cultures and political situations. I would also like to thank my friends – you know who you are – and, particularly, my colleagues at University of Plymouth, UK, for their support and friendship over the last couple of decades. I am grateful to the photographers, foundations, and photography agencies for permissions to include their photographs, and to publishers for agreeing to the re-publication of my writings. Finally, I am grateful to Natalie Foster, Commissioning Editor at Routledge, with whom, happily, I have worked on many projects, and to the team at Routledge: Kelly O’Brien and Ruth Berry. Note: Websites and other addresses referenced in this collection were checked in Autumn 2022.

PART I

Critical Reflections

1 PHOTOGRAPHY, CURATION, CRITICISM

FIGURE 1.1 

 hrystel Lebas, Études, Bel-Val, 6 Mars 2009, Soir I; Études, Bel-Val, 6 C Mars 2009, Soir II; Études, Bel-Val, 6 Mars 2009, Soir III. © Chrystel Lebas. DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-2

4  Critical Reflections

Reflections To photograph is to document. Whether literal or impressionistic, photographs reference people, places, events, phenomena, circumstances, and actions at specific moments in time. The image is a fragment of a broader, multi-layered narrative. Photographs indicate something about social experience. Addressing questions through writing and curating allows me to tease out circumstances and methods whereby photography influences us, centrally contributing to how we understand circumstances under which and through which we live. Reviewing talks I have given, and my published writings, over more than two decades, I see that I frequently return to similar questions, re-articulated in various forms and contexts. Essentially, I keep asking how photography contributes to cultural formations and informs our ways of seeing and knowing. As a curator I am interested in how photography can influence perceptions, attitudes, and actions. What can art do? From an academic perspective, how do photographs operate aesthetically and emotionally to inform and to evoke responses? In analytic terms, I have written about visual culture in terms of meaning and interpretation, identity, and formative influences. Writing about the work of specific photographers, or projects such as residencies or exhibitions, has allowed me to work through some of these questions in relation to identifiable aims, interests, and methods of working; a form of ‘grounded theory’ in the sense that more general questions and analytic approaches are tested and refined through application in a particular context. I should add that I am using the terms ‘photographer’ and ‘artist’ somewhat loosely. Most of those with whom I work are independent photographers, working in still and moving imagery, using art galleries, photobooks, and – where relevant – film festivals to publish their work. Photographers investigating places and situations ask themselves how best to tell a story through pictures. What can images convey? As a curator, I am interested in themed interventions that cause pause for thought. Through bringing together different artists’ perceptions, two-person or group exhibitions facilitate dialogues in the sense of ‘conversations’ between the artists and discussions that might be generated among visitors or by exhibitions’ reviews. Retrospectively, I note that exhibition themes shifted from women and landscape (back in the 1990s, when, certainly in Britain, women’s presence within the field was largely overlooked), to questions of place and identity, and, more recently, environment and sustainability. Also, I had not previously considered the extent to which I have worked with photographers based away from the major European centres, for example, Nordic and Baltic areas, Croatia, or Cyprus. I was aware that photography has allowed me to vicariously indulge my fascination with polar regions, which, of course, does interlink with the Nordic. In terms of exhibitions, often my concern has been to bring that which is overlooked into view – whether work by women, work from regions not well represented in mainstream publications and exhibitions, or, more urgently, work about environmental changes that should concern us but escape attention, often because they are ‘there’ not ‘here’. In this respect, my work as a

Photography, Curation, Criticism  5

writer and curator follows in the footsteps of photographers concerned to enjoin us to ‘look at this!’. Many of my essays on the work of specific photographers, or about photography, place, and environment, were published in photobooks or exhibitions’ catalogues, that are often produced in short print runs and not widely distributed. It follows that these writings are dispersed. More critical pieces have usually found a place in academic journals or collections edited by others, that may now be out of print or not easily available. Re-reading writings from the early 1990s to around 2018 was not only a practical necessity for preparing an anthology; it was also instructive in that I had not necessarily remembered in detail what I had been puzzling about, and had not noted the extent to which I repeatedly return to some questions (for instance, the sublime). Although organized thematically, not chronologically, this anthology does indicate some of the shifts in theoretical and critical concerns that have developed over the years. It also indicates my interest in what images can do; in photography as a form of critical intervention that in some way informs us and nudges us to think differently. Photographs trigger many questions and considerations. These relate to form, style and aesthetics, content, context of making, technologies, and, of course, to photographers, their ways of researching, thinking, and working that draw upon their own biographical experience, interests, motivations, and intentions, as well as responding to image-making aims and circumstance. What photographs facilitate or constrain in terms of meaning and interpretation, emotions, and prior understandings are also in play, as are the situations in which they are encountered. In terms of visual literacy, there are further layers and processes to reflect upon that implicate a range of theoretical, political, sociological, and psychoanalytic models, perspectives, and issues. That there are multiple entangled considerations is perhaps what makes photography so fascinating as a means of communication. Historically, the potential for photo-graphy (writing with light) was premised on chemical reaction to light and sensitivity to light intensity. Now, digital image-­ making draws on mathematical principles to simulate the photographic. But, in terms of meaning and the visual image itself, this makes relatively little difference, except to uncertainties relating to verisimilitude. Many of the questions relating to photography, culture, and knowledge persist despite technological shifts. For most people – other than photographers and image technologists – it is not the methods so much as the results, the pictures, that form the starting point for valuing and responding to what we continue to call ‘photographs’ regardless of the means of making and circulation. That which is depicted is ontologically inseparable from the process of image-registration (the one cannot exist without the other); it is the themes and ideas expressed through the inter-relation of aesthetic form and visual content, through what we see and how it is framed, that arrest attention, seduce imagination, and invoke responses. Photographic aesthetics were formed in part through what early camera technologies and chemical experiments aimed to facilitate, in part through reference to pre-existing visual culture, particularly drawing and painting, and in part through

6  Critical Reflections

the cultural role cameras came to play. These included contributing to ways in which places and circumstances elsewhere were imagined, whether, for example, Pacific regions viewed from Western European perspectives or vice versa. That photography was a feature within Western European industrialization and empire-building, and was associated with American settlers exploring westward territories, is widely reflected in the European and North American histories and archives that broadly define the context within which my familiarity with photo histories was formed and nurtured. Light is core to photography, technically, in terms of the visibility of that being recorded, and rhetorically, in terms of form and poetics. Viewers engage with the content of an image and its implications both intellectually and emotionally, responding to intensities of light, shade, and colour. Reflections on light, its historical core implication in photography as well as in human well-being, are pursued in the brief catalogue essay for the exhibition, Light Touch, that I curated in 2014 for the gallery wall at Baltimore-Washington International airport (Chapter 7). Given my increasing concern with environmental issues, including the human carbon footprint and the consequences of extreme global warming, the title, Light Touch, for an exhibition in an airport, was intended as quietly paradoxical. A picture from Marja Pirilä’s series, Speaking House, 2006, included in that show, forms the front cover for this anthology, selected because it expresses one of my central interests, which is the movement, effects, affects, and reflectivity of natural light. Light touches us, contributing clarity of sight. We feel the regenerative warmth of sunlight on our skin, and we share this light with others. We talk of being light-handed, delicate, not clumsy. To be enlightened is to have knowledge and vision. ‘Light’ is not simply a physical manifestation but a concept with metaphoric resonances. In the context of an airport concourse that featured a glass roof and window panels creating an airfield viewing area opposite the gallery wall, the movement of light across the course of the day significantly adjusted the viewing experience. Viewers, generally passengers in transit, will not have experienced this, but airport staff may have noticed pictures differently according to their changing work shifts. The centrality of light relating to modes of investigation of natural phenomena and to the sensorial has been a recurrent concern within my exhibitions as curator.

Interventions As a curator my focus has been on photography, land, landscape, people, and place. My first two exhibitions concerned the relative absence of attention to work by women photographers within British landscape photography. Happily, three decades on from when I first started considering this in 1992, this scenario has radically changed, not only out of some sense of ‘fairness’ to those previously overlooked or excluded from the mainstream but also because the tenets of the genre have shifted. Where once landscape was primarily associated with territorial-style investigation, now more intimate entanglements within our experiences of place and phenomena have become more central along with engagements with the consequences of the

Photography, Curation, Criticism  7

era of the Anthropocene for ecological sustainability. More recently, exhibitions that I have curated (and most of my writings, other than textbooks) have centred on investigations of place and associated environmental questions, as have many of my lectures (Chapters 3, 5, 7, 9, 11). As is reflected in this anthology, having spent much of my professional career thinking about land, landscape, place, and environment, I have worked extensively with independent photographers (as opposed to those operating primarily commercially) who are more likely to communicate through photobooks and exhibition installations. Exhibitions offer a form of theatre (Chapter 3). Curators articulate bodies of work, either several series by one or two artists, or a range of projects by selected artists relating to a theme or occasion. Audience experiences of exhibitions are accumulative; a range of works viewed collectively interact to invoke responses and generate questions that transcend the import of single images or series. The audience is mobile, normally free to move through spaces in whatever directions and at whatever speed feels appropriate. Indeed, the experience of visiting galleries in the UK in 2020/2021, immediately after the lifting of Covid-19 lockdowns, when one-way systems and social distancing, along with masks, timeslots, and hand sanitizers, were in force, made it clear how important it is to be able to wander freely. For some months, given stipulated routes, not being allowed to return to reconsider a photograph or series in relation to a body of work encountered later in exhibitions seemed a significant restriction.1 The photobook likewise allows for story-telling processes that operate accumulatively; form, design, and sequencing are generative in terms of meaning and interpretation. Sequences and juxtapositions both extend and limit possibilities for interpretation, although of course each reader brings their own experiences and perspectives into play. In relation to this, the positioning of the critical essay is a factor. Should the essay function as an establishing note or an endnote? In this context, the task of writing almost always involves critical foregrounding of aspects of a project, including the photographer’s approach, situating this within the field of historical and contemporary photo practices, suggesting social significance, and drawing attention to specific characteristics of imagery or working methods. In the context of a photobook, it is the photography that is the starting point.2

The Image that Disturbs Photographers investigating places and situations ask themselves how best to tell a story in pictures. What can their images convey that words might not? There is little purpose in images that do not ‘disturb’ in some way. To ‘disturb’ may mean to upset or shock, but more often images disturb more subtly through enhancing information or adjusting preconceptions. Something adds to what we think we know. To paraphrase the American critic, Susan Sontag, photographs should not be taken at face value; rather they should be understood as starting points for learning about the world, for further investigation and reflection, for questioning what is represented (Sontag, 1979). In this respect, interpretation and

8  Critical Reflections

significance are fluid, sensitive to contexts of encounter, and, indeed, the rationale for and the mood in which a viewer is considering an image or series. Insofar as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of ‘decisive moment’ is relevant, it relates to the photographer’s interests and intentions, and to types of practice that rely on scenarios captured (Figure 16.2 offers a good example). More generally, photographs are limited in what they can show, and therefore tell. As the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, famously argued in the 1930s, a picture of the outside walls of the Krupp factory told observers nothing of the labour relations that obtained within the workplace nor of the political affiliation of those in charge (the Krupp family were known Nazi supporters) (Benjamin, 1972: 24). Hence, as storytellers, social documentary photographers use captions, quotes, statements, or contextualizing essays to extend and enhance what they aim to convey. As image readers, we wonder what we cannot see, what is going on behind the walls. Other ‘disturbances” may seem immediate, significant, and shocking. As I write, war is raging in Europe (in Ukraine, 2022). Still and moving photojournalism has seemed relentless, violent, shocking, and upsetting. Anecdotally, numerous people have told me that they no longer watch news on television, preferring to listen on radio, from which I deduce that the power of the image is, indeed, distressing, not only because of what is happening and the limits on what we can do to help, but also because we are reminded of the instability of human circumstances and lifestyles. In other words, what is implied by the scenes depicted is overwhelming. For those of us who do choose to watch the news, questions of ‘image fatigue’ are in play. Is there a point when the repeated image/imagination of horror numbs our sensibilities? And, it might be added, does screen size play a role in this? Is the import of imagery more insistent on a large television monitor than via newsfeeds accessed by phone? Over two decades ago, Martin Lister and I collaboratively reflected on visual analysis and communications, drawing on the agenda and conceptual tools offered by cultural studies (Chapter 16). The centrality of mobile phones as a global space of making, transmitting, and viewing image-information was yet to emerge as the phenomenal network that it has become, although it was being anticipated and developed in the early 2000s by telephonic entrepreneurs such as Nokia.3 Were we to re-address the visual communication issues and implications that we then engaged, questions of screen scale, quality of (pixel) definition, and the mobility of contexts and circumstances of viewing photojournalism and other imagery would be central to our analysis. Indeed, the speed of technological developments and ways in which new possibilities were incorporated within visual culture was marked by the fact that the second edition, 2013, of Lister’s edited collection, The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, first published in 1995, featured a completely new set of essays (and retained only two of the 12 original contributing authors; Lister, 1995/2013). If photography is to communicate responses to events, situations, pleasures, and issues, then reflections on photo-aesthetics need also to take new circumstances of production and distribution into account. In ‘Then and Now’, published in Source magazine 20 years ago, I argued that the task of theory is to explain but that contexts

Photography, Curation, Criticism  9

of making and viewing are always crucial; the ‘nebulousness of image-encounters’ makes analysis of processes of reading and interpretation of photographs particularly challenging (Chapter 18). We now also need to ask whether the flow of images on mobile devices impacts emotionally in similar ways to the more structured experience of viewing photo-reportage, or, indeed, advertising, on television? Is social media less passive because viewers have a sense of agency, albeit arguably an illusory one; but at least they dictate the speed of scroll? Or is it more numbing, given its seeming relentlessness. In what ways do technologies operate differently in terms of image affect? We might also consider what is ‘lost in translation’ given the global extensiveness of news networks. I leave media researchers to reflect on social semiotics and the broader political contextualization. My overall point is that, if the task of theory is to explain, then well-grounded innovatory shifts in theoretical thinking are core to the contemporary academic agenda wherein, as I argue in ‘The Critical Forum’, facilitating opportunities for critical discussion and collective learning is highly productive (Chapter 17).

Sublime as Disturbance Social documentary and photojournalist images disturb most immediately because they tell us something about the socio-historical world that we inhabit that we may not have previously perceived. They adjust or enhance perceptions or shock us in ways that inform and challenge us, for instance, war reportage or images of deprivation. They may operate as a call for action, implicitly or explicitly, according to the context of encounter (for instance, political action or fund-raising campaigns). The sublime disturbs differently. Taken as an existential notion, it relates to that which we experience as awesome, incredible, or inexplicable. Representations invite us to contemplate phenomena over which we seemingly have no influence, often ones that occur despite human presence, possibly pre-exist us, and were we to consider this, will persist beyond the extinction of humans as a species. The sublime was a concern for philosophers within the so-called Enlightenment period in Europe. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) puzzled at that which cannot be rationally comprehended and is beyond logical explanation. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) laid more emphasis on emotional responses, suggesting that one of the pleasures of art was to vicariously offer insights into experiences that would be dangerous and fear-inducing were we to encounter them for real. In the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud extended notions of the sublime in more subjective terms referencing the unconscious and the psychologically repressed (Wells, 2011: 46–49). A ­sunset may be pleasurably awesome; a thunderstorm or tornado is equally sublime, but we don’t hang around to ‘enjoy’ it; rather we batten down and seek refuge. I am fascinated by the apocryphal story of British painter, J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), lashing himself to the mast of a ship to experience, and subsequently picture, the power of a storm at sea. The sea has a momentum over and above our control, and we are well-aware of extensive numbers of ships wrecked over the millennia. I would be terrified were I to find myself in such

10  Critical Reflections

circumstances, but as represented in art (films, music, and literature as well as paintings and photography) the sublime in nature is rendered manageable and, more to the point, pleasurable. For some, pleasure in the sublime may be linked to spirituality, the planet being viewed as God’s earth in Christian theology. Visiting the Amon Carter collection, Fort Worth, Texas, in 2022, I was struck by a statement used as a contextualizing wall text for American landscape painting, written by British art critic, John Ruskin (1819–1900): The aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the… deeper truth of mental vision, rather than…physical facts, and to reach a representation which, though it may be totally useless to engineers or geographers, and, when tried by rule and measure, totally unlike the place, shall yet be capable of producing on the far-away beholder’s mind…the impression which the reality would have produced, and putting his [sic] heart into the same state.4 In other words, in his view, in an age of venture capitalism and industrialization, painting should transcend the empirical in order to invoke the emotional and the existential (theological, or otherwise). Since photography had been announced in France and Britain some 17 years earlier, maybe here we witness the emergent distinction between expressive (painting) and factual (photography) that was to persist well into the latter part of the twentieth century (Wells, 2021: 333–342). Art invites sublime reflection on natural phenomena, their scale, beauty, awesomeness, and possibly also fragility. The sublime in art may also induce us to acknowledge the limits of our courage. Representation mediates experience, holding phenomena at a distance from us. In this respect, art becomes a means of eulogizing phenomena that we might otherwise fear or find incomprehensible. The late twentieth century emergence of notions such as ‘industrial sublime’ or ‘technological sublime’ responded to legacies of nineteenth-century industrial achievements, in effect, expressing awe at what had become legacies of socio-economic histories. Yet such markers of human imposition on the land induce mixed responses. In recent years, a form of ‘disaster sublime’, whereby large-scale images picturing environmental consequences of human behaviour in what is now termed the era of the Anthropocene, has attracted significant interest.5 For example, in 2012, having been closed for refurbishment, The Photographers Gallery, London, re-opened with an extensive exhibition of Oil by Canadian photographer, Edward Burtynsky. In a talk contextualizing and responding to his work, I reflected on ways in which aesthetics, viewpoint, and technique, indeed, the formal beauty of images, may operate to distract from the questions that we ought to be asking about human environmental impact.6 Many of his pictures depict spectacular creations, such as oil wells or highway inter-sections, that could be taken as celebrating human achievement. But when encountered as series, Frankenstein monsters emerge. Hence, the awe implied in industrial sublime or technological sublime give way to disaster sublime; the impossibility of rationally comprehending the implications of the results of human economic imperatives and coming to terms with

Photography, Curation, Criticism  11

the fact that we have collectively sown the seeds of planetary destruction in terms of human life as we have known it. What is to be done? How can photography, in its many forms and contexts, contribute to enhancing awareness of environmental circumstances and issues? Fascination with extreme planetary conditions, including ways in which light reflects on ice and snow, accounts for several exhibitions and catalogue essays with which I have been involved that take us towards polar regions. This anthology includes four essays (of many) that specifically reflect this interest. I have followed the work of Finnish artist, Jorma Puranen, since I first encountered his series, Imaginary Homecoming, in Disrupted Borders, 1993, curated by Sunil Gupta (Gupta, 1993; Wells, 2009). Puranen has spent decades exploring ways in which the Arctic, and Sami culture, have been pictured in photography and painting. My introduction to the Arctic was through Puranen’s eyes; indeed, my first trip to the Arctic region was for a solo exhibition at the Art Museum, Roveneimi (66.5° N) in 2004. It was September, so the town was shifting from the summer tourist season to winter mode. I remember it as rather banal, a border town, a gateway to the Arctic for visitors, although of course, my transient experience tells us nothing about the sense of place that might be constituted through living there. Puranen’s work, made even further north, suggests intensive, immersive experiences, as did work made by British photographer, Elizabeth Williams, who I also reference in ‘Icy Prospects’ (Chapter 6). She undertook an artist residency at the University of Lapland in 2002 to have a prolonged experience of the limited natural light of winter which was of interest to her because of the centrality of light to photography. I find the idea of living for some months in challenging, relatively rural, circumstances simultaneously intriguing and demanding. What would it be like to be there, self-­reliant, always feeling the cold, maybe not engaging in conversation with others for many days? We have email, and the north is generally well-networked. Imagine nineteenth-century expeditions! One of the things that I have learnt through reflecting on polar regions is that I want to visit, I want to experience the elemental for myself, but only in protected circumstances.7 Likewise, Antarctica. Unlike the Arctic, the Antarctic has no native human residents; those who live there are from elsewhere, temporarily based at various national research stations. ‘Landscapes of Exploration’ (Chapter 4) results from a curatorial commission from The Arts Institute, University of Plymouth, UK (where I then worked), for an exhibition to commemorate the centenary of the death of Robert Falcon Scott, who had been born in Plymouth, which remains a major ocean-faring port city.8 The artists included in this exhibition had in effect been pre-selected; it included all those who had undertaken residencies sponsored by the British Antarctic Survey, 2001–2009, none of whom would define themselves as a photographer, although all used photography in some respect. My essay aimed to situate the artists and their works within broader socio-historic parameters and in terms of histories of visual representation and aesthetic sensibilities. Studio visits with them nourished my interest in the extreme conditions that I have never experienced for myself. The symposium paper, ‘No-Man’s Land: Antarctica and

12  Critical Reflections

the Contemporary Sublime’ (Chapter 8) offers some reflections on the sublime at the time when I was writing that exhibition catalogue essay. ‘Points of Departure: Currencies of the Post-Industrial Sublime’ (Chapter 9) likewise addresses notions of the sublime, but as related to industrial legacies rather than polar conditions. Natural and cultural phenomena are entangled. The circumstances those of us from elsewhere find dauntingly or exhilaratingly sublime are the everyday norm for Sami and other Arctic native peoples. Likewise are the everyday circumstances discussed in ‘A Man of the North’, commissioned as a catalogue essay for a retrospective of works by Finnish photographer, Esko Mannikko, based in Oulo, Lat 65° N, a little below the artic circle (Chapter 12). Although I would not associate his work with the sublime, there is something unruly about it that lends edge to his social documentary. From his series, people live in challenging circumstances in which animals, technology (old cars, for instance), houses, and cabins cluster, subjected to extreme ice and snow conditions in winter months. It is not the fact of living in relatively isolated communities that seems unfamiliar – this is something of a trope within projects on photography and place – so much as exposure to weather and climate conditions with limited socio-economic bulwarks.

The Seduction of Beauty Following Plato, American photographer, Robert Adams, relates beauty to ethics and poetics. In his 2010 photobook, What Can We Believe Where?, he asks us to consider western privilege as manifest in the American West (and, of course, elsewhere, for instance, in much of Europe) (Adams, 2010). As a preeminent explorer of land and landscapes, he has written and photographed extensively on what he terms ‘the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world’ (loc cit: foreword), which if not invoking the sublime, certainly invokes a form of spirituality. He acknowledges ‘evidence against hope’ and commits to the necessity of pictures being ‘truthful’ and therefore ‘useful’. He prefaces the book by asking what geography ‘compels us to believe’, what it ‘allows us to believe’, and what obligations follow from our beliefs, thereby suggesting a more activist engagement in response to what is evidenced photographically that moves on from his more neutral considerations on ‘Beauty in Photography’. He defines beauty as ‘a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life’, a comment that I take to include all life: vegetation, water, plants, insects, fish, human, and non-human animals (Adams, 1996: 24). Beauty in this way of thinking cannot be summarized simply in terms of ‘taste’ (cf. Edmund Burke). Taste is subject to fashions, and cultural differences. Within Capitalism, it is extensively market influenced. Trends in farming, horticulture, garden design, and managed parks and woodlands reflect shifts in taste founded in (agri)cultural and economic priorities that often transcend ecological concerns. For instance, the commercial timber industry model involves planting saplings in straight lines to facilitate the movement of logging gear; this contributes to a harmoniously pleasing forestry pattern but is not how woodlands would regenerate

Photography, Curation, Criticism  13

if left to themselves. Likewise, a working distinction between flowers and weeds is that weeds are plants in the ‘wrong’ place, which again is a matter of taste or practical preference. Left alone the domestic yard or allotment speedily offers a good example of the survival of the fittest! In principle, all plants have ecological integrity, and many are edible, but only some are welcomed within garden displays or vegetable plots due to the risk of interrupting some sense of order. Beauty is contingent, in these examples, on situation and purpose. Adams (1996) distinguishes between form and content, proposing that beauty emanates from form, and significance from content. This distinction offers a useful starting point for reflecting on the ‘problem’ of beauty. Form relates to mathematical structure, by extension, coherence, and comprehensibility. Adams asks why form is beautiful, suggesting that ‘it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos’ (op cit: 25). Harmony may be emphasized through use of colours, or, if monochrome, through decisions on tonal range. I would add that the pleasures of form (aesthetics) are enhanced if what is pictured itself has formal integrity; the formal coherence of the photograph emphasizes the formal pleasure of the object, in turn, adding to image enticement. Beauty can be double-edged; it may act to distract from or obscure the implications of what is pictured. Walter Benjamin accused social documentary photographer, Albert Renger-Patzsch, in his book The World is Beautiful (1928), of having ‘succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment’ thereby performing the political function of obscuring socio-economic reality (Benjamin, 1977: 95). For some years, I danced around questions of beauty, finding images extolled for their ‘beauty’ often lightweight, apolitical, and a distraction from more substantial or action-oriented issues. Yet some images are compelling, their beauty caresses us and they have substance thematically; we repeatedly return to them. Beauty may be what draws us to look and look again – at pictures, as well as places and phenomena. For some photographers, particularly those centrally concerned with environmental investigations, ‘beauty’ is also an investigative consideration. For instance, in extensive research through re-photography over several decades, Mark Klett, and collaborators, were interested in exploring nineteenth-century aesthetics as well as social histories, in effect, asking what was there and how did photographers use cameras to frame it. Second Views, and later, Third Views (within which video was also used), was premised on seeking out the original viewpoints and re-­photographing from the same position, thereby not only demonstrating socio-historical change, for instance, a mining community that had disappeared, but also ways of seeing. Swedish photographer, Tyrone Martinsson, uses a similar technique, taking early drawings and photographs of glaciers as his starting point for re-photographing, likewise demonstrating the aesthetics of framing, but in his instance, the motivation is to compare past and present to explore and evidence glacier melt resulting from climate change (Martinsson, 2015). His pictures are beautiful in formal terms, but the implication of the content is a matter of alarm.

14  Critical Reflections

Chrystel Lebas and Jem Southam are among many photographers concerned to explore shifts over time and in relation to seasonal change (Chapter 11). Both use re-photography to explore socio-environmental change over time, although their motivations and situations differ (Southam, 2000).9 Water is core to Southam’s work. He has explored seascapes, estuaries, cliff faces, rocks, ponds, and rivers, and repeatedly returns to the question ‘what is a river?’, the point being that they are in constant flux, responding to a range of elemental forces including the movement of daylight that enlightens or casts shadows – of twigs, trees, birds, or floating debris. For Chrystel Lebas, beauty is a key consideration, always entangled with explorations of lakes, forests, and woodlands, including the effects and affects of the movement and intensity of light (Figure 1.1 on p. 3. Lebas, 2006). For both photographers, aesthetics is carefully considered; their pictures are compelling because we are drawn into the beauty of places whilst at the same time reflecting on the implications of what we see. Others, including environmental activists, may deploy beauty as a strategy. In her work on ocean pollution, Mandy Barker creates seductive images that catch out attention, only to find ourselves distressed at the plastic detritus that forms the image content (Figure 19.4).

Thinking Critically Philosophical assumptions frame ways in which images acquire significance, import, and impact. The human-centricity of Enlightenment era legacies has been extensively challenged in recent debates relating to ecological entanglements and to ways in which human actions have environmental consequences. As Astrida Neimanis argues in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), human bodies are watery; water sustains us and flows of fluid connect us to others. We are a part of a complex planetary ecology, not apart from it. We are also superfluous to it. Plants can survive without humans, yet we are extensively dependent on plants. Such perceptions reflect and perhaps account for historical fascination with land and vegetation, now manifest in the visual arts and in nature writing as a multi-faceted genre. Key examples relevant to photographic practices include the feelings and questions generated by contemporary critics including Rebecca Solnit. Her political perspicacity is illuminating, and detailed observations invite pause for reflection; ‘The Mind at Three Miles an Hour’ is a cherished essay, especially for the resonant title (Solnit, 2001)! Likewise, Robert MacFarlane’s interest in Landmarks engages with a very British sense of that land as a space of clues relating to our collective sense of deep cultural heritage, if only we pause to consider this (MacFarlane, 2016). This literary arena is very rich, a key adjunct to the observations on offer from contemporary photographers. Landscapes may be beguiling, enigmatic, yet replete with hidden histories, often masking sites of earlier conflicts which are often obscure or not clearly acknowledged, apart from monuments to battlefield victors (Chapter 13). For former ­colonializing nations, legacies of colonialism may also be evident yet overlooked.

Photography, Curation, Criticism  15

Many of the stately homes and estates that feature in Britain have their roots in colonial wealth via plantation and slave ownership in the Caribbean and elsewhere. To echo the title of an exhibition in 2022, histories may be hidden ‘In Plain Sight’.10 Crucially, documentary-mode photos would not reveal such histories, often based in practice-led, critical investigations. There are extensive examples of projects that challenge any notion of ‘innocent’ landscapes, to reference David Farrell’s title for a set of photographs of formerly unlocated burial sites for those ‘disappeared’ during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland in the 1970s/early1980s (Figure 13.5).

Anthology As noted in my Preface, it is not possible or desirable to include the whole range of articles that I have written over the last 35 years within this anthology. In some cases, they are unbearably out of date or, from earlier years, not as well informed as I would expect of myself now. In others, for instance, contributions to textbooks (edited by me, or by others), they are easily accessed. More particularly, often it is inappropriate to extract essays commissioned for solo artist photobooks or exhibition catalogues as they extensively cross-reference specific images. As remarked earlier, in such publications, images lead and texts offer support, complementing the picture series through extending references and contextualization. In many cases, I decided that my text was too context-specific to stand alone. The examples that I include here all have some meta-narrative about investigations of place or phenomena; in effect the specific series offered a springboard for some critical reflections on conceptual issues and photographic practices in broader terms. Other articles were selected because they are less easy to access (for instance, hidden behind a paywall in a journal or in conference publications with limited distribution). The collection is prefaced by a conversation with Martha Langford in the form of an email correspondence conducted between June and October 2022. Why by email? Because this is primarily how we have communicated for about two decades. (She is in Montreal, Canada, and I am in Devon, UK. Our communications date at least from 2005 when she was Artistic Director for Le Mois de la Photo, Montreal, and I was invited to peer review her proposal for the accompanying publication, Image and Imagination, that she edited. We last met in person when I visited Concordia University, Montreal, in October 2019, where I also had the opportunity to meet her colleagues and research students. The conversation included here (Chapter 2) takes this anthology of writings as a starting point for thinking about emergent conceptual issues in photography, curation, and criticism. The linear form of books requires that there is an order, here, premised on a loose logic of clusters. The essays that follow are grouped in four sections: On Curation and Residency; Phenomena; Place; Critical Spaces. However, each essay can be read as a stand-alone, or, perhaps, as a path to artists’ websites, and there are many links, overlaps, and resonances between the essays. At the heart of all thinking and writing is uncertainty; it is what propels us to keep on essaying ideas and issues – essayer, in French, means to try. It is easy, but lazy, to think that what is ‘real’ is what you know. Yet, what we don’t know

16  Critical Reflections

includes realities experienced by those in situations unfamiliar to us; or in environmental terms, that which might exist, even if unseen and despite not being defined epistemologically. Photography, along with other arts and humanities, invites us to remember and reflect on our own experiences of people, places, phenomena, and circumstances, and to imagine that which is unfamiliar. Powerful photographs illuminate. They contribute to shifting our perceptions and understandings, even if only just a little. They invite us to reflect, to empathize, to express horror, to act… Hence my interest in curation (articulating images and ideas) and criticism (reflexivity). Liz Wells, November 2022.

Notes 1 As it happened, an exhibition that I had curated, Seedscapes: Future-Proofing Nature, was on at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, UK at the time. As it worked out, the route through the museum meant that all visitors, regardless of whether, or not, they would normally have visited the temporary exhibition galleries, had to walk through them. Some paused to view work that they otherwise might not have seen! 2 For this reason, very few – only two – of the many essays that I have written for photobooks or solo exhibition catalogues are included in this anthology. The writing is intended to relate to the photography, so points made have limited substance without the images. 3 The SHIFT conference, hosted in Jyväskylä, Finland, in October 2006, included a presentation by Mikko Pilkama, from Nokia, on ‘Mobile Digital Imaging Usage’ that demonstrated the exponential speed of take-up of the mobile phone as a substitute camera. 4 John Ruskin, (1856) Modern Painters, quoted in the American Landscape galleries, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, viewed September 2022. 5 ‘The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. …The word Anthropocene is derived from the Greek words anthropo, for “man,” and cene for “new,” coined and made popular by biologist Eugene Stormer and chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000’. https://education. nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene 6 Edward Burtynsky, Oil, The Photographers Gallery, London, 18 May–30 June 2012. Liz Wells, ‘Beyond Documentary – currencies of the post-industrial sublime’, The Photographers Gallery, 22 May 2012. 7 For instance, in 2015 I travelled north to the Barents Straits, close to the Norwegian border with Russia, on a Hurtigruten ship (originally ‘fast route’ coastal post boats, now operating as local car and passenger ferries, for parcel deliveries, and for tourism expeditions). Although it was mid-Winter (early February) it felt safe, meals were provided, I slept well, and shore-expeditions in icy conditions were carefully managed, although in Trondheim, there were high winds walking back from exploring the town, the ice was slippy, and I remember being relieved not to be blown over. The winds prefaced a major storm, named by the Norwegian Meteorological Office as Storm Ole. The ship cruised up and down the Trondheim fjord since it was no longer safe to stay moored and risk a battering alongside the harbour wall. It was rough so many passengers (not including me) retreated to their cabins. I was never scared, although I would have been had I been responsible for helming a small boat! The fjord waters, viewed through the windows from the safety of a large modern vessel, were, precisely, sublime!

Photography, Curation, Criticism  17

8 I knew one of the artists who had undertaken a residency at one of the British bases there, courtesy of the British Antarctic Survey, who over a period of seven years had sponsored residencies for ten visual artists, one musician, and three writers, all variously included in the catalogue and exhibition, Landscapes of Exploration (UK tour to three venues, 2012–2015). Studio visits and meetings with the artists allowed for extensive discussions of the experience of being based there for anything between a few days to, in most instances, several weeks, and also, their experiences of the voyage (usually, not always, via a flight to the Falkland Islands followed by however many days or weeks on board a ship that it took to access the British bases depending on ice conditions at the time). 9 Lebas and Southam were both included in Sense of Place, an exhibition that I guest curated for The Centre des Beaux Arts (BOZAR), Brussels, in 2012, that involved work by 40 artists from 27 states within the European Union (Chapter 11). 10 The exhibition was based on the collections at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, Devon, UK (RAMM), and included newly commissioned work from artist, Joy Gregory, who researched sugar trading in Devon as one source of regional wealth that rested on colonial exploitation and slavery. Gregory, Joy (2022) ‘The Sweetest Thing’ commissioned for In Plain Sight. Exeter: RAMM, exhibition, January–June.

References Adams, Robert (1996) Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture. Adams, Robert (2010) What Can We Believe Where? New Haven: Yale. Benjamin, Walter (1972) ‘A Short History of Photography’. London: Screen. Spring. pp. 5–26. Originally published in German, 1931. Benjamin, Walter (1977) ‘The Author as Producer’ in Understanding Brecht. London: New Left Books. Originally published in German, 1966, from an unpublished mss. Gupta, Sunil, Ed. (1993) Disrupted Borders. London: Rivers Oram Press. pp. 96–103. Lebas, Chrystel, (2006) Between Dog and Wolf. London: Azure Publishing. Lister, Martin, Ed. (1995/2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. London: Routledge, 1st/2nd editions. MacFarlane, Robert (2016) Landmarks. London: Penguin/Random House. Martinsson, Tyrone (2015) Arctic Views, Passages in Time. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing. Neimanis, Astrida (2017) Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury. Solnit, Rebecca (2001) ‘The Mind at Three Miles an Hour’ in Wanderlust, a History of Walking. London: Verso. Sontag, Susan (1979) ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. First published as a collection, 1977. Southam, Jem (2000) Rockfalls, Rivermouths, Ponds: The Shape of Time. Eastbourne, UK: Towner Art Gallery/Maidstone. UK: Photoworks. Wells, Liz (2021) Photography: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 6th edition. Wells, Liz (2011) Land Matters. London: I B Tauris. Reprinted 2021 (London: Routledge). Wells, Liz (2009) ‘Poetics and Silence’ in Puranen, Jorma, Icy Prospects. Ostfilden, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag. pp. 19–30.

2 SPEAKING OF THIS COLLECTION A Conversation Between Martha Langford and Liz Wells

ML:  You

open this collection with an important contribution to pedagogy and museology, a reflection on “Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention”. You and I have many things in common: first, a lifelong fascination with photography; and a close second, an active interest in its various modes of articulation and circulation in exhibition form. In 2007, you argued that curatorial process ought to be considered as more than the organization of related artworks in a space, as an investigation and an argument. You share your research questions – a teacher’s generous gift that reveals the many forces that shape a curatorial proposition. Your use of the word “proposition” is very telling – a word that combines critical judgement with a plan of action to see it through. And you share what it means to see it through, as you discuss the installation of the same exhibition in different spaces that bring out the specificities of landscape and land-use as they might have struck audiences familiar with photography history or bringing other disciplinary or cultural backgrounds to the experience. You conclude with thoughts on the authority of the curator, and whether work can be subjugated to that overarching vision – a discussion that was much heard in the day. It was also around that time that curators began signing their exhibitions – their names not just appearing in the catalogue or on the introductory text, but screen-printed on the entrance wall, shocking to me when I first encountered it. A very rich text, Liz, that brings us into the mind behind the curatorial voice and lays the groundwork for further developments in our field. More recently, the concept of research-creation has entered many academic programs, including the prominent figure of the artist-curator or artist-collector, and these roles, it seems to me, change the dynamic that you described so beautifully in 2007. What have you observed, or perhaps been part of, in this new set of relationships?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-3

Speaking of This Collection  19 LW:  Martha,

thank you for such an interesting question and for asking me to reflect on developments both in my practice as a curator and in the profiling of curators more generally. To respond to the second point, I am interested in your comment on the emergence of curators signing their exhibitions. This is not something I had particularly considered, probably because as an author and editor this seems very normal to me. There are differing institutional scenarios, and it remains the case that curatorial interventions sometimes seem anonymous. To take an example that used photographs within its displays but was not about photography, I visited a blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum earlier this year (on Stonehenge), which offered a fascinating historical exposition with numerous written captions and texts. But it was difficult to ascertain whose ‘voice’ or authority was framing the exhibits and exhibition concept. The impression was of a singular way of talking about Stonehenge as a place of history and myth, even though the archaeological and conservation limits on what is known about artifacts were acknowledged. To the best of my memory, no exhibition statements were signed, and the curatorial team was listed only at the exit point. I found the relative anonymity of responsibility for the history as recounted disturbing although, of course, it had the authority of being a British Museum event. Reflecting on this I am reminded of E. H. Carr’s, What is History?, a set of essays on the limitations of empirical theories of knowledge published in 1964. Do you know the publication? It caught my attention when taking a course in Economic and Social History in the 1970s as a sociology undergraduate. Carr makes an analogy between research and fishing, remarking that the facts that are found, like fish, depend on which area of the ocean you choose to explore. He enjoins us to study the historian, what he (sic) is looking for and where he is looking. If a historian (curator) is not named, how can we find out more about their interests, pre-conceptions, and viewpoints? Identifying the curator in a catalogue is not sufficient, as not everyone will purchase it. Additionally, nowadays audiences may want to check-out profiles and previous activities online. So perhaps the move towards ‘signing’ exhibitions can be seen not only as a claim for creative input and oversight, but also as a contribution to challenging any notion that shows can be developed from somehow ‘neutral’ perspectives. In other words, curatorial signature indicates responsibility and, by extension, contests any notionally apolitical speaking position. To return to your point about the risk of imposing the mark of the curator and somehow subjugating works within the curatorial proposition, in principle, if art has integrity of purpose and realization, and if audiences take time to engage reflectively with individual images and sequences, then there is little risk of works being subsumed. Of course, the title of an exhibition and dialogues set-up through juxtapositions of work by different photographers do influence audience response. But meaning and interpretation are fluid, and images articulate engagement in terms that each viewer brings to their encounter. I never cease to

20  Critical Reflections

be surprised by unexpected responses and questions, or some of the discussions that I happen to overhear in galleries (whether relating to an exhibition I have curated, or on occasions when I am a viewer eavesdropping on conversations). Then there is always a broader context. What type of institution is involved and what audiences do they attract? Are there related events or opportunities to meet the artists? How have exhibitions been contextualized, for instance, as part of a themed festival, or as a celebration of photography? Is a themed show intended to provoke awareness in some respect? For instance, my curatorial work has often been oriented in terms of feminism, place, or environmentalism. Promoting awareness is something that I know is important for us both as writers and curators. I am reminded of your role as artistic director for Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2005, which unfortunately I was not able to visit. I do have a copy of the associated publication, Image & Imagination (2005), that you edited, which is interesting not only thematically but also for including an international range of voices and perspectives, in visual and written forms. This points to what festivals can facilitate in terms of bringing together and celebrating diversity of concerns and contributions. It is also striking for your editorial starting point which is not to consider photographs as documents or the technologies used to construct them, but, as you put it, ‘the life of the photograph in the spectatorial mind’. So, if photographic communication is about offering information, and promoting awareness and reflection on ideas and issues, what induces engagement with images and how can we account for the ways in which some of them stay with us, a form of ‘afterlife’ of encounters with images in exhibitions or other forms of publication? ML:  Let’s follow your mention of reflection into reflexivity. The way you begin your essay on the work of Elizabeth Hoak-Doering and Marianna Christofides for their exhibition at the 2011 Venice Biennale of Art is notable. Here we will meet two expat artists working at a “critical distance” from the nation they are representing. But first we learn something of your situatedness, mindful of your task as an interpreter of this duet, who is not of their culture and background, but as you declare in the very first line, “writing from a distance”. Your essay sets out the degrees of separation that are part of the two artists’ processes, whether materially or experientially – those states of separateness that, while different in form and intent, paradoxically strengthen their connectedness as Cypriots. Your opening statement creates the same degree of separation, prefacing passages of close description that allow the edges of the reader’s mind to dissolve into the work. Here I am thinking of phenomenologist Edward Casey’s description of the edges of memory as a “fringe” but also of ethnographer Clifford Geertz’s sense of “reflexivity” – of the scientific description that can be attained only by knowing and surrendering the self to the other. This is always an imperfect process, as we know. So here I want to ask you about the balance between entering the work that you are considering and maintaining the distance that allows you to think not only about the situation of the artist but also about the viewer – to make yourself a communicating vessel between

Speaking of This Collection  21

strangers. It’s a question of method but one that requires a certain state of mind that goes beyond “research”. LW:  That’s a good question, one that relates to emotion and identification, by which I mean, it transcends notions of knowledge in any (over-)simple empirical sense. Elsewhere in Europe ‘science’ encompasses the arts and humanities. In Britain we still to some extent suffer legacies of the two cultures notion that, I would suggest, paralysed institutions intellectually by setting ‘science’ – with specific notions of rigour based on logic, experiment, and deduction – against ‘the arts’ seen as the world of the intuitive, and of that which cannot be substantiated through positivist methodologies. It is a false binary. I have had several discussions with scientists on creativity and imagination in their various fields, the ‘what ifs…’ of discovery. When I was a sociology student (in the 1970s), facticity in fields such as sociology and anthropology was being challenged. A classic undergraduate exam question was, ‘is sociology a science?’, to which the response should have been, what is meant by science? The response that was encouraged was to weigh up empirical/positivist methodologies against those based on listening (to people, sometimes termed ‘respondents’ rather than ‘participants’). Just as black and white photography is in fact many subtle tones and gradients of grey, binaries as a starting point for any exploration are always intellectually crude and reductive. Transposed to photography histories, such a binary might be the distinction between, for instance, the social documentary model adopted in the 1930s in Mass Observation (Britain) or the Farm Security Administration project (FSA – USA) on the one hand, and, on the other, the collaborative approaches that have become more common. For instance, handing over the camera and on-site darkroom training was core to the approach taken by American photographer, Wendy Ewald, working with small rural communities in the 1980s, or, indeed, the community darkroom projects that became common in the UK and elsewhere at the time. As we know, ‘documentary’ encompasses a wide range of conceptual assumptions, contexts, and working methods. More recent thinking has also been contextualized in terms of post-colonial legacies and conundrums. For instance, in my edited collection, The Photography Cultures Reader, 2019, I included an essay by Ariadne van de Ven ‘The Eyes of the Street Look Back: in Kolkata with a camera around my neck’ (first published in photographies 2011, Vol 4:2). Starting from a distinction between citizen-photojournalism and stereotypes of insensitive tourist photography, she considers the unsettling experience of walking through unfamiliar city streets with a camera, re-appraises the political implications of tourist photography and legacies of nineteenth-century colonial photographic practices, and argues for a nuanced approach to considering the ethics of the tourist gaze. This might also exemplify a distinction between reflection and reflexivity. If a photo is made and appraised, retained or deleted, the editing decisions involve reflecting on the image, considering the context, and the purpose of making. If, from considering an image, it becomes clear to the photographer

22  Critical Reflections

that the circumstances have been misunderstood, or misrepresented, a degree of reflexivity is involved; something has been learnt from the image and the process of making that causes them to consider not only that their approach needs re-framing, ethically or politically, but possibly also that their pre-­ conceptions are ill-founded philosophically. In other words, reflection involves pause for thought whereas reflexivity challenges knowledge, that is, ways in which thinking is framed. I am not familiar with the philosophical and anthropological writings of Clifford Geertz. Does ‘knowing and surrendering the self to the other’ imply serious critical re-appraisal of previous epistemological assumptions, resulting from engagement with other cultures and perspectives? In which case, I agree. To return to questions of critical distance, I have always been intrigued by the German Marxist playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, and his deployment of the notion of alienation as a dramatic device. For Brecht, naturalistic theatre was based on empathy with characters and non-naturalistic theatre, which he termed epic theatre, aimed to draw attention to the broader social circumstances within which characters operate and are constrained. (See Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘What is Epic Theatre?”, 1977.) Critical distance suggests an analytic approach, rather than an emotional one. But again, the binary oversimplifies, especially when we consider artistic methods and processes and the indistinct boundary between the role of art (including photography and film) in suggesting different ways of thinking and seeing, and the function of illustration as a mode of documentation that draws attention to how things appear without necessarily questioning how we perceive phenomena, their contexts and significance. For audiences, processes of identification, empathy, and intellectualization are complexly interwoven; individuals bring their own cultural formations and sensitivities into play. To give an example, in Facing East, I included pictures staged in woodlands in the east of Finland, by Finnish photographer, Juha Suonpää. The series humorously referenced Finnish masculinity and trophy hunting (animals, and nowadays wildlife photographs). So, I was surprised to be thanked by a viewer for reminding her of where she grew up, which turned out to be just beyond the border with Russia, an area visible within the frame. Her identification with the region clearly trumped any engagement with the theme. ML:  Why surprised? Your Russian viewer recognized a very distinctive quality in your curatorial work, which is both situated and transnational. Here I want to claim you as a Canadian because of your mother’s nationality, but more seriously, I want to draw attention to the breadth of your landscape research. Your interest in Marlene Creates, for example, whose projects on landscape and memory are rooted in Newfoundland and Labrador, and whose activist-environmentalist work on the boreal forest has been performed on the land where she has made her life since 2002. What have I just described? A body of work that captures both the specificities of place and its global flows – its physical and ideational properties – and this is also how I would describe your contributions

Speaking of This Collection  23

to landscape studies. Your work intensifies our interest in what is bounded by the frame, while extending the view beyond those edges. You have found kinship with artists who seek that balance, and the strength of those relationships comes through in your exhibitions and writing. LW:  What interested me about the invitation to write the catalogue essay for the Cypriot Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011) was that the curator, Yiannis Toumazis, invited two non-Cypriot writers to situate the two artists within international dialogues. In addition, both artists brought external viewpoints and experiences into play. Elizabeth Hoek-Doering, originally from Philadelphia, relocated to Cyprus as an adult, and Marianna Christofides, born Nicosia, departed to study art in Athens, London, and Cologne, and now lives between Germany and Cyprus. Both artists work in multiple art forms, and both experiment conceptually in terms of processes and materials, taking a critical approach to their own work and, crucially, to Cypriot histories and culture. Through a 5-minute twin-screen projection, in Leaving the Harbour of Haloes (2011), Hoek-Doering references an aspect of maritime history, little known yet crucial in terms of the identity of an island nation. Carvings of ships by anonymous sailors were inserted into existing frescoes in a ruined Church just outside the walled city of Famagusta, sometime in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, unfamiliar not the least because Famagusta was abandoned after the conflict of 1974. Using frottage to reproduce the carvings as drawings, she re-animated the ships, thereby re-instating a forgotten history. In terms of reflexivity, the project rested not only on extensive historical research but also creativity in imagining the lives of sailors marooned or shipwrecked on this remote island shore. Christofides’s film, Sundays in Nicosia (2010), follows migrant Asian women domestic workers, normally on temporary visas and working indoors thereby invisible during the week, as they gather on their day off at a market area between the wall that forms the border between the south and the north of the island and the Venetian wall that encircles the old city, their colourful saris enlivening the streets. In terms of human circumstances, one project draws attention to the historical insecurities of the maritime while the other suggests a hidden, insecure, contemporary underclass. In Brechtian terms, arguably, their position as artists, working both within and outside everyday Cypriot culture, fosters space to remark on phenomena so familiar that they pass unnoticed. In relation to this, my position as writer was in some respect ‘double-distanced’ in that, rather than encountering material places or events, I responded intellectually and emotionally to questions and perspectives brought into play by the artists and through the ways in which their work was framed conceptually, critically, and methodologically. The essay is, in effect, a second-level response that mediated between the works and the international context of an art biennale, whilst also stimulating my developing interest in the complex tapestry of Cypriot culture, histories and socio-political issues. Although not foreseen at that time, this essay seeded the British-based artist residencies that I initiated with Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, which led

24  Critical Reflections

to the exhibition, Layers of Visibility (2018), within which reflexivity founded in outsider perspectives also formed a crucial thread. ML:  Liz, what inspires me about these thoughts and the mental pathways you describe through these works is your seemingly inexhaustible curiosity and how you feed it. Here you speak of a “developing interest”, then listing the categories of knowledge that you have pursued to understand these artists’ place-making better. There is a kind of eagerness in what you write, as well as a degree of trust that doing your critical work properly – I almost wrote “responsibly” – means keeping faith with photography’s descriptive powers. The engine of Brechtian distanciation is sometimes understood differently, as a warning not to trust the senses or the sentiments they spark. You have a way of noticing and mentioning little things that have caught your eye, things that have touched you, such as the colourful saris of the workers, that not only acknowledges the anecdotal but empowers it. Barthes’s writing is also full of such low-key observations, neither punctum, not studium, but passing thoughts and fancies. John Berger did the same, from the depths of his empathy and with a novelist’s sense of timing. Like them, you give proof of susceptibility. Turning to your “Unique Modes of Investigation – Photography and Landscape Research”, I find you examining and relating the various seeing/ learning processes that the artists have shared in conversation with you. A very poignant example is Jem Southam seeing and learning to live with a footprint in a picture that he had not noticed at the time. You write about some very systematic landscape projects – rephotography and the use of ordnance maps – that one cannot help but notice have been executed by human beings, not machines, with sustained effort, personal sacrifice, and affection for their subjects, land and sea. This text is ostensibly about what artists do, but it’s also about what you do, Liz, as you translate these photographic works to words. Tell me more about the writing, its rhythms and patterns of exposition, explanation, and noticing. Having done the research, how goes the writing? LW:  Yet another incisive question! To respond to your point about Brechtian distanciation, I would distinguish between sentiment which I take to reference emotional dynamics, and sentimentality, which can be superficial and highly self-indulgent. The Oxford English Dictionary definition (1993 edition, the version I happen to have) includes six separate notes on sentiment: ‘one’s own feelings’, ‘sensation, physical feeling’, ‘opinion’, ‘emotion’, ‘an emotional thought expressed in literature or art’, ‘tender feelings’, that remind us that meaning is highly context-specific, and also raise the question of where ‘one’s own feelings’ are sourced, that is, the balance of the innate and the culturally learnt. (Since I am not a primary school educator nor a psychoanalyst, I won’t comment on the debates that swirl around nature-nurture questions.) The OED also offers two notes on sentimental that reinforce my understanding of the term, ‘showing emotion rather than reason’ and ‘of music, literature etc.: appealing to sentiment; dealing superficially with emotion, esp. love’; the latter of course also applies to photography and the visual arts. What stands out

Speaking of This Collection  25

here is that ‘emotion’ is posited in opposition with ‘reason’. For Brecht, distanciation (sometimes translated as ‘alienation’) was intended to open critical distance whereby audiences observe the behaviour of characters as a scenario develops with certain social and political inevitabilities and learn from it. In terms of the visual arts, Edward Hopper’s paintings come to mind; we remember characters in forlorn situations, but we do not empathise with them so much as wonder at how the circumstances in which they find themselves came about. In photography, Allan Sekula’s insistence on critical realism, which Van Gelder and Baetens define as ‘a practice, a research method rather than an artistic style’ based on the articulation of accumulated images and information, likewise operates through trusting audiences to reflect, and possibly act, on what has been brought to attention (Van Gelder and Baetens, 2010). When researching for Landscapes of Exploration, the exhibition and publication (2012), I had a memorable discussion with ecologist, Professor David Walton, then a senior scientist at the British Antarctic Survey (Cambridge, UK), who was responsible for setting up the Antarctic artist residency scheme on which the exhibition drew. He talked of creativity in science, of reflexivity in knowledge paradigms, experimental methods, new inventions, and shifting frames of reference. He also remarked on the benefits of different ways of seeing and thinking that artists (visual artists, writers, musicians) bring into play. Jem Southam, who you mention in your question, once remarked to me that he and a geologist might look at the same landscape, but what they see differs; where geologists decipher layers of time sedimented within the rockface and its shaping, he expresses a response to form, light, colour, and indications of human presence. More particularly, this moves the dialogue on to contemporary posthumanism debates that position humans, not as ego-centric observers of a world somehow external to us or as beings entitled to manipulate phenomena for our own benefit, but as an element within a complexity of planetary phenomena. It is not easy to shift towards a more de-centred understanding of ourselves, of seeing and being (refuting Descartes), of our ecological integration within non-hierarchical inter-relations and inter-dependencies (challenging Darwinism), and of our transience. Recent challenges to human-centric thinking, within which women academics and critics have made significant contributions, have fundamental ramifications for research including photographic investigations, particularly where they relate to place and environment. As to my approach to research and writing, it is something I have always enjoyed, ever since writing (very unoriginal) stories as a child, which, thinking back, were observational narratives; they always concerned things that had happened to me or that I had witnessed, even if thinly disguised in terms of characters. I should add that I requested – and received from my parents – a camera for my 7th birthday, a Brownie 127, which in the 1950s was unusual for a child, particularly a girl. I have a visual memory, and observation was clearly something that interested me from a young age. Also, I attended a

26  Critical Reflections

Montessori primary school. Montessori education is based on ‘self-directed activity, hands-on learning and collaborative play’ (https://montessori-nw.org/ what-is-montessori-education/), a system within which teachers guide and suggest, and the emphasis in the infant years was on learning through play. I  have come to realize that this was formative in terms of my approach to thinking and writing, which is, thinking through writing, and also involves walking as a space for reflection – ‘The Mind at Three Miles an Hour’ as Rebecca Solnit puts it (Solnit, 2001). Fundamental to the notion of learning through doing is the possibility of trying things out, pursuing ideas, and testing whether and how they have some pertinence and integrity. Translated into encounters with projects, imagery, and photographers, this involves becoming familiar with their work, ways of working, and contexts within which they like to operate – residencies, collaborations, longer-term projects (for instance, rephotography) – as a means of reflecting on their contribution and its significance. As a curator I work with contemporary artist-photographers, which means that I can meet with them, discuss ideas, hear stories first-hand, even if by email, telephone, or video (zoom/skype). This model and method of thinking and writing about imagery, that is rather different to the art historical, perhaps also reflects the influence of sociology, not to mention feminist critiques. Learning through doing implicates emotional and intuitive responses; it is not solely founded in academic training and intellectual scholarship. I should add that I understand ‘intuition’ to be founded in prior experiences and what we have absorbed from them. So, as you remark, I enjoy discussions with artists about their processes of thinking through making – although some are remarkably cagey about this. Studio visits or, more recently, meetings online, form one strand of enquiry when writing essays for photobooks or catalogues. My starting point before meeting is to reflect on project themes and, where possible, view the photography or films to which I am charged with responding. In meeting I am always curious about motivation, the circumstances in which projects came about, work methods, and seek insights not only into work processes, form, theme, and aesthetics, but also into how they view the results and the potential import and impact of their work. Some are very clear about this, especially those who are environmental activists; others are more circumspect. That said, this is a little disingenuous. There is a distinction between one-off discussions for example, for a catalogue essay commission and the ongoing engagement with certain artists with whom I have worked repeatedly wherein there is an ongoing conversation within which questions are re-formulated and further issues emerge. There is also a difference between writing as a critic, reviewing a photobook or exhibition (for which there is no involvement with the photographer(s)), writing a contextual essay commissioned for an exhibition catalogue or photobook, and working as a curator on projects in development whereby I become part of discussions at an early stage that later feed into my production of exhibition texts and/or a catalogue essay.

Speaking of This Collection  27

In terms of the practical process of writing, I write messily. I over-write and pare back, re-order, or edit severely. I discard sentences and paragraphs that turn out to be unhelpful deviations. A mutual friend of ours once remarked to me that he never writes a sentence until he is satisfied with the previous one, which I have never forgotten precisely because I could not work like that. Do you? My fear is that thoughts and anecdotes, competing for my attention, might flee away, so I need to capture keywords or phrases, or a book reference, to keep them in the frame. This also sometimes reflects trying to compress too many ideas, points, or speculations within one (often over-long) sentence or paragraph. Indeed, I’ve done this today, responding to your question via several tangents (now eliminated). One final point, I am interested in the weight of words. Sometimes, although not often, I shift towards what I would define as ‘poetic form’, allowing associations rather than sentence constructions to motor the events and emotions that I am exploring and wish to convey. There aren’t any examples in this anthology (maybe there should be). I should add that for me, poems are for reading out loud. That I also compose lectures for speaking (in conferences, to students, at public events…) almost certainly influences my pleasure in the spoken word. I enjoy the subtle shift in meaning or emphasis that one word may offer in contrast to another that is almost, but not quite, a synonym. After I finished secondary school, and having specialized in lighting design at drama school, I spent several years working in theatre, which in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s was an excitingly radical space. As in photography, light in theatre operates functionally, but also affectively, inducing attention and appealing to the senses. To return to my earlier point, it is possible for images and experiences to be multi-sensory, as in the sounds, smells, and textures of phenomena, without being superficially sensationalist. In What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West, Robert Adams frames his explorations by asking ‘What does our geography compel us to believe? What does it allow us to believe? And what obligations, if any, follow from our beliefs?’ (Adams, 2010: n.p.). This surely suggests journeys and sensorial experiences, seeing and learning from what has been observed and experienced, leading to reflections – the first notion that came to mind was ‘compassion’ – relating to associated implications. What should be done as a result of what we have come to believe? This sounds rather pious, but it is core to environmentalist thinking, not to mention climate change activism, and is what motivates the ecological investigations that now particularly interest me. ML:  I am touched by your use of Adams in this discussion (and Solnit earlier) to elucidate an activism that is not ideological, therefore divisive, but affective, embodied response that can be brought into the discourse. It doesn’t seem pious at all, not in your usage, but practical and urgent. At the same time, your curatorial projects and writing both acknowledge and cultivate the irrational experiences of beauty and pleasure, childlike discovery and (dare I say?) the privilege that some of us have been given to indulge ourselves in formal beauty

28  Critical Reflections

and sensorial immersion. This brings an obligation that Adams may not have been thinking of an obligation to accommodate anger and frustration. A very hard read is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), its climate and rage leaving the realm of science fiction in 2022. Could you imagine a companion exhibition, Liz? Could we bear to look at it? LW:  Martha, I had not previously read The Ministry for the Future. Thank you for suggesting it. At over 500 pages, not to mention the extensive range of thought-provoking scenarios and issues, it is indeed a ‘hard read’. So, as an educationalist – not an ideologue – how to respond curatorially? My aim as a writer and curator is to induce critical thinking. I generally view antagonism as unproductive in terms of the persuasion involved in inciting change, although, of course, sometimes shouting, or in art terms, agit-prop, may seem the only viable means of commanding attention. I respect photographers who are overtly activist, and, indeed, those (including several friends) who risk fines and imprisonment protesting with – in the UK – Extinction Rebellion and equivalent movements. Of course, I am politically and socially aware, although not overtly activist. I have been on many demos over the decades, but – as Robinson suggests – I now wonder whether the effect is more to do with reassurances of identity and solidarity than influencing significant political change. In the end, this comes down to economic power and cultural capital. I have the latter in some respects, but not the former. So, I work within the sphere that I know. The art that interests me has something substantial to convey, usually about people, places, and circumstances, and does so with subtlety and integrity. I  enjoy beautiful objects, ideas, and experiences. But I am not interested in art for art’s sake. I am interested in aesthetics as a strategy for enticing insights and inciting reflection. Robinson asks the old (Leninist) question, ‘What is to be Done?’, offering a critique of global capitalism and its potential for self-­ destruction resulting from the consequences of industrialization now manifest in extreme climate change and the impact of this for the future of humankind. My question is perhaps narrower. What can art do? It’s one that I often ask myself and embed in talks that I give to students. If the purpose of art transcends the superficial, then what can be affected through photographic media, and how? John Kippin, whose work is referenced in two chapters in this anthology, once remarked that ‘if art doesn’t become an embodiment of values then it really doesn’t have much purpose’ (Kippin, Wainwright and Wells, 2012:113). He also suggested analogically that art acts more like water eroding a stone than something that is hugely incisive or active. If, as Raymond Williams suggested, eras are characterized by ‘structures of feelings’ and, as Robinson suggests, culture is the sphere within which we make sense of who we are, then engaging within everyday cultural experiences, as playwrights, poets, artists, curators, and in other creative arenas, does matter if we seek to induce reflections and influence shifts in ideas, attitudes, and socio-political priorities. Which brings me on to the exhibition that I would create in response to The Ministry for the Future. I don’t have a ‘disaster scenario’ or apocalyptic exhibition proposal. Rather, as suggested, I am interested in provoking critical

Speaking of This Collection  29

thinking and inviting what are probably very little changes that don’t add up to very much, except that, if all of us in the developed world take some everyday action, and support green initiatives in local and national governments, the Paris Climate Accord objectives have a small chance of being met. As it happens, my recent work includes a trilogy of exhibitions relating to environmental concerns, two of which have already been shown. The first, Seedscapes, Future-Proofing Nature, was developed in conjunction with Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK. It was due to open in Spring 2020, so was among the first events to be postponed due to the Covid-19 lockdowns (initially, late March 2020 in UK). It eventually opened that Autumn and later toured to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), Exeter and finally to the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, not far from Glasgow, where it coincided with COP 26 (also postponed from 2020). The Dick Institute ran associated climate awareness events for schools and young people. Drips on the stone! In addition, because of repeated lockdowns, Impressions Gallery created a virtual version of the show, which can still (in August 2022) be viewed on their website (www. impressions-gallery.com/seedscapes), so the life of the show and its audience has been extended. Further stone erosion! The second exhibition, Sea, Sand and Soil: Plastics in our Environment, resulted from an invitation to create an exhibition for PingYao International Photography Festival, 2021. China is a major exporter of plastic objects and packaging, so it seemed an appropriate venue to bring together work by three environmentalist artists. Due to lockdowns, it became my first experience of curating an exhibition without ever seeing the venue or the installation, but it did win an award as one of the three outstanding exhibitions that year. Of course I have no way of knowing whether it contributed to changes in behaviour or sensibilities, but then, as noted earlier, audience response is always difficult to assess. The third exhibition, yet to be fully researched and realized, is on the consequences of searise in Atlantic coastal areas. Marlene Creates, whom you mentioned, is one of the artists who I would want to include, particularly her wonderful video-poem on lost words, vocabulary no longer in use due to loss of ice on the East Coast of Newfoundland where she lives and works. This should be my next exhibition project, and is very relevant to me personally as I live near the coast in the South-West of England, so am aware of the implications of rising sea levels, storms, drought, and other manifestations of extreme climate change, for this peninsula region. Do exhibitions accommodate anger and frustration? Political engagement and direct action are probably better vehicles for this. But carefully considered (group) shows resonate beyond the immediate experience of dialogues between images, series themes, artists, and curator(s). The theatre of exhibition offers space for reflection, perhaps – in terms of structures of feeling – contributing to encouraging us to imagine alternative futures, which is, of course, a necessary precursor for action. Martha Langford/Liz Wells, 2022

30  Critical Reflections

Martha Langford is Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, a Distinguished University Research Professor in the Department of Art History, Concordia University (Montreal), and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her most recent publications are three edited collections, Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017); Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-industrial City (2021), co-edited with Johanne Sloan; and Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives, and Museums, co-edited with Jason Camlot and Linda M. Morra (Routledge, 2023). Langford’s book-length studies of photographic experience include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001, revised second edition, 2021); Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007); and A Cold War Tourist and His Camera, co-written with John Langford (2011) – all from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Langford was the founding director and chief curator of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, an affiliate museum of the National Gallery of Canada, from 1985 to 1994. Prior to the creation of the CMCP, she was executive producer of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada. She organized numerous exhibitions that toured in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. She is currently writing a history of photography in Canada.

References Adams, Robert (2010) What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1977) ‘What is Epic Theatre?’ in Understanding Brecht. London: New Left Books. Originally published in German, 1939. Brown, Lesley ed. (1993) The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edition revised and enlarged. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carr, E. H. (1964). What is History? Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kippin, John, Wainwright, Chris, & Wells, Liz (2012) Futureland Now. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press. Langford, Martha, Ed. (2005) Image & Imagination. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press Robinson, Kim Stanley (2020) The Ministry for the Future. London: Orbit Books. Solnit, Rebecca (2001) ‘The Mind at Three Miles an Hour’ in Wanderlust, a History of Walking. London: Verso. Van de Ven, Ariadne (2011) ‘The Eyes of the Street Look Back: in Kolkata with a camera around my neck’. photographies 2011, Vol. 4:2, pp 139–155. Republished in Wells, Liz (2019) The Photography Cultures Reader. London: Routledge. Van Gelder, Hilde & Baetens, Jan (2010) ‘A Note on Critical Realism Today’ in Van Gelder & Baetens (2010) Critical Realism in Contemporary Art. Leuvan: Leuvan University Press. Wells, Liz Ed. (2012) Landscapes of Exploration. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press.

PART II

On Curation and Residency

3 CURATORIAL STRATEGY AS CRITICAL INTERVENTION The Genesis of Facing East

Exhibition involves imposition of order on objects, brought into a particular space and a specific set of relations with one another. The ordering may be in accord with established classifications and habits of display or may challenge conventions; but is necessarily rhetorical in calling attention to artifacts brought together to be subjected to visual scrutiny. Exhibition commands visual attentiveness. This is taken for granted in museum and gallery studies. The creative role of the curator is perhaps less well understood. The figure of the contemporary art curator is a relatively new feature of the world of the art museum. (MJ 2004). I remember a photography conference at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, some years ago, when curators were referred to as ‘the new carpet baggers’ of Europe. It is obvious why (insensitive) curators might acquire such a reputation, especially as curators work very closely with artists during periods of project development, and then, once an exhibition is over, from the artist’s point of view, may seem to lose interest in their work. But the role of the curator is not well understood. Not long ago, a Faculty Associate Dean, responsible for Research in a post-92 British University (happily not the one where I work) commented to me that surely curating was ‘just organising’. My response was a little sharp! Someone else once remarked to me that he always thought of curators in terms of facilitation for artists, meaning that it hadn’t previously occurred to him that curators might initiate an exhibition concept, seek out artists and research contexts, negotiate with galleries and publishers (for catalogues), in effect, shaping creatively in their own right. Indeed, some comments on the role of the curator do leave one wondering how exactly people think exhibitions come about!

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-5

34  On Curation and Residency

Curating as Research Process I curate exhibitions of landscape photography, which may include video and installation. Landscape can be defined as the cultural representation of space as place. (Massey 2005). Site and space, political and spiritual identity, are complexly inter-woven. Landscape may affirm or extend our view of our relation with land, challenging dominant aesthetics and subject matter, bringing image and ideology into question. This chapter focuses on the genesis of a particular current exhibition, Facing East, contemporary landscape photography from Baltic areas (2004), in order to explore something about the making and workings of exhibitions. My central purpose is to argue for an understanding of curating as a research process which, as with any such process, involves investigation, discovery and critical reflection, central to which is the definition and refining of key research questions. I want also to indicate some of the ways in which an exhibition may stand as critical intervention. How did this particular exhibition come about, and what makes exhibitions substantial, let alone radical? It came about, as so often, through a form of serendipity. I had been working on British and American landscape photography, and I was considering broadening the horizons as I am researching a book on contemporary photographic landscape practices. Sîan Bonnell, Director of Trace Gallery in Weymouth, who was involved in initial proposals for a photography festival in Bournemouth, approached me for an exhibition proposal, and introduced me to those who run the gallery at the Arts Institute in Bournemouth, on the South Coast of England, without whose support the project would not have happened. ‘Text plus work’ is their central gallery emphasis, and they wanted to commission a new show as their festival contribution. They were also interested in touring the exhibition for two years subsequent to the festival. In the event, the festival did not develop as originally envisaged, but the tour for this exhibition surpassed all expectations and was subsequently extended for a further year, having been booked for its sixth and seventh venues, a degree of circulation which is more or less unprecedented in contemporary photography in the United Kingdom. When I was first approached, in 2002, I realized that the festival as planned would coincide with the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004, so it seemed obvious to look at a region within which there was a strong interest in landscape, and also a changing set of social and political relations. From a research point of view, the fundamental purpose of the project was critical evaluation of photographic work from Scandinavian and Baltic areas which takes land, landscape, identity and environment as thematic focus. My concern was with the relation between aesthetic strategies and ideological issues.1 I applied to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council) for funding, identifying key research questions as follows: • Does contemporary landscape photography in Scandinavia and the Baltic States offer a challenge to more established aesthetics and concerns? • If this is the case, in what respects is this challenge evident?

Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention  35

• What trajectories and differences can be discerned within and between the various nations, in terms of themes and aesthetics? • How is landscape as a historical genre perceived by contemporary photographers? • Is landscape photography in this region viewed in terms of the relation between land, landscape and identity – and how is this manifest? • How does this relate to recent political histories, in particular the dominance of Soviet Russia in the East of the region for much of the twentieth century – affecting Finland as well as the Baltic States. Of course, there are no comprehensive or conclusive answers – but these questions oriented the research and, thus, the final selection of work for the exhibition. I should add that, courtesy of the AHRC, I was able to travel extensively in the Baltic region, visiting archives and meeting with artists, curators and arts administrators, all of whom offered positive support for the project.2 It goes without saying that, in researching towards exhibitions, I read widely in terms of social and historical context as well as aesthetics and art history. I particularly explored previous exhibition catalogues, if they appeared to have some bearing on my research questions. As with all research, it is difficult to identify the precise effects of preliminary research or to explicitly link initial processes of exploration with final exhibition outcomes. Arguably, the connection resides in the confidence with which it becomes possible to view, appraise and critically situate bodies of work, having previously informed oneself as fully as possible and stimulated visual appetite. Research comes to underpin curatorial ‘voice’. Curatorial voice operates through initial definition of field and identification of key research questions, through selection of work, through the ‘theatre’ of exhibition which is fundamental to rhetorical affects, and through ways in which the project and the work of individual artists is contextualized in accompanying materials. Exhibitions wherein a curator has determined a theme or proposition, used the work of others merely to illustrate it and produce writing geared towards anchoring and constraining interpretative potential, rarely hold interest for very long. But where an exhibition has been carefully thought through, substantially contributing to knowledge within a particular field, ‘voice’ operates complexly, in effect, setting up some sort of dialogue between works included, as well as between the curator and the works. The multiple discourses through which this dialogue resonates contribute to quality of audience engagement.

Facing East Audience is a problematic notion. We can engage psychoanalytically and de-­constructively with spectatorship processes, or we can follow Bourdieu into sociological analysis, but neither tells us much about what actually happens as individuals explore and respond to an exhibition. (Bourdieu, 1994; Bourdieu & Boltanski, 1990). In many respects, viewers lie beyond curatorial control. In producing catalogue essays or exhibition statements, we assume that viewers have interests coinciding with that

36  On Curation and Residency

of the curator, in my case, combining the academic, the socio-political and the aesthetic. Of course, they may not. At the initial opening of Facing East, I was approached by a Russian woman, now living in the south of England, who had come to see the work because it was from Baltic areas; she was thrilled to find the region where she was born depicted in the further reaches of one picture. There is no way I could have anticipated this. Likewise, at a previous exhibition, on women and landscape, which included work based in the Egyptian desert, an elderly man took little notice of the exhibition concept or the work but started recounting his wartime memories of crossing the desert.3 Such anecdotes remind us that ‘audience’ is essentially unknowable. Spectators forge an independent sense of an exhibition; they bring their own subjectivity, desires, history and cultural experiences into play. Facing East includes 15 bodies of work by 16 artists (two work in collaboration) and encompasses a range of aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns. The artists included are based in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Denmark. (Russia, Poland and Germany also have Baltic coasts, but their cultural centres lie elsewhere – Moscow, Berlin, Warsaw/Krakow.) Given that little work from this region has been previously shown in Britain, I wanted to offer a fairly broad-based overview, indicating a range of photo-methods, issues and resonances. Indeed, if an exhibition is to offer some form of critical intervention, rhetorical tactics have to be carefully considered. The complexities of artists’ intentions, concerns, working methods and contexts of production, aesthetic strategies and effects play a crucial role. From a curator’s point of view, selection of work is central to critical strategy. Where possible I meet with artists since discussion about the genesis of specific projects and images and their critical reflections on their own work helps me to situate their work conceptually within an overall project as well as respecting their intentions, perceptions and preferences. The title of the exhibition is deliberately enigmatic, which I hope attracts interest or speculation. There is some explanation in the booklet which accompanies the show: As borderline states between Soviet Russia and Western Europe, the Nordic countries and the smaller Baltic states have had to “face east”. With the break-up of the former USSR, and the easing of travel restrictions across the Baltic Sea, they now face west. But, we “face east” to them. As the European Union enlarges, our curiosity about cultural difference extends. In the text which accompanies the show I added that, ‘To face east is to face the dawn, to witness new possibilities’. This chapter is to some extent based on the introductory text. The exhibition explores some of these new possibilities: changes, and modes through which tensions between continuities and change are being explored. The exhibition does not include older work; but historical research was essential in order to comprehend what might be under challenge. For instance, ‘Explosion No.1’ by Petter Magnusson (Figure 3.1), a young Swedish photographer who spent

Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention  37

FIGURE 3.1 

 etter Magnussen, ‘Explosion No. 1’, 2002. © Petter Magnussen. (Original P in colour).

some years studying in Norway, in effect challenges the Norwegian cultural icon of the mountain, which, as I found, was central to the photographic archive. The wooden house at the foot of the mountain by a fjord, offering solitude away from city crowds, remains part of the Norwegian dream. This digital assemblage explodes the rural idyll, bringing together the house, the mountain, and the drama of the clouds. Scale, composition, and heavy framing parody the pictorialist. The explosion may reference mining that, with fisheries and North Sea oil, centrally supports the Norwegian economy. But meaning is to some extent open. Magnussen remarks, It could be a disturbance or mining in a classic romantic landscape, with a possible ecological comment, or it could be war in the peaceful north, or an absurd attempt at terrorism outside of NY; or it could be some more mystical force in action, or the dream of an explosion, or an experiment in putting sublime forces/images up against each other in an investigation into an updated romanticism, a natural disaster, or even, as someone guessed, the peasant’s home brewery exploding…4 Although certain openness of interpretation is integral to the picture, the mountainscape idyll is definitely in question. Likewise, as Norwegian photographer and

38  On Curation and Residency

archivist, Per Olav Torgnesskar, in Prospects, 2002, reminds us through his series of ‘postcard’ images, rural and small town scenes may be dull and journeys remarkably banal. This body of work was in two parts. First, fifteen images from an extensive series in which he used postcard size and format to make images of ordinary places. The pictures were based both upon actual images available to him as then an archivist in the Royal National Library, Oslo, and upon his memories of the endlessness of journeys with his parents as a child stuck in the back seat of a car with little of note to view. We also included his video, Norwegian Scenarios, 2000, constructed from television news footage which, again, testifies to the ordinariness of the everyday. Both photographers thus challenge the dominant iconography of the Norwegian landscape as snowy, mountainous sublime. Exhibition installation enhances critical effect. Also concerned with contemporary Norway, Ane Hjort Guttu (like Torgnesskar, based in Oslo) links the affects of natural light with the modernistic, reflecting cultural change. Each picture in her series, Modernistic Journey, 2002, is intended as a separate image, but in the show we effectively constructed a diptych through juxtaposing a picture in which sunlight animates the upper edge of a mountain with one in which sun falls across a modern apartment block; parallel geometries drawing attention to this paradoxical similarity of effect. Although each was made as a separate piece, through pairing two pictures I was able to suggest interrogation of the nature/culture binary. A further picture captures the reflection of a white block of flats in the lake landscaped into the foreground. The observer is not conceptualized as modernist in the sense of extolling modernity, so much as post-modern in observing ways in which culture incorporates nature. Landscape, however abstract and symbolic, is always at one level about place and human intervention. Layers of historical development are marked in Herkki-Erich Merila’s series, Lunatica, 1999, connoting moonlight and, of course, lunacy. Estonian rural scenes are viewed by night; the presence of roads and factories is marked. Fields have been harvested but the hay now sits in the shadow of agri-industry. Car headlights – the ultimate symbol of everyday modernity, – rather than moonlight, illuminate the harvest stacks and distant industrial plant. This is, of course, somewhere, but it also stands for everywhere. This series articulates tensions – nature/culture, tradition/modernity – within each image. Critique is not always obviously integral to the image, especially cross-culturally. There is a well-worn joke about survival under the Soviets – you could become a communist, an alcoholic or a photographer. Photographers claimed to observe and tell things as they appeared; it was difficult to condemn someone for documenting something. Gestures of resistance and renewal may be expressed through form. For many in the former Soviet states, landscape offered a relatively unconstrained field of practice; aside from restrictions on photographing in certain military areas, landscape photographers could experiment pictorially. Latvian photographer, Māra Brašmane (Figure 3.2), worked in street documentary from the 1960s on; but she also explored the changing Daugava estuary from Riga to the Baltic coast, observing shapes made by plants within the flow of water or held within the illusory solidity of ice. Graphic surface, timelessness, repetition, and cyclical renewal speak

Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention  39

FIGURE 3.2 

 āra Brašmane, from Waters, 1999–2001. © Māra Brašmane. (Original in M colour).

through this extensive series of work; light is part of the ‘moment’ of the image, and nature seems transcendent. This appears traditional, and indeed, it is. But the work refuses the imperatives of socialist realism, in effect offering a mini-challenge within the particular historical context (although this work was not much exhibited in the Soviet era). Viewed in Britain it does beg explanation; my reasons for including it are not at first apparent. Pictures by Lithuanian, Remigijus Treigys, likewise untypical of the Soviet era, depict rural or coastal scenes from the Baltic coastal region where he lives. His Distressed Landscapes, 1999–2003, are dark and mysterious; shadows predominate and detail is obscure. Significantly, an essay on his work is titled ‘The Invisible Side of the Void’. (Naru, 2004). Surface intrigues; he not only retains ‘blemishes’ but also touches the paper enhancing marks of making; each image is, thus, unique. Treigys is one of a number of Baltic artists in the 1980s associated with what some critics defined as ‘distressed aesthetics’, involving emphasis on the pictorial and an eschewing of documentary idiom which together indicated refusal of the heroic norms of socialist realism. Again, in a British context, this is not immediately evident. Taken away from the Soviet context, the work resonates through complex layering of observation, association, perceptions of time and space, nostalgia, tone and mood, and the geometry of the image. The exhibition text on which this essay draws comes into its own in indicating effects of such very different contexts and strategies relating to production. That said, neither Brašmane nor Treigys were motivated in terms of resistance; their concerns are much more existential.

40  On Curation and Residency

Use of colour is relatively recent in all three Baltic States; equipment is limited and materials are expensive. Thus, there has been a direct leap from the authoritative rhetoric of black and white to the fluidity of the digital. This is not uncontroversial. Andrejs Grants, who has been influential since the 1980s for naturalistic documentary and who seems to have taught every young photographer in Latvia, resists what he sees as the undermining of ‘authority of record’.5 Some of his comments did seem to echo debates in Britain in the 1980s. But nothing directly replicates. Grants told me that he values ‘mystery’ in the picture; different layers, something spiritual. In a post-Soviet context emphasis on the existential also implies anti-­materialism (in the Marxist sense), again, perhaps, passive resistance. Gatis Rozenfelds, who was taught by Grants, takes a different line on the advent of colour and the digital: he wants to challenge what he terms ‘beauty landscape’, to find something ‘more truthful’.6 His series, Weekends, 2002, concerns the shaping of new suburban landscapes, but also explores colour as a means of speaking about land. The images note everyday scenes and, to British eyes, may appear relatively ordinary photographically. (British debates of the 1980s about colour and documentary seem outdated now!) In the Baltic region his work is seen as very original; it was included in the third Baltic triennial.7 I included it for two reasons: first, to balance the more abstract aesthetics seen in some of the Baltic work thus contributing to demonstrating to a British audience something of the range of contemporary interests and practices, and second, in terms of subject-matter, to indicate everyday ordinariness. It is quite difficult to place in relation to other work in the exhibition, as here it does not seem particularly radical, nor does it startle or entice. Interesting ontological points relating to digital colour as opposed to, what is clearly seen by some as, a more considered aesthetic of hand-printed monochrome, do not come across.

Considerations Exhibition themes emerge as works are juxtaposed with one another. Exhibition space facilitates or constrains what can be achieved as both conceptual and aesthetic considerations are taken into account in the hanging, along with basic practical issues such as where will larger work fit, which walls can take the weight of heavily framed pictures, what will be the effect of the movement of daylight near gallery windows, what space needs to be left clear around fire exits, and so on. When I was first asked to talk about my experience as curator for the show, Facing East had been to two venues with rather different set-ups and audiences.8 The primary audience at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth is students and staff, although the gallery is also open to the public. By contrast, Impressions Gallery in York was a specialist photography gallery; the majority of visitors will have gone there intentionally and the exhibition attracted an apparently unprecedented level of interest for the time of year (4,708 visitors). Both these galleries differ from the three following venues, two of which are arts/media centres and the third of which is also the local library. In such cases, installation decisions have to take into account attracting the attention of visitors whose reason for being there was, for instance, to go to the cinema.

Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention  41

In such instances, questions of which work to hang opposite a cinema entrance, near a café, or down a corridor, become especially salient. The Arts Institute at Bournemouth has two galleries across a corridor. Both galleries have large French windows and, in April/May, natural light was dramatic as it moved and changed the feel of the space over the course of each day. A short stroll allowed for most of the work to be scanned. What came to matter was that each body of work could hold its own within the space and that pictures were complemented and enhanced through juxtapositions. This meant paying attention to obvious issues such as being careful where smaller work, or work within which colour is less vibrant, were placed in relation to other works which threatened to dominate. The corridor came into its own as a space for the series of Norwegian ‘postcards’ and the effects of daylight in the galleries were utilized to emphasize Nordic qualities of light. Hanging decisions also entailed some thematic connections. For instance, colour documentary photographs from the woodlands of middle Sweden were hung facing colour imagery of wildlife in rural Finland. At Plymouth Arts Centre there are three galleries, only one of which has natural light, a factor which became crucial in determining which bodies of work were hung in that relatively small room. In York the gallery was radically different. Impressions Gallery – which closed in 2006 pending a move to Bradford, Yorkshire – was a converted house with five rooms on two floors and a hallway with stairs. Work by various artists had to be grouped in twos and threes, which made questions of aesthetic strategies and thematic links much more predominant. This changed the viewing experience as each room acquired a particular emphasis and atmosphere, and it was likely that the audience would view the show room by room. For instance, in York, one of the upstairs galleries included work from Denmark and Sweden which variously speaks of communications and migrant labour. Denmark apart, the rural population throughout the region is sparse; many live in relative isolation. The climate is unforgiving, distances are extensive and train or road transport may be slow.

Landscape Photography from Baltic Areas Winds howl across the flatlands of Denmark between the North Sea and the Baltic. Agriculture is now industrialized, but traditionally Denmark and South Sweden were family farming areas, rural communities, facing each other across the Øredok sound. Joakim Eskildsen’s (Figure 3.3, p. 42) tribute to his grandmother, is based on a not uncommon early twentieth century story of sisters sent from the relatively poor South of Sweden to live and work on a farm in more affluent Denmark. This extract from a larger installation includes a portrait of his elderly grandmother and a study of her hand, on which years of manual labour seem etched. The black and white pinhole photo-aesthetic lends distance to the rural landscape, but, in fact, this was only three generations ago. We are reminded not only of personal history, but also of the relative speed of change. In Øredok (1998) John S. Webb documents this coastal area in South-West Sweden, previously something of a nature reserve,

42  On Curation and Residency

FIGURE 3.3 

Joakim Eskildsen, from Requiem, 2000. © Joakim Eskildsen.

now eroded by roads and industrial plants congregated around the motorway bridge which, since 2000, has linked Sweden with Denmark, finally terminating the relative isolation of the north from the rest of Western Europe. The work is in the form of a series of 360-degree panoramas, digitally stitched, and thus disorienting for those with intimate knowledge of the local landscape. The eight panoramas are mounted in two vertical blocks of four, each implied narrative of change underscoring others as we contemplate the changes wrought. In Sweden rural activities, such as berry-picking, formerly associated with family days out or community harvesting, have become organized commercially and, as Swedish artist, Margareta Klingberg (Figure 3.4), notes, offer a source of seasonal employment for ‘new Swedes’ from Eastern Asia and elsewhere and migrant workers from former Soviet areas. Woodlands and closeness to nature may remain a part of Swedish consciousness, but the realities of industry and city culture cut across traditional imagery.

FIGURE 3.4 

 argaretta Klingberg, ‘Lövsjöhöjden’ from From Home, 2001–2002. M © Margaretta Klingberg. (Original in colour).

Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention  43

FIGURE 3.5 

Juha Suonpää, from Wilderness, 1990s. © Juha Suonpää. (Original in colour).

The Finns are proud of their woodlands and lakes, but inland is also boggy and rugged; ice, snow and limited daylight in winter make existence and survival exceptionally difficult. Wild animals, and hunting, carry significance founded in need. The popularity of wildlife photography, involving treks to forest hides, ­echoes this – the photograph acting as substitute ‘trophy’! Juha Suonpää’s (Figure 3.5) humorous, anti-pastoral pictures, mostly from the eastern border forests, formed part of his doctoral study of this masculine pastime. At one level, the work is humourous: a bear, eating convenience food, stands still to be photographed, and a photographer disguises himself behind a tree, wearing antlers to fool passing wildlife. This image, along with Magnussen’s explosion, were the two pictures favoured by the various galleries for private view invitations and more general PR. Indeed, the (badly) disguised photographer features on the front cover of the Arts Institute booklet accompanying the exhibition. They are striking images, but so are many of the others in the show; I presume it is thought that humour and paradox seduce contemporary audiences. But a number of more symbolic points are encoded: the blues of the sky and the water in which a cow has drowned precisely match that of the Finnish flag, and a distant line where managed forestry gives way to wilderness marks the Russian border. From a Finnish perspective the implications of this are

44  On Curation and Residency

multi-layered, simultaneously reminding us that Russia once ruled Finland, and noting the unruliness of the landscape on the Russian side of the border whilst, paradoxically, regretting loss of Finnish wilderness as it has given way to managed woodlands. Indeed, forestry is now big business; birch trees, which once grew randomly amongst the lakes, now stand regimented through organized planting. Commercial logging has cleared acres of woodland. In their extensive visual research on change in northern forest areas, Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo comment on the implications of the loss of what for many is a primary space of contemplation, a part of Finnish identity; a spiritual home. Their starting point for The End of the Rainbow was an interest in the spiritual and the shamanistic, although as the visual research developed it became increasingly analytical and political. (Kovalainen and Seppo, 1997). Their concern is with the disappearance of forest, change in the Finnish woodland landscape, and forest identity; for the Finns, forest is a crucial space of spiritual replenishment, where human culture remains relatively unmarked. But after 50 years of intensive logging nearly all the natural forests have disappeared. The project is ongoing. Facing East includes two long panoramas (2003) portraying individuals in rural spaces clearly in process of change. The artists also interview these local habitants who recount memories of their place within the woods, and what the woodlands meant to them (headsets allow visitors to listen to the interviews). Indeed, industrial development in Finland only dates from the second half of the twentieth century; nature remains central to Finnish ‘soul’; summertime in the lakes or gathering wild berries and mushrooms in autumn is still common. The sauna cabin by the cold lake offers an elemental spiritual experience, transcending simple cleansing and health. Just being is important; in Like a Breath in Light (ongoing) Marja Pirilä’s breathing is marked in a series of images taken at different times of year, always from the same position, sitting with a pinhole camera on her knee, facing north across the lake, open to the effects of elemental light and colour. The ensuing abstract images are suspended behind glass, as a group of floating impressions of light and colour, shifting in intensity in response to movement of light within the gallery. The University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki, capital of Finland, is a major centre for masters and doctoral level studies in photography. Professor Jorma Puranen’s 1990–1991 series on Lapland, language, and nomadic Sami peoples, are widely known in Britain. (Gupta, 1993). The critical foundations of his work offer an influential example of the social and philosophic edge that we can expect from contemporary Finnish landscape photography. Jari Silomäki, in his Weather Diary (ongoing), points to tension between the global and the local, as place, personal experience, and the distant backdrop of world events blend together. To play with words, they are ‘con-fused’ into a sometimes uneasy relationship that confuses any sense of specificity of individual experience. Every day he takes a photograph, printing in colour and hand-writing some comment on it which relates to that day’s experience. The comment may reference the news, or world events, or his own immediate personal situation. That this is amalgamated from his point of view is inscribed through his own handwriting. Depth of colour reflects light and exposure

Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention  45

FIGURE 3.6 

 iitta Päiväläinen, ‘Portrait’, 2001, from Vestige – ice series. © Riitta R Päiväläinen. (Original in colour).

times, maybe linked to events. For instance, on the day on which Silomäki made ‘Turku, the day US bombed Afghanistan’, he was expecting the news. He had his camera set up on a tripod, ready for exposure for the length of the news item; hence the purple intensity of the sky. Several of his daily photographs are shot in northern Nordic nightlight, where the sun never quite sets, reminding us of extraordinary qualities of the landscape there. Riitta Päiväläinen’s (Figure 3.6) evocative photographs of clothing, standing upright, frozen in the icy landscape, eerily devoid of the people who might have once worn the garments, imply human transience and vulnerability relative to continuity or change in land and landscape.

Conclusion If exhibition articulates curatorial ‘voice’ through research parameters and through selection of work to be included, then installation operates as evocation. As I have indicated, gallery space influences ways of working. For instance, the more narrative series about work and transport links, Eskildson’s grandmother, Klingberg’s foreign workers, and Webb’s new roadways, were grouped together. The frozen shirts, the pinholes of the lake, and the daily diary formed a further, more philosophical, grouping. At Impressions Gallery they shared one of the upstairs galleries,

46  On Curation and Residency

creating an intensity of reference to sky and snow in what the Programme Manager nicknamed the ‘ice’ room. In summary, we can conceptualize curatorial voice and strategy in terms of a number of inter-related levels of evocation. Artists ‘speak’, more or less assertively, through their work. To some extent, work is appropriated to the interests and vision of the curator, although, in my experience work refuses subjugation. Artistic affects are contained by, or rupture, the authority of the curator. Viewers engage with photographs as art objects, as representations, as symbolic instigators – of memory, fantasy, and reverie – and, as I have already remarked, respond for themselves. Comments and feedback often surprise me. This encounter is ordered through the selection and juxtaposition of imagery within the specific gallery space which, in effect, results from dialogue between the curator and the works. It is also inflected through interpretative indicators in accompanying labels or catalogue essays. Indeed, it is through installation, and through written contextualisation (or gallery talks) that the critical intentions of the curator may become most evident. Curatorial strategy becomes most effective as critical intervention when it is intended not to close down exploration but, rather, to invoke a range of issues and emotions, representations and debates, in order to provoke continuing curiosity and speculation – which in its turn, may fuel further research questions and explorations. Liz Wells, 2007. Originally published in Judith Rugg, ed. Issues in Curating, Contemporary Art and Performance, Bristol: Intellect, 2007.

Notes 1 Research for the exhibition also underpins a chapter on landscape photography and national identity in my book, Land Matters (2011) in which I take Scandinavian and Baltic work as a case study. 2 I should like to acknowledge the support of AHRC, and also of FRAME the Finnish fund for art exchange for funding transport of Finnish works to the UK. 3 Liz Wells (curator) Viewfindings: women photographers, ‘landscape’ and environment, opened at Newlyn Art Gallery in 1994 (subsequent tour to Watershed, Bristol; NMPFT, Bradford; Zone Gallery, Newcastle). I overheard this conversation when I happened to be in the gallery. 4 Email from artist, 23rd February 2004. 5 Andrejs Grants, discussion with author, Riga, August 2003. 6 Discussion with artist, Riga, August 2003. 7 What is Important?, 3rd Ars Baltica Triennial of Photographic Art, tour, Baltic region 2003–2005. 8 The exhibition opened at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth in April 2004, then toured to Impressions Gallery, York (20 November 2004 – 22 January 2005). By the time of finalising this paper for publication it had also shown at Plymouth Arts Centre (Spring 2005), Lighthouse Media Centre, Wolverhampton (May 2005), and the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock (Autumn 2005). Further bookings include Tulley House and Gallery, Carlisle (Autumn 2006) and The Yard Gallery, Nottingham (Spring 2007).

Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention  47

References Bourdieu, Pierre (1994) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul. Bourdieu, Pierre. with Boltanski, L. (1990) Photography: a middle-brow art, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gupta, Sunnil. ed. (1993) Disrupted Border. London: Rivers Oram Press, pp. 96–103. Kovalainen, Ritva. and Seppo, Sanni. (1997) Puiden Kansa, Helsinki, Pohjoinen Gallery. MJ, (2004) Manifesta Journal. Amsterdam, No. 4, Nov. Abstract used for PR. Massey, Doreen. (2005) For Space, London: Sage. Naru, A. (2004) ‘The Invisible Side of the Void’, translation supplied by the artist. Wells, Liz (2004) Facing East, Contemporary Landscape Photography from Baltic Areas, Bournemouth: The Arts Institute.

4 LANDSCAPES OF EXPLORATION

FIGURE 4.1 

 ap produced by the British Antarctic Survey with data from the SCAR M Antarctic Digital Database, accessed 2022. © UKRI-NERC 2022.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-6

Landscapes of Exploration  49

Antarctica is not a scientific curiosity but a key part of Planet Earth. Processes taking place there affect the world’s climate and its oceans, and link the continent to all corners of the globe. In understanding climate change, the Antarctic plays a crucial role. The ice sheet preserves a climate and pollution record spanning the last half million years.1 When Francis Drake set out to circumnavigate the world in 1577–1580 little was known about Terra Australia (southern land); it was believed not to exist, to be attached to South America, or to Australia. Drake discovered the passage (now named after him) that proved that no southern continent was connected to Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago forming the southernmost region of South America. Explorers found various islands in the Southern Ocean, the ‘sub-Antarctic’, during the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This archipelago attracted whalers and seal hunters as well as geographers and cartographers. But nothing was known about the Antarctic itself, so little could be imagined anthropologically, botanically or geographically. Later expeditions, supported by a number of European nations, between them gradually discovered and charted the Antarctic Peninsula.2 British ventures (often departing from, or returning to, South America or New Zealand) were active within this and have become legendary. For example, in 1841 James Clark Ross pushed far enough southwards through pack ice to discover the barrier off the Antarctic on the New Zealand side, now named the Ross Ice Shelf. In 1902, the three-man team of Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wilson reached 82o 16’ 30” South, penetrating further inland than had ever previously been achieved (the Discovery expedition). Famously, a few years later in 1911–12, the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, reached the South Pole five weeks ahead of Scott who, along with his four-man team, never returned. But, as Ranulph Fiennes is at pains to point out, Scott should be lauded for what he accomplished in terms of scientific discovery, especially in his 1902–4 expedition, rather than castigated for coming second and failing to make it back (Fiennes, 2003). During this period – often described as ‘The Heroic Age’ – nations such as Sweden, Germany, Japan and Belgium first made serious attempts at Antarctic exploration. International exploration was a matter of national pride as well as one of individual achievement. The Antarctic is riddled with histories indicated through naming – Ross Ice Shelf, Larson Ice Shelf, Weddell Sea, etc; South Georgia (island) is named after King George III, British monarch at the time of its discovery.3 It is hardly necessary to remark on the centrality and significance of geographic exploration and scientific research in the Arctic and the Antarctic. There is also continuing interest in oil and mineral prospects. In 1959 twelve governments, including the United Kingdom, together agreed The Antarctic Treaty (in force from June 1961) whereby this region was declared an international zone, an area of scientific cooperation and support, used only for non-military purposes.4 During the latter part of the twentieth century, the speed of development in Antarctic exploration has been immense with many new nations becoming engaged in Antarctic-based

50  On Curation and Residency

research. In the last couple of decades, the peripheral area, particularly the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula, has also emerged as a tourist destination, albeit an expensive one (the Lonely Planet guide to Antarctica was first published in 1996!). The majority of visitors reach the continent by ship, although it is also possible to arrive by plane from Chile or, once in the Antarctic, to fly into the interior. Many of the various national base camps are linked by air. Nowadays there is a small science station at the South Pole with several space telescopes, one of which is located some 500m from the Pole. The United States Contingent construct a road across the ice, when needed, for ground transportation to move bulk fuel, machinery and materials to and from this ultimate continental interior. For those of us who have never visited the Antarctic it comes as something of a surprise to see, for example, a photograph of a large grey and metal building, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, rising from the snow, silhouetted against an intensely blue sky (Rubin, 2008: 225). Research conducted by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has been framed rhetorically (since 2009) as ‘Polar Science for Planet Earth’ and organised under six headings: Polar Oceans, Climate, Icesheets, Chemistry and Past Climate, Ecosystems, Environmental Change and Evolution. Given current debates relating to climate change, one of the goals is: To explain changes in atmospheric circulation, temperatures and sea-ice e­ xtent in both polar regions over the past 50 years and to determine how much of this change is due to human activity and how much is a result of natural factors (including solar variability).5 The majority of those based in the Antarctic are support workers, facilitating the scientific investigation that remains the primary focus and rationale for investment by various nations including the U.K. For artists and writers, opportunities to explore the Antarctic itself remain relatively unusual, and arguably a privilege, one with responsibilities to reflect upon, respond and convey something of the experience of what by all accounts is an extraordinary place. So what can art do? Writing in 1936, the German Frankfurt School critic, Walter Benjamin, contrasted the healing work of a surgeon with that of a magician and drew a parallel between this and a comparison of painting and photography (Benjamin, 1936). Where the surgeon cuts into a body (science) the magician performs a sleight of hand (faith/theology); where the photographer penetrates reality (literal representation) the painter critically reflects upon phenomena (conceptual art). Benjamin was writing at the height of the modern era with its emphasis on innovation, experimentation and technological development. His concern was to argue that film (photography and moving imagery) had superseded painting both in terms of its modern (technological) characteristics and, given mass reproduction, its democratic potential to reach wide audiences. We no longer accept such a definitive distinction between art and photography, although, of course, specific media have particular intrinsic properties, potential and limitations. Indeed, it might be argued

Landscapes of Exploration  51

that various media and modes of expression complement one another in terms of visual means of detailing phenomena and communicating emotional responses to people, places and events. If this argument is extended, it can equally be suggested that the aims, methods and outcomes of various means of scientific discovery and various media of artistic research may be similarly complementary. Following Benjamin, if surgeons cut into the body, psychoanalysis can tell us something about how such an invasion might feel and artists are concerned with shape, posture and gesture, visual indicators of experiential responses. Likewise, scientists and artists, exploring the same place, may produce complementary results and insights. Aims, methodologies, means of information collection and methods of analysis differ, but they share goals of detailed investigation and discovery. Arguably such differences of objectives, tactics and responses together serve to extend our understanding of the nature of environments such as that of the Antarctic. The Antarctic is in many respects a place of mythology as well as of scientific enquiry. It has figured extensively in the artistic and literary imaginary, often linked to notions of pristine landscapes and the sublime. Particular places inspire geographic imagination through stories told about them. David Hempleman-Adams travelled south in 1995–6. Introducing The Heart of the Great Alone, photography from The Royal Collection associated with Scott, Shackleton and other expeditions, he comments on the psychological challenge both of survival and of achievement of goals in the Antarctic, adding that a key difference between now, and the Heroic Age, is that contemporary explorers know that it is possible to reach the South Pole (Hempleman-Adams, 2009). He also refers to the ‘dramatic stories’ of expeditions. Exploration is the stuff of ‘Boy’s Own’ romance, very familiar within English culture of the early to mid-twentieth century. Stories are recounted orally (there is a market in after-dinner talks about exploration). They also escalate rhetorically – Amundsen’s account of his 1910–1912 journey prosaically titled The South Pole, An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the Fram (the name of their ship) was re-published in 2007 as Race to the South Pole! Amundsen’s writing is not in terms of ‘race’ but in terms of challenge and discovery. Indeed, in so far as there was a sense of competition between nations, surely what explorers have in common more than outweighed any sense of rivalry back home. Amundsen left the Norwegian flag at the South Pole, literally staking a claim, but he also left a note for Scott, fully expecting him to be the next person to arrive there. Histories are chronicled in journals alongside scientific notes and more mundane everyday experiences or narrated visually through sketches, photography and film. Herbert Ponting’s photographs of the Terra Nova icebound or Frank Hurley’s various photographs of The Endurance (1915), yet another tall mast ship marooned within the ice pack, bring a shiver to the spine as we imagine how it might feel to be frozen into the ice for the winter months. Ponting was the first professional photographer to join an Antarctic expedition. Scott’s hut at Cape Evans included a darkroom for his use (Hempleman-Adams, 2009). The resulting photography undoubtedly benefitted from the in-depth investigation facilitated by the length of

52  On Curation and Residency

FIGURE 4.2 

 erbert Ponting, ‘Terra Nova Icebound’, 13 December 1910. Royal H Collection Trust/© His Majesty King Charles III 2022.

his stay (in effect a precursor of the type of residency recently sponsored by BAS). By contrast with Hurley’s silver prints in documentary idiom, Ponting used carbon prints to enhance tonal subtlety, the aesthetic contributing to expressing something of the sublime nature of the environment. He included many landscape studies alongside more detailed photographs of wildlife and of the expedition team. He later experimented in re-printing images on different coloured papers aiming to more precisely express the sublime colours he perceived in the Antarctic landscape. His results reflect detailed observation, notes and memories that are unlikely to be accumulated through a short visit (for example, the few days experienced by tourists on Antarctic voyages).6 That we can imagine the Antarctic as a physical place has as much to do with ways in which it has been pictured as with verbal description or poetry. Historically, art has mediated geographic and scientific exploration. Ships’ crews regularly included artists (later photographers) alongside cartographers whose role was to visually represent that previously not known – at least to the Western world. A huge amount has been published on the subject of polar exploration, including explorers’ journals, biographical accounts and historical overviews (often including

Landscapes of Exploration  53

illustrations by painters, photographers and cartographers); scientific and geographic data; artists’ books and exhibitions. Titles are often evocative, for example, The Heart of the Great Alone (Hempleman-Adams, 2009) on Scott and Shackleton, or I May Be Some Time (Spufford, 1996) on ice and the English imagination. The role and responsibility of artists has changed over time. While we may interpret Edward Wilson’s extensive series of Antarctic drawings and paintings from 1902–4 and 1910–12 in terms of mood, aesthetics and artistic style, he would have viewed them as primarily informational – as well as recreational, as a personal pastime.7 Pictures stimulate the geographic imagination, contributing to formulating perceptions of places. More recently, artists have operated as educators, drawing attention to that which might otherwise be ignored. For many scientists this is the primary function of art, or of non-scientific writing. But arguably art, at its best, transcends reportage. As an expressive mode of communication art may operate more or less explicitly – or rhetorically – to shift or enhance understanding of place and circumstances. A number of the national Antarctic programmes, including the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK, have commissioned residencies, lasting from a few days to two–three months, whereby artists (visual artists, writers, musicians) have had the opportunity to explore and express something of their experiences and responses to Antarctica and also to live and work alongside scientific teams. The journey is psychological as well as geographical. Attempts to absorb the immensity of the experience, to make sense of the Antarctic as a place start with advance research and planning, and continue after returning home. As Paul Rodhouse, marine biologist and painter, has commented Back in my studio in Cambridge further thought processes go on as I re-run the paintings I have made in my head and then refer to my sketches, notes and digital images. I never start working on a canvas until I have thought through in some detail how I am going to approach a painting. This is not to say that my work always ends as it was first conceived – there are many unexpected turns and happy accidents which I gladly seize upon and exploit in the pursuit of an original finished work.8 Different art forms involve differing work methods. Painters or printmakers, such as Philip Hughes, Keith Grant, Chris Drury and, indeed, Paul Rodhouse, rely on sketches, photographs and workbooks, including written notes as memory aides, when developing full scale paintings back in a studio. By contrast photographs and video have to be shot in situ (although edited later), which raises questions about the reliability of the range of equipment likely to be needed. This was a key concern, for instance, for the five video camera set-up used by David Wheeler, and for effective sound recording and smooth camera movement when flown on kites in Neville Gabie’s project! Nowadays, with digital technologies, material can be reviewed on the spot. In the days of film, photographers such as Hurley or Ponting had to maintain a darkroom along with dry and stable temperature storage conditions for undeveloped film, developed film, and prints.9 By contrast, now the visual record

54  On Curation and Residency

may be instantaneous: Simon Faithfull’s palm pilot drawings, or Layla Curtis’ journey line, offered immediate webcast expression of their experience of the journey south. Likewise, sculpture and installation based on object collection relies on access to particular places. John Kelly collected stones and botanical samples, Craig Vear sampled sounds of the Antarctic. Installation art, such as Anne Brodie’s messages in bottles or Chris Dobrowolski’s sledge depend on advance planning, and on chancing possibilities – Brodie took bottles with her and Dobrowolski packed a load of old picture frames, both no doubt puzzling customs officers and those loading the ship. Artists respond to what they find, for example, although Dobrowolski had been collecting Antarctic ephemera in advance of the trip he did not know that packing boxes are still marked ‘man-food’ (although there is no longer a need to distinguish from dog food). Whilst all artists pursued research in advance, both to try to anticipate what might occur in practical or emotional terms and also to take a relevant range of equipment, there was always an element of serendipity. Art concerned with place and the nature of specific environments articulates philosophical reflection, practical strategies and determination to respond to what is actually seen or experienced, in order to avoid making work blinkered by pre-conceptions. The ability to engage with the unexpected, or with that so sublime that our emotional responses cannot be imagined even if we know in advance that, for instance, luminosity or sheer mountainous scale are characteristic of a particular place, is crucial to an artist’s endeavour to communicate that which reaches beyond what might previously have been imagined. Most of the artists commenced their residency with a flight from the UK to the Falklands Islands, then a journey by sea from Stanley (the exception was Neville Gabie, who, through an accident of timing, travelled from South Africa which is his country of birth so it seemed appropriate). Travel from Stanley was on board either the James Clark Ross or the Ernest Shackleton. In several cases the journey occupied more than half the time allocated for the residency and most of the artists comment on it, either through making work about the travel experience or through notes in journals and sketchbooks. Hence the journey formed a part of discussions with me during meetings or studio visits (Winter 2010–11). It was clearly a particular type of social negotiation. Several involved themselves with routine onboard tasks including loading and unloading, and everyone variously socialised with the ship’s captain and crew and with the range of scientists and Antarctic base support workers also on board. It seems some longer lasting links developed; David Wheeler remarked that the first officer from James Clark Ross, the ship on which he travelled, subsequently made a point of coming to see his exhibition (in Halifax, UK, 2010). One of Anne Brodie’s videos shot in the ship’s bar effectively indicates evening life on board, as we hear snatches of conversation whilst watching a gin and tonic heeling with the ship. Similarly, Layla Curtis’ close up video of the movement of her soup in the bowl invites us to wonder at the difficulties of moving around, talking or eating on board as the whole ship rolls with the extreme waves.

Landscapes of Exploration  55

As a time-based medium video is ideally suited to indicating something of the experience of constant movement, of the ship itself or of the landscape through which it is passing. David Wheeler’s five cameras set up in a row on deck not only record the environment through which the ship is moving but also indicate something of the experience of looking out from on board. Likewise, Neville Gabie’s continuous process of sketching shapes through line drawing on a bridge window during daylight not only tells us something about the shape of the ice silhouetted against the horizon, but also reminds us of the claustrophobia that many hours confinement in a cabin can bring. Simon Faithfull’s video records one minute a day of the 44 days he spent at sea, as his journey to the Antarctic (where in the end he only spent five nights) was thwarted by inclement weather. We empathise with the cabin fever that we imagine this produced, while knowing that the tasks of daily recording, in video or by palm pilot, will have mitigated this. Several of the artists commented on the necessity of routine professional tasks for everyone, both on board ship and when based in the Antarctic itself. Simon Faithful also made a daily drawing that was embedded in an email sent to over 3,000 people (or institutions) worldwide. He commented on the challenge of making “a record of me being at that point and attempting to filter the world through my head and getting it down as a set of lines”. He was using a palm pilot so the sketches tended to be details rather than big, and always minimalistic. He critically commented on the process as “an absurd proposition to go to Antarctica and attempt to capture it by such limited means”. The drawings work minimally to trigger imagination through poetic ellipsis; there is more white space than pixellated lines. Yet, through giving a series number and a location (including latitude/longitude), a running account of the journey was set up, with the images subsequently displayed as postcards, a slide carousel or on illuminated laser edge plastic. Likewise, Layla Curtis deployed available technologies, generating a web-based track mapping her journey that was instantaneously and globally accessible. In this respect, self-appointed tasks of journal writing or making work served on the journey and in the Antarctic to introduce professional order into what might otherwise be a set of emotionally chaotic experiences. Routines of investigating, measuring, recording, interpreting and calculating, or running support services such as transportation or canteens, all involving various deadlines along with regular maintenance tasks, operate at one level to steady what might otherwise be overwhelmingly sublime responses to the vast terra incognita of the southern waters and continent. South of the Falklands Islands, there is a Convergence Zone 20–30 miles wide where the warmer waters of the South Atlantic meet the cold waters of the Antarctic, usually producing a region shrouded in mists and fog. Apparently, both the air and sea temperature drop rapidly as the ship enters the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world’s greatest ocean current. For first time visitors this must be an unnerving experience akin, perhaps, to an eclipse of the sun or similar sublime natural phenomena. Anne Brodie commented that she understands why it is important for organisations to have an outline of what you intend to do when you are there, but that it becomes a hugely personal journey and how the environment affects you as

56  On Curation and Residency

a human affects your work. She remarked, “we’re very small and transient; this can make mark-making (for example, drawing) seem pointless as it won’t last”. John Kelly, for whom the experience opened a ‘poetic pulse’, commented that it is not only difficult to come to terms with the scale of what confronts you but also to deal with it afterwards, to adjust when you come back. Aside from existential considerations, how the environment actually affects materials may be difficult to anticipate. Brodie often works with that which she finds in situ, so tracing paper and plastic became materials – ephemeral and translucent – but the tracing paper curled up in the Antarctic environment. Among the artists, she was perhaps the most focussed on people and place. The glass bottles that she took with her and handed out to those at the base camp were intended to solicit responses (messages in bottles) relating diverse experiences of working there. The everyday experience of living and working on board and, more particularly, in the Antarctic, attracted a range of comments from the various artists. The majority spent time at Rothera, the main British station, although John Kelly was at the small summer-only base on Signy island. Simon Faithful went via South Georgia to Halley, Neville Gabie also went to Halley, and the writer, Jon McGregor, failed to get to Rothera at all because of ice. Chris Drury became interested in the surface of the ice, remarking that winds have a vortex pattern at Rothera and scour the ice of snow which makes delivery runways possible (no doubt one of the reasons why the base has developed there). It is the largest base and the one most accustomed to visitors, for example, television crews. Halley, which was established as a physical science station in 1956, is built on a floating and moving iceshelf and is now in its sixth version (as most of the earlier stations have been buried and squashed flat by the annual accumulation of snow). The latest version (completed in 2011) is built on skis, so that the modules can be towed inland each year to keep them from floating out to sea. Buildings at the bases are colour coded according to their precise use, but the skis have to be white as colour absorbs warmth and would dissolve the ice beneath. One of the artists described colour as ‘an imposter’ in terms of Antarctic phenomena and the response of light rays. For artists as visual thinkers, the visual impact of colour interrupting an otherwise white land palette begs reflection. One relatively common difficulty was the dependence on the generosity of support workers for transport to places that they wished to explore, moving between base camps, or from ship and base. For safety reasons, no one leaves a camp alone and all expeditions have to be notified. Trips out could mean waiting for several days hoping for space on a plane. If weather is adverse, flights are cancelled. Jean McNeil makes use of this as a plot development point in The Ice Lovers, when a pilot and a younger woman scientist find themselves stranded due to a technical fault, with no possibility of a repairs mechanic being flown in through the fog. The artists often had to wait for a space on a plane, but it seems it was worth the wait; for example, everyone who went to Sky Blu made work in response to the experience and recounted stories of its pristine vistas and scale. This is a distant camp up on the plateau on an area of blue ice about three hours flight from Rothera, used

Landscapes of Exploration  57

primarily as a refuelling stop for planes flying on to Halley, the Ellsworth Mountains or even the South Pole itself. David Wheeler found himself in this isolated spot at Christmas, at the height of Antarctic summer. Philip Hughes derived several of his larger paintings from his experience of being there and Chris Drury also took the opportunity of a flight to the Ellsworths, one of the most remote mountain ranges in the world. Opportunities and working relationships were partly a matter of chance. Chris Dobrowolski’s decision to bring picture frames with him might be interpreted as questioning how art might be made relevant, how the experience of the Antarctic might be ‘framed’, as well as providing him with material for transformation. The 12-foot-long sledge that he made there was designed and constructed with support from one of the sledge maintenance men familiar with traditional sledge-building; a budget restriction had meant his next project was cut, so he had spare time. Chris Drury shared a room with a field assistant who helped him plan his snow drawings, and he also talked extensively with the scientist responsible for glaciological echo soundings. This became pivotal in his work, as the camaraderie led to access to data that could be extracted for his prints. Drury’s interest in things that cannot be seen, but can be visualised by other means, relates to the abstract systems sometimes characterising scientific measurement. That data from instrumental technologies, developed for scientific research or for navigation purposes, facilitate graphic rendering of that which cannot be literally detailed testifies to further disciplinary cross-over as the visualisation also informs nature research, for example, expressing the flight path of an albatross. In terms of investigation, Drury’s renderings also complement figurative representations of the bird, for instance, Keith Grant’s paintings. Albatrosses are huge birds (stuffed examples in various Antarctic or Natural History museums testify to their sheer size). Conveying a sense of their import within their surroundings, and the sheer geographical range of their territory, is challenging. Both Grant and Drury collected information systematically through notes and sketches (for paintings made later) or through technical data extraction. But their choice of subject matter is hardly neutral; the albatross resonates mythically as a sublime creature, an omen of either good or bad luck, and a metaphor for human attitudes to the natural world. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem (1798), the Ancient Mariner’s ship becomes becalmed, cursed as a result of killing the albatross that was beating its wings behind them. The crew subsequently hang the dead albatross round his neck in place of a crucifix. The symbolism is powerful. His conscience cannot be assuaged. The poem signifies something of the psychological and spiritual journey experienced in voyaging south. In other words, scientific data collection methods and varied methods of visual imaging, along with poetic sensibilities, together offer a complex picture of this large seabird that not only indicates something about the bird itself and its behaviour patterns but also articulates its symbolic import. The research station is a captive space. As one of the artists commented, “… if you want to come to terms with the reality you have to come to terms with

58  On Curation and Residency

the people who work there”. It is an artificial community; there is no indigenous human population nor is there a sustenance relationship with the land. Research involves importing everything that might be needed. One artist commented on the amount of plastic brought in, as everything arrived wrapped in plastic air bags (like department store packaging). Whilst no doubt necessary in transport terms, this can seem environmentally intrusive (although all alien materials are removed from the Antarctic for disposal). Day-to-day realities of living and working do not figure prominently for most of us whose imaginary versions of the Antarctic are probably somewhat more romantic in terms of sublime notions of pristine landscapes. In fact, the community there is a microcosm, a little society with everyone including cooks, mountaineers, pilots, plumbers and electricians, doctors, scientists; “…every time you sat down to eat you found yourself with someone whose world is totally different”. People live and work there, with some staying, returning regularly, or staying continuously in order to maintain or support the work of researchers through both winter and summer seasons. Anne Brodie’s messages in glass bottles reflect the diverse range of people and responsibilities on the base. Paradoxically, in terms of desire for academic inter-disciplinary cooperation, sometimes there was very little contact with scientists as they were often out in the field for long periods. Indeed, the sheer extent of scientific data collection led several of the artists to remark that they wondered who is determining what data is used and who is taking decisions as to where, when and what to explore further.10 Perhaps artists and writers are, by their nature, more socially investigative than some. Many base camp workers spend two and a half years in the Antarctic, so some had the reaction “oh well, yet another artist” and had little interest in art, in what artists do or in how artists and writers work. In addition, apparently most staff are in their twenties; the artists were generally older. Some viewed artists as taking up science space, both berths on the ship and accommodation on base. As in any community, some people engage with art and artists and others do not see any relevance. Apparently, there were sceptics who viewed the residency programme as a BAS corporate public relations gimmick. Social skills and a willingness to ‘muck in’ obviously help thaw attitudes as in any semi-institutionalised circumstances. But for people accustomed to a high degree of creative autonomy, the mode of being, especially at Rothera with its summer population of up to 120, must seem frustratingly restrictive and clearly the social dimension posed some challenges for the artists working out ways to benefit from the privilege of close contact and intellectual engagement with scientists of varying disciplines while navigating institutional and personal pitfalls. But they were not entirely isolated. Unlike in earlier historical periods, satellite communication allows for contact with home. For Layla Curtis and Simon Faithfull, new technology facilitated artworks – the web-based account of her journey and his regular palm pilot emails – that could not previously have been envisaged. For Neville Gabie, it allowed for a correspondence with his wife, Joan Gabie, also an artist, which led to a series of drawings based on his emails and her interpretation of his accounts of his experience. In his Antarctic journal, Keith Grant comments

Landscapes of Exploration  59

extensively on his response to the environment, to the people he encountered at the base camp, to work conditions, but also on missing his family and, towards the end of his trip, looking forward to being reunited with them back home. As an artist now based in Norway, who has made extensive studies of light in the Arctic, he is familiar with the elemental conditions of polar areas and with the demands of representing changing formations of ice, sea, sky, weather, light and colour. Given this experience, his several philosophic comments on the immensity and intensity of such effects and affects in the Antarctic, and on the challenge of expressing this through painting, seem all the more significant. Grant’s exploration of polar light in many respects fits within a long tradition in painting of investigating the sublime in landscape. Referencing the Platonic distinction between pleasure and pain, Irish Enlightenment philosopher, Edmund Burke, reflects on the sublime as an effect or response to phenomena. He suggested that, The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. The passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions. (Burke, 1759, Section XV111) Given our instinct for self-preservation he suggests that death is the one thing worse than pain. However, in an arts context, as spectators we do not confront actual challenges; rather, what is fascinating is enjoyment of vicarious experiences of pain or danger. Art may be deeply enjoyable precisely because, as audience, we are drawn into contemplation of scary or incomprehensible phenomena without directly encountering them. In the case of artists and writers (and anyone else) undertaking research in places such as the Antarctic the experience of the sublime is more immediate. Again, to quote from Burke: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror….Astonishment…is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect. (op cit. Part II, Section 1) As Philip Hughes commented, however much research is undertaken in advance, nothing prepares one for the actual experience of being in the Antarctic. In the Enlightenment era, when Burke was writing, humankind was romantically posited as existing in harmony with nature yet, as thinking beings, superior within the order of things. There was a perhaps paradoxical interplay between the

60  On Curation and Residency

desire to comprehend, and pleasure in incomprehensibility, at the gap between what could be seen and what could be known. Notions of the sublime in landscape have extended to encompass concern with industrial sublime, legacies of the modern era (sometimes dystopian) and of nineteenth and twentieth-century socio-­ economic circumstances that remain marked in derelict industrial places, or those now re-developed for alternative uses. The notion of gap, inducing admiration, astonishment, wonder or fear, figures in more recent discussions of the sublime. We wonder at the technological, both in terms of phenomena seen or experienced but not understood, and in terms of that which despite the fact that it cannot be perceived influences behaviour patterns. For example, wi-fi invisibly penetrates our everyday space and we can channel surf the television from the armchair. It is indeed the stuff of science fiction – as was once the idea of reaching the South Pole, let alone building a space observatory there! While many aspects of the Antarctic remain to be explored, it is precisely technological developments that have enhanced ways of charting this vast area. The sounds of the Antarctic, captured by Craig Vear, rely on highly sophisticated recording technologies that complement the classical references of Melanie Challenger’s poems or resonate with Jean McNeil’s description of the polar landscape as the setting within which the futuristic plot of The Ice Lovers is played out. Similarly, David Wheeler’s panoramic photograph digitally printed on navigation chart paper, in combination with Philip Hughes’ painterly depiction of the sheer immensity of the Sky Blu plateau, enhance our sense of the immensity of space here – we imagine how fearsomely the winds might screech round tents in the temporary camp and the sheer cold of being there. Anne Brodie and Chris Drury recall travelling together to Sky Blu, where their first response was to set about building an igloo; this perhaps says something of the (childlike) pleasures of direct tactile engagement with nature, picking up stones, damming streams or, in this instance, hewing out chunks of ice to create a hideaway. Brodie subsequently used ice fragments from the igloo to build a structure that was eroded by the wind in only three days. She also brought two ice pieces back from Sky Blu. Scientists bring ice back for analysis, but her doing so resonates more symbolically as they were intended as mementoes. It also testifies to her determination, as bringing ice out involves getting permission, finding a spare box for conveyance, arranging for a 90kg block of ice to travel in an unheated plane from Sky Blu to Rothera, then by ship back to BAS, Cambridge where it is archived for ‘non-scientific purposes’. In trying to grasp something of the sublime immensity and remoteness of the Antarctic I asked the artists about light, colour and sound. Philip Hughes commented that being summer, it is light all the time, and that this affects you (you never stop working as you can work at 4.0 in the morning). Apparently, everything is flattened as the light gradually changes over the course of the day and the colour of the ice is amazing, although he anticipated this. For Chris Drury, as is evident in his prints, the Antarctic is blue; for Layla Curtis it is “as many shades of blue as you can imagine, from greys to turquoise”. For Drury it is marked by “persistent, roaring wind; plus, near the sea, the sound of water melt from glaciers”. This is

Landscapes of Exploration  61

particularly captured in Craig Vear’s sound recordings, but is also evident in Neville Gabie’s camera kite-flight video when the wind arrests the microphone. Gabie commented on the wind and on the “really cold light”, adding that at sunset the place fills with warm tones and hues. For others the Antarctic is very black and white. Simon Faithful referred to an “extreme hallucinatory white” commenting that rather than being expansive, there is no horizon so there is a collapsing of space; “it feels like the world has been deleted” rather “like being in a black room with your eyes open”. David Wheeler remarked that colour stands out and anything that is large with a bright colour, like a ship, or a human being, helps give scale to where you are. For all the artists, there was some sense of perceptual disorientation that was simultaneously fascinating and profoundly disturbing. Although David Wheeler also commented that there are “not many times that you are away from sounds of the ship’s engines ticking over, or an aircraft, or a generator”. In such an expansive space such alien – yet necessary – noise must blend astonishment at both technological sublime and the environmental. At least engine noise is familiar, even if apparently out of place. Other experiences must be even more unnerving, for instance, apparently it is utterly silent walking along the hills at Fossil Bluff on George VI Sound, as there is no life there, no signs of insect life, no dust, no cobwebs, and only an occasional bird in the air. Wildlife generally gathers nearer the sea, concentrated in certain areas. John Kelly, who, as is clear from the tonal qualities of his work, is among those who saw the Antarctic as black and white, remarked that at Signy, a remote British research station on a small island in the South Orkney islands, there is quite a lot of exposed rock. Also, much more wildlife than he anticipated: birds as well as penguins (about 25,000) and seals (elephant seals and fur seals). He noted that Antarctic terns, Wilson’s storm petrels, skuas, sheathbills and snow petrels were all around. Kelly was based at Signy alongside two penguin researchers, two botanists, a base commander and a maintenance man. He was there for a long period of time and comments that after a few weeks down there they became interested in what he was doing. His background in geology and geography may have helped him relate to the broader context of Antarctic science, although, as he remarked, scientists tend to identify very deep veins of research that are narrow, and tend not to be inter-disciplinary, which is a great limitation when thinking about inter-relations of art and science. Science and contemporary art share the same fundamental goal, that of investigation and discovery. But disciplinary approaches differ markedly, with the sciences generally emphasising specialism and established methodologies, and artists often more open to differing modes of enquiry. Yet there is an emphasis on research through practice in applied science, as there is in contemporary art, that should at minimum offer a parallel emphasis upon discovery and critical reflection, on theoretically informed practice. In the instance of Antarctica as a last vast sublime wilderness, perhaps Benjamin’s surgeon, artist and film maker remains metaphorically instructive. Each brings different objectives, modes of creative thinking and methods into play, together

62  On Curation and Residency

offering a fuller picture of what has occurred. One of the values of artists living in remote places, alongside scientists of various disciplines and expertise, as well as with support teams, is that art can represent place, mediate scientific responses to phenomena and also, crucially, offer different perceptions through which new ways of thinking about and exploring our environment may be generated. Clearly, if this is to be achieved, then investigations have to penetrate beyond the superficial. Hence, the value of longer-term residencies which offer opportunities to study the environment in different weather conditions and through seasonal change, and also take into account the seasonal rhythms of scientific endeavour. As with Herbert Ponting’s extensive portfolio of Antarctic photography, made over many months, the work of the British Antarctic Survey artists gained substance and therefore accumulated authority through our sense, as audience, of the seriousness of their research and commitment to communicating impressions, findings and responses through creative practice. All the artists and writers variously comment that the experience continues to influence their work. But the significance of the residency programme goes beyond this as, conversely, their work offers insights that are subjective as well as informational, offering points of identification for us and thereby contributing to general understanding of the nature of the Antarctic as a region and of why Antarctica matters. Liz Wells, 2012 First published in Liz Wells Ed. Landscapes of Exploration, British Art from Antarctica. Plymouth: UPP, 2012, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name, that brought together the work of ten artists, a musician and (in the catalogue) three writers, that opened at The Levinsky Gallery, University of Plymouth, UK, on the occasion of the centenary of the death of Robert Falcon Scott (Scott of the Antarctic) who was born in Plymouth.

Notes 1 John Kelly, Antarctic artist 2003–3, exhibition invitation, 2006. 2 Given that this is a publication including work by British-based artists supported by the British Antarctic Survey, this extraordinarily abbreviated summary highlights British expeditions. This is not to dismiss the importance of ventures by many explorers from elsewhere. 3 Histories and perceptions may differ, or be contested. Certainly the Falkland Islands/ Islas Malvinas are a matter of continuing dispute. It could be argued that this is primarily because, for example, if an oil field is discovered in the Falklands region, British ownership facilitates economic benefits. 4 The others were Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, U.S.S.R., U.S.A. There are now 28 nations active in the region. 5 http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/about_bas/publications/pspe.pdf 6 A key example is ‘Cirrus Cloud over the Bourne Glacier’ 19th December 1911, which he carbon printed onto paper dyed orange, and onto blue, in an attempt to capture actual colours. Orange print included in The Heart of the Great Alone, The Queen’s Gallery, London, 2011/12.

Landscapes of Exploration  63

7 The Scott Polar Research Institute archives hold an extensive collection of his work and that of many other polar artists and photographers. www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/ catalogue/edwardwilson/ 8 Paul Rodhouse. http://website.lineone.net/~polar.publishing/paulrodhouse.htm accessed 13.9.11. Professor Rodhouse, marine biologist and painter, is currently responsible for the British artist residency programme, originally set up by Professor David Walton. 9 Ship-borne photography dates from its earliest days; it is known that Sir John Franklin had daguerreotype equipment on board for his fated North West Passage expedition of 1845 (Gordon, in Hempleman-Adams, 2009: 39). The daguerreotypes that Franklin had made did not survive so we have no visual record of that trip. 10 On further enquiry, I was assured that this is driven by project proposals subject to international academic peer review, or by long-term data collection (for example magnetic or seismic data) that contributes to a global data system.

References Amundsen, Roald (1912) The South Pole, An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the Fram, 1910–1912. London: John Murray. Trans. A.G.Chater. Re-published (2007) as Race to the South Pole. Vercelli, Italy: White Star Publishers. Andrews, Lynne (2007) Antarctic Eye. Mount Rumney, Tasmania: Studio One Benjamin, Walter (1936) ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Hannah Arendt ed. (1970) Illuminations. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. Brandt, Anthony ed. (2004) The South Pole: A Historical Reader. Washington DC: National Geographic Society. Burke, Edmund (1759) ‘A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful’ in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds) (1996) The Sublime, a reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Cambridge: CUP. Fiennes, Ranulph (2003) Captain Scott. London: Hodder and Stoughton Hempleman-Adams, David (2009) The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography. London: Royal Collection Publications. Rubin, Jeff (2008) Antarctica. London: Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd. 4th Ed. Shaw, Philip (2006) The Sublime. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Spufford, Francis (1996) I May Be Some Time. London: Faber & Faber. Walton, David W. H. and Pearson, Bruce (2006) White Horizons, British Art from Antarctica, 1775 – 2006. London: Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

5 ON BEING OUT OF PLACE

Time, slowness, walking, reflection, and being out of place, are recurrent themes in comments and writings by artists, academics, and environmentalists. In her essay, ‘The Mind at Three Miles an Hour’, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that many philosophers associate walking with thinking. (Solnit, 2001). Indeed, apparently Thomas Hobbes had a walking stick with an inkhorn built into it so that he could jot down ideas. Those familiar with her ruminations will know that she notes various types of walking, for instance, Wittgenstein’s habit of walking in silence up and down a room. He maintained a summer house by a lake in the remotes of the Norwegian mountains familiar, now, from Guy Moreton’s evocatively titled essay on ‘Landscape as a mindscape: searching for a place to think’, in which he not only reflects on his photographic investigation of the site where Wittgenstein’s house stood, but also on W G Sebald’s Ring of Saturn which Moreton describes in terms of ‘melancholic wanderings through the East Anglian landscape’. (Moreton, 2009:50). Additionally, Solnit reminds us of Rousseau’s engagement with nature and his interest in walking as both a simple pursuit and a space of contemplation. We might also think of Thoreau’s two years in the Walden woods, or of the various projects pursued by artists that involve extensive travel to previously unknown places – for instance, Alec Soth’s Mississippi river project, or Yan Preston’s Yangtze investigation, both of which involved numerous field trips over periods of several years. (Soth, 2008; Preston, 2018). These are forms of purposeful wandering, motivated by curiosity, a range of questions, and by the time and freedom to reflect in depth, through writing or, as in the latter examples, thinking through photographing. As John Berger has remarked, ‘The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled’. (Berger, 1972:7). It is not walking that is our theme here. It is the creativity that can result from being out of place, working – and exploring – somewhere where phenomena DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-7

On Being Out of Place  65

are freshly observed, smelt, or touched. Landscape painter, Michael Porter, commented that the title of a talk that he gave on ‘The Ramblings of a Landscape Painter’ could be taken ‘to refer to the physical act of walking in the countryside or alternatively the wandering thought process and bringing together of disassociated ideas’. (Porter, 2007:50). He remarks that he never comes back from a walk without stones in his pocket. For ‘stones’ read objects, images, anecdotes, memories. I have yet to meet an artist or writer who doesn’t carry some form of notebook, bag, or camera. As projects develop, methods of working become more purposeful. In ‘Lost in the Horizon’ Ingrid Pollard reflected on her experiences of rural residencies. She remarks, ‘spending days and nights on the Farne islands gave me the profound experience of island life. Big open skies, star gazing, clouds and weather systems’. (Pollard, 2005:60). She adds ‘I watched the watchers; the warders, who spent a large proportion of their working time watching; watching the tourists, the westerlies, the birds, the skies, and the seas.’ (Pollard, loc cit). She talked of the scale of the horizon viewed from the islands, and of using a panoramic camera as it ‘echoes the way our eyes more readily scan a scene horizontally than vertically’, again, reminding us that however momentarily ‘lost’ artists nonetheless reflect, take note, and ensure that they have relevant technical equipment with them when exploring. (op cit:61). Indeed, in thinking through artistic practice, the medium is a core component within the chosen method of enquiry; in Pollard’s case, the type of camera that she selects determines the means of seeing photographically. Artist residencies offer space to think ‘outside the box’. The pleasures of dis-­ location, and the possibilities that newly encountered spaces, histories, and situations afford, stem from the voluntary nature of such residencies. Being displaced as a result of family tensions, war, or economic imperatives is an utterly different type of experience. For artists, writers, or activists, such disruption might turn out to be creatively or politically productive, but none the less forced migration, that is, involuntary relocation is not at all the same thing as proactively taking time out. This is not to say that residencies are easy. Travelling takes us away from the familiar and out of our comfort zone. What is normal to those living in a particular location may be experienced by visitors as discomforting, unheimlich, although, of course, during the course of a residency the unfamiliar may be incorporated into everyday patterns – a route to and from a studio, a preferred coffee shop or produce stall in a local food market. Living away from home for a short period of time fosters heightened awareness. Lives are lived in parallel; for local residents the presence of an outsider, a stranger, whether an artist or otherwise, may be merely incidental in terms of the course of daily life and cultural circumstances. It is no wonder that artist residencies are highly sought; for artists, whether studio, street, or land-based, time-out offers space for reflection. For many of us, reflections are pursued through practice. As a writer, I work things out by trying

66  On Curation and Residency

to make sense of them in words, whether academic or through some form of ­story-telling. Sketches, camera notes, collecting objects, noting personal responses to light, textures or smells, observing behaviour – human and non-human – are all a part of a process of familiarization, of ‘getting to know’ somewhere. This deliberate approach – intentional, and via deliberation – informs our sense of place. Of course, this is not an objective experience. Robert Adams commented that landscape photography implicates biography, geography, and metaphor (aesthetics). (Adams, 1996:14). Residencies offer an opportunity to reflect on and learn from new observations and perceptions, but we make sense of histories and present phenomena encountered through reference to our previous knowledge, experience, and understanding that, of course, reflects our specific cultural formations, psychologically and sociologically. In this respect, we are simultaneously out of place in that we are from somewhere, and ‘out of place’, elsewhere, dis-located. Creative retreats, workshop and residency opportunities, come in various forms. In some instances, the space offers an opportunity to develop or complete a pre-­ existing project, whether in a facilitated workshop environment or given a desk and/or studio and time to focus. Others may be entirely open. For example, the Wapping Project, originally based in East London, offers accommodation in Berlin, but it is stipulated that no work should be made. Some retreats are rural, away from academic or art market centres; others may be popular precisely because they are located in major capital cities where the making and exhibition of new work may attract interest from established critics and collectors. However, residency proposals are most commonly project-led, with a statement of purpose and intentions as a part of the application process. They may be funded as much for the benefit of the sponsoring organization as for the individual artist, as a means of the host organization enhancing their engagement with contemporary practice, using artworks from residencies as a basis for exhibitions, events, and publications, and perhaps to extend their art collection or library. Indeed, one of the drawbacks and artistic risks of residencies is an increasing emphasis on demonstrable outcomes, so that on the one hand, hosts have something to show funders and, on the other, given the Western work ethic, artists can demonstrate productive use of their time. Reflection cannot be measured in terms of productivity. This does not mean it shouldn’t be valued. Nor does it mean that we should be skeptical about project-led proposals wherein specific intentions are suggested and questions are set up as starting points for wanderings and wonderings, along with some clear intentions in terms of medium and materials. We need some sense of purpose, and the writing of a proposal in itself fosters reflection – exactly what is it that I want to think about, do, or achieve? This seems fine as long as there is space for ideas to develop and for a project to be refined in response to actual experiences of places. *** As a capital city with several schools and universities – although no specific fine art college – Nicosia seems familiar in numerous respects. People generally speak

On Being Out of Place  67

excellent English, and Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC) itself, as a former electricity generating station, has much in common with culturally re-­purposed power plants and industrial buildings internationally, from the Tate Modern, London to the Power Station of Art, Shanghai (both former riverside power plants). Yet, the accommodation for the residencies from which various projects generated in the context of the Plymouth-NiMAC collaboration is about 100m from the south wall of the Buffer Zone; armed border guards are visibly present, although in the last few years crossing from south to north within the city has been unrestricted, at least for those of us who appear as tourists. Dis-located geographically and removed from normal everyday demands and commitments, the professional creative challenge for artists as temporary residents lies in working out how to respond conceptually and phenomenologically to this, in some respects, very different political and social environment. Residencies offering opportunities for enquiry through creative practice are highly sought and valued as spaces of philosophical investigation and critical reflection. This Plymouth-NiMAC residency programme is possibly unique as an international partnership between a University and an arts centre that enables artists based in an academic context to pursue practice-led research. Given the exigencies of work, productivity, and survival nowadays, certainly for artists in the UK, Europe, and North America, residencies act as one of few types of generative space offering time and freedom for creative reflection. Core to this is the value of the ‘uncertainty’ associated with new contexts, events, and encounters that enhances critical and creative reflexivity in ways that become manifest through art resulting from the experience, challenges, and opportunities offered through being out of place. Liz Wells, 2018 First published in Liz Wells Ed. Layers of Visibility, Plymouth: UPP, 2018, the catalogue for Layers of Visibility, an exhibition at Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, 2018/19, that brought together five bodies of work by six artists (two working as a pair), all of whom were academics based in the School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Plymouth, UK, and resulted from a five-year artist-­ residency programme in collaboration with NiMAC.

References Adams, Robert (1996) ‘Truth in Landscape’ in Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture. Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Penguin Books. Moreton, Guy (2009) ‘Landscape as Mindscape: searching for a place to think’, symposium paper 2007, in Wells, Liz and Standing, Simon (2009) Relic. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press, Land/Water and the Visual Arts symposium series. Pollard, Ingrid (2005) ‘Lost in the Horizon’, symposium paper 2004, in Wells, Liz and Standing, Simon (2005) Surface. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press, Land/Water and the Visual Arts symposium series.

68  On Curation and Residency

Porter, Michael (2007) ‘The ramblings of a Landscape Painter’, symposium paper 2005, in Wells, Liz and Standing, Simon (2007) Change. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press, Land/Water and the Visual Arts symposium series. Preston, Yan (2018) Mother River. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Solnit, Rebecca (2001) ‘The Mind at Three Miles an Hour’ in Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso. Soth, Alec (2008) Sleeping by the Mississippi. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl.

PART III

Phenomena

6 ICY PROSPECTS

FIGURE 6.1 

Jorma Puranen, ‘Terra Incognita’, 1997, from Curiosus Naturae Spectator. © Jorma Puranen.

Wilderness is a place of imagination, a space beyond that which can be clearly known. As such, several contradictory associations adhere to the notion of wilderness: it has been seen as barren, as a place of spiritual redemption, as object of conquest, as natural habitat for animals and vegetation, as challenge for geographic DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-9

72  Phenomena

mapping, as military vantage point, and as opportunity for prospectors in logging, mining or fur-trading. Most of us never actually travel in previously unmapped regions, although we may have clear, possibly romantic, notions of extensive vistas, apparently unpopulated, open or forested, savagely hot or freezing cold. Historically, wilderness pictures were often commissioned for topographic rather than aesthetic reasons; but nonetheless played a scene-setting role in landscape photography. This paper is concerned with interventions by two contemporary photographers that question the terms of the genre. The particular focus is on Lapland, that is, the north of Scandinavia. Through reference to the work of Jorma Puranen (Finland) and Elizabeth Williams (UK), it comments on more critical photographic engagements. Although from the Southeast of Finland rather than the north, Puranen comes from a culture within which the effects of snow and ice are very marked. Williams does not; her fascination is as an outsider. As I shall indicate, both bodies of work reflect anthropological attitudes and are, for want of a better phrase, anchored academically. One reason for focussing on work made in the north is that, although perceived as Arctic wilderness, Lapland is homeland for the nomadic Sárni people. It is wilderness only in the minds of those who don’t live there. My central concern, then, is with artists’ interventions which question notions of wilderness, deconstruct the conventional landscape pictorial, and engage issues to do with fantasy; desire and the geographic imagination, in other words, invite us to dream with open eyes (the phrase is borrowed from Michael Tucker, 1988, Dreaming with Open Eyes on art and shamanism).

Wilderness For the Oxford English Dictionary ‘wilderness’ refers to ‘land which is wild, uncultivated, and inhabited only by wild animals’; this makes it ‘a wild, uncultivated, or uninhabited region’. Historically, colonial attitudes have been implicated. For instance, the American West or the Australian Bush appeared wild and uninhabited to White settlers; that these areas were inhabited and had meaning for Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals is now widely acknowledged. How can we speak of wilderness when it is, by definition, unknown and unknowable? Geographical imagination is conceptual, rather than topographic; accuracy of mapping is not necessary for roaming and reverie. Wilderness can only exist through fantasy. Wilderness explorations, whether of desert, forest, seas, mountains, or polar regions, are founded in flights of fancy and desire. Yet, paradoxically, we can only imagine, chart, or picture uninhabited regions through reference to the knowable. Questions of representation arise; however dreamlike the imaginary, we formulate or speak our feelings and ideas through language, visual or verbal. It is a semiotic commonplace that native Arctic languages have over 50 words broadly referencing snow whilst English has three: snow, ice, and slush (and hail and sleet describing icy rain). Language, in limiting that which can

Icy Prospects  73

be expressed, both reflects and frames socio-cultural circumstances and philosophical modes. Northern languages, such as Innuit or Ural languages, are adapted to Arctic circumstances in ways that English (which is a Germanic-root language) is not. The limitations of English contribute to the unknowability of icy wilderness; and the limitations of experience contribute to what can and can’t be formulated in response to the imaging or picturing of far north snowscapes. But representation (in words, thoughts, or pictures, or in the vagueness of dreamlike states) contradicts unknowability and ‘untouchedness’. In other words, in Western rational philosophy, the desire to define wilderness, through exploration and mapping, articulates an essential contradiction. Photography, often perceived as a literal medium ideally suited to the empirical, has been centrally implicated in attempts to chart and reclaim wilderness. It has witnessed the exploits of explorers, and been used for topographical depiction, thus influencing the visual imaginary. Photographs document people as well as places. Contradictions emerge: notions of wilderness are often premised on ignoring the presence of native peoples – the Bedouin, Australian aboriginals, Native Americans. On the one hand, ethnographic photography testifies to habitation. On the other hand, as if turning a ‘blind eye’ to human presence, lands are typically represented as empty sublime vistas, perhaps potential sources of raw materials such as minerals or timber. As Stevie Bezencenet has commented, The ‘Landscape’ genre tends to present aesthetically pleasing images of natural scenes and Man’s intervention in them, whilst serving the ideological functions of investigating philosophical and religious concepts – demonstrating social order, confirming ownership and affirming personal and national identity. (Bezencenet, 2000: 56) Photography thus intersects with and articulates broader concerns relating to politics, economics, anthropology, geography, and geology; this adds to its representational force. We want to believe the possibilities implied by that which we see in the picture.

Wilderness Journeys For Edmund Burke the sublime refers to that which is daunting, fearful, yet exhilarating in its natural magnificence. The sublime unsettles, there is an aura of danger. Part of the fascination with wilderness is the risk of the unknown. Wilderness is not tame, not easily subsumable within a landscaped picturesque. But the sublime relates to the aesthetic. Burke was not concerned with the perverse pleasures of actual risk; rather with the speculative pleasures of contemplation, with the awefull. The pleasure of the sublime thus results from an interplay of the forces of the natural and the perversities of the imaginary.

74  Phenomena

If people cannot – or choose not to – make actual journeys they can fantasize about the lives of explorers. There is a sub-genre of travel writing and photography premised upon the heroicism of having ‘been through this and lived to tell the tale’, which panders to such imaginary wanderings; the pleasures here are risk-free! Francis Spufford evokes the geographic imagination, One is sitting somewhere in the warm – perhaps it is sunny, perhaps it is a dark evening of a temperate winter and the radiators are on – and whatever one’s attitude, whatever the scepticism one applies to the boyish, adventurous text in ones hands, into one’s mind come potent pictures of a place that is definitely elsewhere, so far away in fact that one would call it unimaginable if one were not at that moment imagining it at full force. Perhaps the place is a howling trough between two huge waves of the Antarctic Ocean, where a twelve-foot open boat encrusted with ice and containing five men, one of whom has gone mad and won’t move, looks as if it is about to flounder. Perhaps the place is the foot of a cliff in the dark, so cold and still that the breath of the travellers crystallises and falls to the snow in showers, so cold that their clothes will freeze at impossible angles if they do not keep their limbs moving. Perhaps the place is the South Pole itself, an abomination of desolation, a perfect nullity of a landscape, where a party of people are standing in a formal group, one pulling a string attached to a camera shutter. (Spufford, 1996: 1) Photographers do not have the luxury of distanced fantasy. Taking photographs necessarily involves trekking in remote areas. Towards the climax of the first half of the recent fictionalized account of Shackleton’s 1914 trip to the Antarctic the photographer attached to the expedition (working in film as well as stills) was one of the five men selected for the tough overland journey to the South Pole – the photograph being seen as necessary for describing place and as witness to their achievement. Such docudramas contribute to the visual imaginary, feeding into a generalized romance of the polar. This drama was shot in Greenland, which is inhabited not by penguins but by polar bears, and which, no doubt, exhibits different types of light and ice formation, if only we, the viewer, were skilled enough to distinguish between the icy North and the icy South. ‘Icyness’ becomes a symbol of polar extremes – rather as the green grass of the home counties comes to stand for England, masking visual, geological, and climactic diversity. Icy vistas also come to stand, metonymically, for masculinity. The post-war popularity of exploration films such as Scott of the Antarctic (1948) rested in part on the drama of the story of an Englishman taking on the challenge of conquest, mastering fear of the unknown and conquering land. The narrative coherence partly rested on a sense of authenticity; although, again, this turns out to be generalized rather than

Icy Prospects  75

specific. Accuracy clearly was of some concern to the producers who employed two technical advisors to ensure a degree of realism. (One of them, David James, had spent the year immediately after the war working for the Falklands Islands Dependency Survey). A sense of authenticity was constructed in part through narrative accuracy in terms of, for instance, props, methods of using of equipment and behaviour in sub­zero temperatures. But environment was also of some concern. The film was acted on location in Switzerland and Norway (as well as in the studio). Apparently generalized icy vistas were sufficient for this purpose. However, as David James remarks, The first point upon which there was complete agreement was that the film should be made in colour, since black and white could not possibly do justice to the blues and greens of pack-ice, the wonderful limpid colours inside crevasses, or the pure pastel shades that are found in the clear air of the Polar dawns. It was obviously necessary that a small unit should go to the Antarctic for atmosphere and background shots. (James, 1948: 44) It fell to him to take the camera team on a three-month expedition to the Antarctic to acquire genuine footage. That the explorer is a male figure is reflected in the phrasing of polar fantasy. David James speculates on the attraction of the Antarctic in what might be viewed as archetypical language of the grownup boy scout, What exactly it is about that bleak and austere continent that attracts men is hard to explain, but the thrill of the unknown, the fascination of making the first footprints, the beauty and remoteness of a land as virgin as the mountains of the moon and, above everything, the exhilaration of battling against titanic elemental forces, all conspire to make those who have once been there long to return. (James, 1948: 17) The terminology is indicative: polar land is virgin and men thrill at the unknown and untouched. Landscape photography, historically, has been dominated by a series of ‘great masters’. I have suggested elsewhere that historically (in Western culture) land has implicated men and women differently, and that aspects of this differing relation are reflected in different approaches to picturing land (Wells, 1994: 44–51). Furthermore, men have generally enjoyed a greater degree of freedom to travel. This is not a hard and fast distinction – there were exceptional Victorian women travellers. But landscape photography as a genre, historically, has been dominated by men. Polar photography is no exception to this. Spufford’s home-based travellers of the imagination include women left behind.

76  Phenomena

FIGURE 6.2 

Jorma Puranen, from imaginary Homecoming, 1991. © Jorma Puranen.

Lapland – Arctic Wilderness Both the Arctic and the Antarctic are key wilderness areas, inaccessible through winter months. The Arctic has been more fully charted than the Antarctic. Northern nations such as Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Lapland, are populated, albeit sparsely. Tourism has begun to feature; winter month packages to the north of Scandinavia include adventure holidays involving overland skiing, husky-drawn sledges, snowmobiles, and overnight stays in ice hotels. The ‘white nights’ of June/ July apparently attract hundreds of tourists to Lapland, travelling by car and camper van from all over Europe to look at the empty horizon towards where the North Pole must be. The view is often obscured by fog, but, as Jorma Puranen remarks, ‘there on the edge of a huge cliff, people drink champagne and celebrate having come to the end. It’s the end of their physical journey and it’s where the journey of their imagination starts’ (McNeill & Sand, 1998: 75). Lapland is home and homeland for the Sámi people, about 50,000–60,000 inhabitants. The Sámi have a history which transcends, yet has been influenced by, political tensions as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia variously redivided Lapland over the centuries. It is a history anchored around rather different survivalist concerns and experiences. In Scandinavian terms the Sámi are the exotic ‘other’ of the north, and, photographically, have been imaged picturesquely in modes typical of Euro-centric ethnographic colonialist themes and conventions.

Icy Prospects  77

Refusing Appropriation Puranen researched ethnographic collections in the archive at the Musée de L’Homme, Paris, seeking nineteenth century portraits of the Sámi, some of whom were ancestors of people known to him. (The originals are by a French photographer travelling with Prince Roland Bonaparte in 1884). He reprinted the images onto acrylic sheets and carried them to the northern slopes of Norway and Sweden, physically installing the sheets within the ‘home’ environment prior to rephotographing. His idea was ‘to metaphorically return people who had been buried in archives back to the landscape and culture from which they had been separated’. (Gupta, 1993:96). The original aim was to restore each person to their home area, but the wide-ranging geographical origins made this impossible; the anthropological explorers have been extensive and thorough in their treks. As Puranen has commented, photography and anthropology were both implicated (he uses the term ‘abused’) in colonial processes. The series could have been made through digital amalgamation, but for Puranen the ritual of taking home the dispossessed was an essential part of the project. The portraits show faces, or faces and shoulders, a composition typical of ethnography with its requirement for systematic recording and classification of subjects as ‘types’. The ensuing face and shoulder images of (now long dead) Sámi people, their bodies seemingly buried within the snow, appear ‘larger than life’ due to their position in the snowy hills and valleys and to the sense of scale within Puranen’s pictures – historical echoes etched into lands marked by symbols of the present such as power lines or open mine shafts. In the 1993/94 British exhibition, Disrupted Borders, pictures were installed to be viewed across the gallery, or at the end of an alcove, thereby adding to the imposing effect. (Gupta, 1993). As spectators we first saw the landscapes from a distance, across which we were enticed to respond to the faces which confront us. Deceptive beauty! The aesthetic harmony of the images belies uncomfortable questions about dislocation, colonization, identity, land and belonging. As Peter Osborne remarks, For a travelling culture with a fluid conception of space, the enforced accumulation of its faces at a fixed centre such as an ethnographic archive, amounted to a declaration of war on its cultural logic. The nationalizing function of the original imagery also contained the fear and fascination settled peoples often feel in relation to nomads. They seem to them to personify an enviable freedom outside social constraints and yet, in their unknowability and their silent challenge to property and social order, appear to embody chaos. These acts of symbolic possession represented a form of Symbolic exile for the Sámi which Puranen’s work attempts to reverse. (Osborne, 2000:149) Elizabeth Edwards terms Imaginary Homecoming ‘a dynamic articulation of history as a continuing dialogue between past and present concerns’. (Edwards, 1995:317).

78  Phenomena

Puranen’s approach is methodical: ‘as a photographer, I have a scholarly attitude, I try to read up as much as possible before I plunge myself into new situations and new places’. (Aula, 1992:141). That his starting point for the series was an archive testifies to this. However, as Puranen remarks, ‘transforming the resulting information into comprehensible visual form finally entails spending time in the landscape: letting one’s eyes linger in the distance, in the wind and the rain; among the sounds of the animals’. (Puranen, 1999:11). The artist thus becomes subject to local climate conditions and cultural constraints. Any risk in the making of work is actual, not held at a distance through pictorial framing as it is for his audience. He worked closely with contemporary Sámi people on the project. In some pictures within the series Sámi men hold the images of their ancestors; in others the large plexiglass pieces take position in the snow, in the woods, or near railway tracks whilst images reproduced on polyester sheets were wrapped round tree trunks or hung within bushes. A further dimension to the story lies in the battle for the environment of the north – the pictures show power lines, railway tracks, and mining. It is not only people who have been appropriated, but also the land. Imaginary Homecoming reflects Puranen’s deep sense of disquiet about the effects of incursion northwards. This concern was further marked in his later series, Curiosus Naturae Spectator, in which silk sheets, or flags, inscribed with works, were inserted into the landscape. Irony emerges from tension between the scenes depicted and the Latinate inscriptions which reference cartography. For instance, ‘Systema Naturae’ foregrounded against a clearly manmade dam or ‘Terra Incognita’ flowing across a large rock. (Figure 6.1) Use of Latin, which as the language of the Roman Empire connotes Imperialism, references classical Western Renaissance Art. It is the language of the Catholic Church, which since the Romans, has claimed universalism, and of cartography (pursued under the auspices of the Mediaeval Church). The weight of history resonates in the two examples cited, for instance, ‘Terry Incognita’ is familiar from maps; in this context it suggests not only the unknown but also unknowability, except that this spot has been accessed by photography. Other examples are more complex: for instance, one inscription reads ‘speculum orbis terrae’. ‘Speculum’ means ‘I see’; also, mirror; also copy or imitation. This layering of reflection (mirror) and imitation complexly nuances the edges between sky, sea, and ice in the snowscape which appears almost as the end of the world or ‘Terra Exagitatorum’ in which the land is shown scarred by the debris of mining. One response could be to translate ‘exagitatorum’ as exaggeration in the French mode of throwing up hands in horror (Vous Exagérez!). A more literal translation refers to the land of those who have been displaced. In this nuance the land becomes more equivalent to the French ‘terroir’, with its sense of history and belonging. But if the title is spoken aloud, a sense of dis-ease is implied through the staccatoness of the word. Land agitated by those who have no right to be there? The photographs are framed in accordance with the aesthetic traditions of landscape photography, with emphasis upon depth of field to draw attention to detail, harmony (the golden rule) and tonal contrast. But the words interrupt easy viewing; rather than anchoring meaning the inscriptions throw it into disarray.

Icy Prospects  79

FIGURE 6.3 

J orma Puranen, ‘Terra Exagitatorum’, 1995, from Curiosus Naturae Spectator. © Jorma Puranen.

Phrases such as ‘Terra Incognita’ also bring the observer/explorer’s sense of cultural centrality and superiority into play. Who gives him the power and the right to name and designate the character of Arctic lands? Naming may be seen as attempted mastery over the otherness of untamed nature designed, consciously and/or unconsciously, to displace threat. Puranen remarks that most of the people who mapped, drew, or otherwise illustrated Lapland over the course of centuries had never really travelled there (McNeill & Sand, 1998:74). Cartographic picturing operates likewise. As Nikos Papastergiadis notes, The sciences of studying other lands and other peoples were always framed through the rhetorical tropes of the theatre. To see them, the self-constituted, the audience had to be safely seated in such a position that they could recognise the exotic as part of that distant land of make-believe. (Papastergiadis in Puranen, ibid:73) This theatre of the imagination led explorers, with their various national flags, to forge towards the North Pole. Puranen reminds us of this territorialism through using flagpoles with their flying sheets to note claims made over such lands which take the form of memories, histories, narratives, geographies, but also involve that which is forgotten or lost. In ‘Terra Exagitatorum’ a satellite dish, shed and power lines foreground people and memory as we realize that any claim for autonomy on

80  Phenomena

the part of the Sárni has long since been lost. As Puranen puts it in the title of the catalogue for his retrospective exhibition, Language is a Foreign Country. (Puranen, 2000).

In the Land of Make-Believe Physical journeys north terminate but the journey of the imagination reaches beyond the point of arrest, towards the ultimate goal, the North Pole. Work processes involved in this illustrate the difference between imaginary and actual circumstances. Puranen told me that often he would set out before dawn to locate the plexiglas pieces, effect the mise-en-scene, or pro-photographic event. He would then wait until the light was as he wanted it before making exposures. By this time, the top surface of the snow would be melting, due to sunlight, thus rendering it impossible to reclaim his materials. So, the photographic journey involved waiting for the rest of the day until the surface crisped up again towards dusk. He would take his flask and sandwiches, observe the vistas, and listen to the birds, necessarily becoming immersed in the environment. Thus, the making of an image became ritualized within a carefully planned excursion. The environment imposed its own pace and restraints upon the manner of operating as a photographer. Without this account the geographic imaginary roams free, paying no attention to the specificities of climate and conditions. The geographic imagination may be the starting point for a project. UK photographer, Elizabeth Williams, spent three months in the winter living and travelling in the north of Finland. As a photographer she wanted to experience the loss of light, the extended twilight, and the reflection of dimming natural light on the whiteness of the ice and snow. This residency was part of a larger project, Wanderings, which has taken her to other extreme conditions of light, space, and place in Egypt and in South Africa. As she notes, The aim is that, through living in another place for a while, and having 'wandered, sweating, freezing, seen the sun set, rise’ one can begin to see links; similarities and differences, signs and signatures, analogies and sympathies, and through making representation open the door to new associations, stories and dialogue (Extracts from correspondence with author, January/February 2002. The quote is from Nils-Aslak.Valkeäpeä, Sámi poet) The first installation to emerge from an early visit to Egypt was titled Strange Territory; she describes her research as consisting of an examination of the discourse between a physical experience of the desert, a metaphorical notion of the desert, and a cultural reading of the desert arising from the history of European involvement with the desert and its inhabitants in the middle east. (Williams, project proposal statement, circa 1997)

Icy Prospects  81

These extreme places are also spaces traditionally occupied by nomadic peoples. The notion of ‘home’ is a further starting point; as she comments, ‘as western culture becomes increasingly nomadic in terms of race and identity, and nomadic tribes become more sedentary in terms of locations and lifestyle, notions of home are constantly changing and challenged’. (Williams, 1998). The anthropological dimensions of the project are very explicit here. Like Puranen, Elizabeth Williams talks of the difficulties involved in realizing an image which she had pre-conceptualized. Wanderings involved living and journeying in extreme conditions in three different parts of the world. The icy north was her final venue; having made a couple of exploratory journeys previously, she took a Winter residency at the University of Lapland. Gender becomes relevant: one of the first problems encountered was clothing. Luckily, she is tall and slim; British four seasons gear is designed for sale to men! Then, she had to get there. As she notes, (Re) your comment about women travellers and safety. How you would need to arrange a hotel room beforehand. I felt the same but in all three sites my plans for this just didn’t work out! In Lapland I had University of Lapland accommodation arranged for after my through the night train journey north. Nobody told me that I was arriving on a local holiday and that all would be shut up …So there I was, with baggage for two months (which was much heavier than for a hot climate), in well below freezing temperatures, in a country where I couldn’t speak the language with nowhere to go! In the end I managed to find someone who could speak English who wrote down instructions for a taxi driver. I found a taxi and he took me to the university guesthouse, but it was well and truly locked up, so he took me to a travelling salesman’s hotel and helped me get a room. I had to stay there three days as a weekend followed the holiday. The hotel didn’t provide food … so I had to find where to get some on a bank holiday. … this leads on to thoughts about dislocation, resourcefulness and the temperament or psychology of people who get drawn to desert/wilderness travel. (Email correspondence with author, 2002) This thrill at the unknown or desire to explore spaces for oneself transcends the Burkian sublime. The risks are all too real. Williams adds, …alcoholism is strong in Lapland and Finland in general. The laws for sale of alcohol were stricter than here, but beer was easily available. Vodka was the spirit drink .. I didn’t see or hear of too much violence in town. At Rovaniemi I was pretty much on my own and not in a community. However in Inari (a Sámi centre in the north) I stayed in a cheap B&B with a reindeer herders bar downstairs. Men looking like Canadian lumberjacks came in and had to hand over their knives in their belts or boots to the barman before they were allowed a drink. It had a history of brawls. I was lucky in that an

82  Phenomena

ex-student of mine from Helsinki was up there, so we met and spent an evening drinking in the bar. He introduced me to the Head of Sámi radio and translated & I saw life! My room did have a lock (thank goodness) but it also had a large hole in the wall to the outside -25C temperature! I stuffed it up with a blanket. (Correspondence, 2002) These are some of the reasons why women, traditionally, have been supposed to wait at home in the relative safety of geographic dreaming! Given the title of the overall project Wanderings, and her central interest in the nomadic, the foot is an important symbol; Williams had made a point of photographing a foot in direct contact with sand or with desert gravel (in Egypt and South Africa respectively). She had imagined photographing the foot of a Sámi woman, but no opportunity to do so arose. So, she substituted her own. Here again, the specific conditions of working in icy areas constrained her mode of working: I particularly wanted a woman’s foot in the snow as if she had just come out of the sauna and was about to roll in snow or dip in the lake (ugh!). In the end, I did it myself .. twice, as the first lot weren’t any good. By that I mean I used up one film (24) on one occasion and then another film another day. So about 45–50 times I soaked my bare feet in a bucket of hot water, ran out to the snow where my camera was set on a tripod and used delayed shutter release. Then ran back again. Every 5th time I had to bring back the camera to warm it up to prevent the batteries freezing. The tripod was too cold to touch with bare hands so I had to keep gloves on or my skin would have stuck to the metal. Temperatures were -20C and -28C (Actually my feet felt great afterwards!). (Correspondence, 2002) In both Puranen’s and Williams’ examples, the work situation, and the determination necessary (given what many would view as daunting circumstances), are clear in the photographers’ accounts. But to what extent do we think about this in considering the imagery? The frozen gloves, abandoned apparently whilst trying to reach out across the ice, seemingly speak volumes! Another photograph, taken whilst ‘wandering’, shows the frozen Kilpisjårvi Lake, over which, or beside which, Williams walked to get to the ‘local’ shop (which, apparently, ‘sold most things’). The journey was one to one and a half hours each way, usually undertaken by torchlight in the dark (as she reserved the limited hours of daylight, from approximately 10.30am–2.30pm, for photography). From an English perspective this is a daunting thought, more particularly so when we consider the heavy layers of warm clothing, rucksacks, snowshoes or boots, and the business of carrying or dragging purchases on the return trip, not to mention unknown aspects of the territory. The everyday banal becomes a matter for careful consideration with dire prospects associated. Commenting on her photograph of a crack in the ice

Icy Prospects  83

on the lake she notes ‘the ice was creaking and groaning and it was scary to have one foot on one side of the crack and the other foot on the other side’. Quite! (Correspondence, 2002).

Icy Prospects As an aesthetic category the sublime offers the perverse pleasures of pictures, vistas and viewpoints which may imply danger, but offer no real threat. For most of us it is not the real, but rather the imaginary, free of actual risk, which we seek. If the sublime is pleasurable because of the inter-play of fear and desire, then wilderness imagery offers a secure position from which to dream. Paradoxically, as polar regions become more accessible, so the imaginary becomes possibly more accurate but also seemingly more banal. Writing about her cruise to the Antarctic in 1996, Jenny Diski comments, Sometimes, looking out to sea, I had to shake away the films I had seen, the sense of remembering, without having ever actually experienced the event. I had seen such a sea many times on television, film and in photographs. The sea outside my cabin window looked remarkably like those pictures. It was, well, a copy. And here we all were, taking films of what we had already seen on film so that our children and grandchildren and our friends would once again not see it all afresh for themselves. And if they do go off to strange places, it will be, like us, to confirm what is already known. To see again, in nature, what has been seen already in hi-fidelity, sound-surround, fullcoloured vista-vision. (Diski, 1998: 157–8) This Baudrillardian loss of originality of imagery is endemic within travel photography, saturated as it is with postcards, advertising, and topographic imagery.

Dreaming with Open Eyes A landscape is speechless. Day by day, its only idiom is the sensory experience afforded by the biological reality, the weather conditions, and the actions that take place in the environment. However, we can also assume that a landscape has another dimension: the potential but invisible field of possibilities nourished by everyday perceptions, lived experiences, different histories, narratives and fantasies. In fact, any understanding of landscape entails a succession of distinct moments and different points of view. The layeredness of landscape, in other words, form part of our own projection. Every landscape is also a mental landscape. (Puranen, 1999:11)

84  Phenomena

Artistic investigation which unsettles and interrogates is to be welcomed. Both Puranen and Williams make work underpinned through reference to the anthropological, but this is a radical de-constructive anthropology, one which unseats Euro-centeredness and refuses unreflexive notions of otherness. In inviting us to consider the parameters which allow for the arrogance of claiming and naming of spaces unknown, or for using photographs to typologize and classify ethnic groups, or asking us to imaginatively rethink what it must be actually like to experience Arctic winter as a woman, alone and foreign, albeit befriended, both photographers challenge us to rethink stereotypes and other taken for granted notions of how polar regions, such as Lapland, appear to us. In considering the historical and cultural circumstances which obtain behind the icy prospects, both make substantial contributions to radicalizing the visual and the anthropological. Both draw attention to complexities in the history and actuality of exploration thus subverting the geographical imagination through refusing easy wilderness dreams. Liz Wells, 2003. Originally published in Malcolm Miles and Nicola Kirkham, Eds. Cultures and Settlements, Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003. Jorma Puranen is based in Helsinki (a former Professor of Photography at Helsinki University of Art and Design, now Aalto University). Elizabeth Williams moved from Oxford, and from lecturing at Reading University, to North Wales. Both were generous in talking about their work and experiences. Unfortunately, it has not proved possible to trace prints or to contact Elizabeth Williams for permission to include her images mentioned in the text.

References Aula, L (1992) ‘Jorma Puranen took the Sámi People Home’. Form-Function, Finland, 1. Bezencenet, Stevie (2000) ‘Wilderness Dreams’ in Wells, L et al (2000) Ed. Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now. London: I.B. Tauris. Diski, Jenny (1998) Skating to Antarctica. London: Granta Books. Edwards, Elizabeth (1995) ‘Jorma Puranen – Imaginary Homecoming’. Social Identities, Vol. 1.2. Gupta, Sunil (1993) Disrupted Borders. London: River Oram Press. James, David (1948) Scott of the Antarctic. London: Convoy Publications. McNeill, A & Sand, M (1998) Continental Drift. Europe Approaching the Millennium. 10 photographic commissions. Munich: Prestel. Osborne, Peter (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Puranen, Jorma (2000) Language is a Foreign Country. Helsinki: The Finnish Museum of Photography Puranen, Jorma (1999) Imaginary Homecoming. Oulu, Finland: Pohjoinen. Spufford, Francis (1996) I May Be Some Time. London: Faber & Faber. Wells, Liz Ed. (1994) Viewfindings: Women Photographers, ‘Landscape’ and Environment. Tiverton, UK: Available Light. Williams, Elizabeth (1998) Wanderings. Leaflet for internet project, Photo98, Yorkshire.

7 LIGHT TOUCH

Light is core to our existence. This is evident from physical and social phenomena. Without daylight there would be no life, few animals, limited agriculture, and a dramatic shift in the ecology of woodlands, hills, and plains. Humans can survive on water alone, but not for long. We need food, and vitamin D (for which sunlight is a key resource). The vegetation that sustains us is likewise light-sensitive, subject to climate and weather as well as terrain – with, as we know, drought or flooding contributing to risk of starvation whilst extreme cold in winter limits access to crops snug below the winter snow and ice. Agricultural use of greenhouses is widespread and experiments in laboratory-generated food increasingly feature, but light and warmth remain crucial to germination and growth; artificial lamps and heating substitute for nature’s seasonal cycle. We perceive light through the way it reflects from objects. Electric and magnetic fields oscillate in waves that intersect at right angles. Matter encountered by the electromagnetic waves absorbs light; hence, for instance, light appears dimmer to us on cloudy days as the density of the clouds acts as a filter. Light – although it may appear white – is composed of rainbow colors, and color effects are determined by the extent to which each hue is absorbed by matter. So, for instance, we may describe a paint pigment as ‘red’, but in fact it appears red because of other colors being abstracted through absorption by the material of the paint. As viewers of pictures this doesn’t matter; we engage intellectually with the content of an image and emotionally with intensities of light, shade, and color; medium and materiality are not our immediate concern. For artists, though, the properties of particular materials, their effects and affects are crucial, and carefully considered in composing pictures, whether through a camera lens or on a surface. This absorption phenomenon also accounts for why objects that appear colorful in daylight (or in artificial light) may appear black in the dark. Unless a little light falls on them, we cannot DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-10

86  Phenomena

see them. Nocturnal perambulation brings touch, hearing, smell, and memory into play as we navigate without vision. In fact, out of doors, even with a new moon, there is some natural ambient light from stars; hence the possibility of using long exposures to photograph at night. There may also be ambient illumination from streetlights, shop signs, car headlamps, and so on. But when light is limited, different sensibilities are drawn into play; familiar surroundings come to seem strange. Architects take the movement and intensity of natural light into account when designing buildings, whether domestic or public. Windows allow daylight to caress us, although in hotter regions they often face away from the baking midday sun. Buildings also need to be insulated, ventilated, heated, or cooled in accordance with prevailing climate and weather conditions. When natural light and moderate heat are not available, we increase our dependence on fuel resources, whether oil and coal or alternatives such as wind power and solar energy. Indeed, in much of the world, artificial light extends work hours and leisure possibilities, taking over as a primary stream of nocturnal illumination, both indoors and out of doors, introducing tungsten textures to the generally more muted palette of the moon and stars. Extensive energy resources are devoted to ensuring that we are not plunged into the dark. Yet, darkness (lack of light) offers potential for rest and replenishment; individual balance restored. There is a long-standing association between light and art in Western culture that is both literal and allegorical. Medieval gothic cathedrals included frescos along with stained glass windows, generally recounting biblical myths. Light was integral to this; the windows both facilitating the ingress of light and also the expressive emphasis that light lent to the glass panes. Abbé Suger, Abbot at the Cathedral of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, France, in the 12th century, proposed a division between ‘lux’ (light), ‘lumen’ and ‘illumination’ whereby lux refers to natural (physical) light in general. That was profane in that it shone on everyone even heretics and sinners.1 Through the window it was transformed into lumen, a metaphysical light, bathing a holy, consecrated space becoming a source of faith and godly inspiration thereby becoming a source of illumination – or knowledge – a life-enhancing light. Suger’s typology of the transformative qualities of light also included allegorical notions of color, with blue skies representing eternity (heaven) and red representing earth, blood, and the body. The symbolism is clear; light in its illuminatory capacity becomes a spiritual force. Associations between light and worship are not exclusive to the Medieval western church. For example, in Pagan culture, celebrations marking the key solstices of summer and winter, with gatherings at sacred sites of worship such as Stonehenge in the South of England likewise respect sunlight, here associated with seasonal transition (in Latin sol = sun). While art no longer plays such a specific didactic theological role, acknowledgement of the inter-relation of vision, knowledge, and light is evident from the extent to which ‘light’ continues to permeate metaphor and myth. In the English language, sight and knowledge are associated through the notion of seeing – ­connoting both literally seeing (with one’s eyes) and comprehension. ‘I see’ may reference literal perception, or it may indicate understanding of a situation or a concept.

Light Touch  87

We  reference comprehension in terms of illumination, which is associated with knowledge and understanding. Indeed, we talk of ‘light dawning’ or – in confusion or in a dispute – ‘seeing the light’. To be ‘in the dark’ is to be lacking information, to be out of the loop. That light is valued over darkness is also marked. People or animals may appear ‘bright’ or ‘subdued’. In Western culture young brides traditionally wear white; black is associated with mourning.2 If the preoccupations of artists indicate something about human concerns, the numbers of paintings and photographs made historically and now that depict dawn and dusk testify to our attachment to these moments, and also to the extent to which the apparent movement of light (which is actually a movement of matter that absorbs light and also of the planet as is revolves on its axis around the sun) is called upon expressively. There is perhaps nothing more amazing than the gentle emergence of light at the beginning of each day or the gradual silencing of birdsong as darkness falls, although, of course, both are much more marked in rural areas than in urban ones. This exhibition brings together work by three artists from northern Europe, Chrystel Lebas (France/UK), Heidi Morstang (Norway/UK), and Marja Pirilä (Finland), with that of two American artists, Lynn Silverman based in Baltimore and Frank Hallam Day in Washington, DC. All five use photography to explore aspects of the physical world and our relation to it. Photography is particularly appropriate to the exhibition theme. Photons = units of light energy. Photo-graphy literally means ‘writing with light’. Early photography was viewed as ‘photogenic drawing’, imagery resulting from a chemical transformation effected through exposure to the rays of the sun. Visual sensitivity to intensities of light and shade remains central to the aesthetics of photographic seeing (even though, given digital technologies, the infrastructure may now be mathematic rather than chemical). The exhibition title, Light Touch, is intended to remind us of our relationship with light and the myriad ways in which it touches us. Baltimore Washington International Airport, with its use of glass roofing and wall panels to create outdoor views and facilitate ingress of available light, offers a good example of an integrated approach to illumination (perhaps paralleling to the Medieval cathedral as a port of call for travelers). Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects of the airport gallery is that the shifting direction and intensity of light during the course of each day animates the pictures, introducing a further dimension to the notion of Light Touch. Each artist in some respect questions the movement of light and our responses to it, exploring interior and exterior spaces. They variously document the effects and affects of light, taking as subject matter: camper vans sited in woodlands, a seed vault in the Arctic, a managed park area explored at dawn and dusk, exterior reflections projected within a decaying building interior, and windows looking out to our external environment. Brought together, their work invites us to reflect on ways in which light touches us, contouring our environment, and, on our relationship with the natural world of which we form a part. Precise themes and artistic concerns vary. Heidi Morstang and Chrystel Lebas are both directly concerned with the natural environment, exploring ways in which

88  Phenomena

we relate to the physical world, contributing to sustainability (or to endangering it). Lebas has undertaken several artist residencies across Europe through which she has explored rural areas, questioning ways in which we attempt to negotiate and contain natural phenomena. For example, in 2010/11 she worked in Risnjak National Park, Croatia, which is a managed mountainous area through which a dual carriageway has been routed to speed the journey between Zagreb, the capital city, and Rijeka, a key Adriatic port. But what was the impact on wildlife? Her panoramic film, Tracking Nature – Dedin, Risnjak (2009; 53’05”), concerns the Green Bridge built over the motorway to facilitate animal movement from one part of the forest to the other.3 Apparently, according to the video camera tracking system used by park rangers, it took about three years for bears and other large mammals that roam the region to learn to cross the bridge, rather than following their previous route that now leads directly across the tarmac. The sound of traffic in the film reminds us of the aural impact, of the shift in the soundscape caused by the highway. Lebas’ research also resulted in several still photographic sets of images documenting local flora and fauna, and, following animal tracks deep into the woodlands at dusk. In addition, she used long exposures to record the effects of the movement of light over the Kupa River that flows from its source in the Northeast of the Park forming the border between Croatia and Slovenia. Aside from drawing attention to the inscrutable beauty of landscapes such as these, we are reminded of the various interests at stake in environmental conservation: tourism, animal husbandry, transportation links, the ability of woodlands to absorb enhanced levels of carbon emissions. Taken overall, the project questions ecological mutability and the import of human action within this. The series shown in Light Touch engages similar questions but less overtly. Études Bel-Val (2009) resulted from an artist residency at an estate in Northeast France. Lebas chose to focus on one spot within this managed landscape, a lake observed from the same position, using the same camera, at different times of day and year (see Figure 1.1). The vista through the space between the trees that surround the waterscape emphasizes visual symmetry. The pictures document rhythms of change over time, the leaves that frame the lake view in Spring and Summer giving way to the stark forms of denuded trunks and branches of Winter. Pictorial affects are enhanced through the effects of light as the landscape morphs through the day and the seasons with colors and shadows taking on different hues and patterns according to the angle and intensity of the sun, its reflections and its after-light. The lake is literally touched by light. The scenes are strikingly seductive and beautiful; we are also reminded of the immensity of natural forces. The balance of color within each picture contributes to a sense of calm and harmony that emanates from the geometry of composition; that the panoramas derive from different moments within a twenty-four hour period, and also within the annual seasonal cycle, is reaffirmed through the stating of the time of day and date of each image.4 But this apparently serene scenario is in some respects paradoxical; the lake forms part of a managed estate – nature contained and controlled. Weather, light, and ecological shifts remain beyond human control although human action has consequences. Heidi Morstang directly addresses questions of

Light Touch  89

natural disaster and human response through the theme of her film, Prosperous Mountain5, and her still photographs from Svalbard in the north-west of Norway, high within the Arctic Circle.6 One legacy of the mining industry previously active here is a network of shafts that have now been transformed into an international seed vault intended as a disaster-proofing global resource. The film is the first in a trilogy concerning biosecurity, pollination, and the implications of climate change. As an artist often working in collaboration with scientists, she not only researches project themes, but also considers ways in which pictures, through the deployment of visual aesthetics, communicate differently (to, for instance, policy reports, international accords, or articles in scientific journals). Her interest is in exploring and responding to questions, circumstances, and places, rendering complex information in a form that is distinctive, memorable, and emotionally charged, but also elliptical and haunting in its implications. The seed vault is a global resource, a safety net put in place in case of natural disaster or political upheaval. But Morstang’s work draws attention to the Arctic as itself a fragile wilderness. Glacier melt offers visual evidence of change that most environmental scientists agree results from global warming caused in part by industrial emissions. The seed storage vault replaces coal mining shafts, neatly, and perhaps paradoxically, bringing together concerns with energy, warmth, and food, linking the islands to the Norwegian economy and now, through seed storage, to the world more widely. While the purpose of the research differs, there is a link with her previous short film, In Transit (2011), which concerned the recovery of abandoned bodies of Norwegian soldiers, killed in Russia during the Second World War.7 Here her interest was in the denial of an uncomfortable aspect of history and the difficulty in acknowledging something that many would prefer to forget, namely, that these young soldiers had volunteered to fight for the German army in the Nazi era. The film is not a documentary; rather it reflects on that which we chose to hide and does so through a delicate exploration of the landscape within which forensic archeologists were seeking evidence of the presence of corpses signaled by metal insignia or tools on or below the surface of the soil in this remote woodland on the Russian western border. The implications of the film are uncomfortable, rendered more far-reaching given Morstang’s decision not to anchor the film to a specific story or to edit the film as a documentary. As a narrative of non-commemoration, it reminds us that we are all implicated in inconvenient truths – things we would prefer to forget or ignore. By contrast, Prosperous Mountain, and her sequence of still images, The Road North, constitute a narrative of now and of what might come to pass. The set of images for The Road North was made within half an hour. Shifts in colors and in the way that light reflects on the ice in this far northern roadway testify poetically to fragility, transience, and mutability. Glacial melt in the Arctic is contributing to sea rise; coastal communities in the northern hemisphere are directly affected. As with Lebas’ work, the images are beautiful in terms of composition and subtleties of color tone, but this is a paradoxical beauty as we find ourselves contemplating fragility, mutability, risk, and loss.

90  Phenomena

The artists included in this exhibition variously respond to – and remind us of – the palette of the natural world, deploying color as a key aesthetic element within their work. Between them they span an almost complete spectrum of tones and hues, ranging from the hot ambers and reds in Marja Pirilä’s pictures to the cooler pale greys, blues, and light pinks that characterize work by Lebas and Morstang. Pirilä has been exploring the colors and movement of natural light, and related aesthetic and emotional affects, for many years. She is also interested in early camera and lens technologies. For her series Like a Breath in Light (2002/4), she used a pinhole camera, held on her knees, for long exposures as she sat silently in the same place overlooking a lake in the Finnish heartland, waiting for images that gradually take form.8 The soft edges that characterize the colors in the pictures arise from her breathing very slightly shifting the camera. Hung behind glass they have an ethereal quality that is contemplative, poetic, and evocative. For me the stillness suggests ecological and spiritual harmony. Place is not specific in her work. Rather her concerns are with our relation to light and shade, shadow and reflection. In a further series, Interior/Exterior, she created Camera Obscuras (dark rooms) in everyday apartments using plastic sheeting over windows to block out light.9 She inserted a convex lens within the black-out material; the scene from outside was thus reflected inside. A camera set-up within the dark room was used to photograph the room’s inhabitant indoors bathed in the reflected outdoor scene. Like the chink in Plato’s Cave that forms a starting point for Sontag’s reflections on the world seen through photographs, we reflect on the curious inter-relation of interior and exterior.10 Speaking House uses a similar method, but in a building with resonances as it is the abandoned, uninhabited, deteriorating interior space of a former mental asylum, recognizable as such from an institutional bed frame, or an old wooden chair (see front cover for this anthology). What is particularly extraordinary is the range of colors within the yellow-amber-brown-red spectrum that appear. The imagery in Speaking House evokes a range of emotions that cannot be explained simply in terms of photographic transcripts of melodious color effects. The outside world is drawn inside, the external setting overlaid on the internal scenarios; the effect is unsettling, more so when we remember that this was a place of confinement for those with mental issues. Again, we are reminded of human fragility. Light is transient. So are we. In contrast to the other artists included in the exhibition, Lynn Silverman works in monochrome. Her series, Lookout, reminds us of early interior photographs wherein an external source of natural light was necessary for exposure. It is no coincidence that, for instance, the well-known portraits of her daughters by the British photographer, Lady Hawarden (active 1857–64), were staged on the terrace of their family house or, if indoors, near windows or mirrors in order to maximize the flow of light within the room.11 Pictorially we are reminded of a longer tradition within painting, following Vermeer, of depicting interior scenes as if illuminated by natural light. [For example, gently profiling the ‘Woman Reading a Letter’ (c1663/4) or on ‘The Milkmaid’ (c 1660).12] It may be no accident that the painter’s brushes depicted by Silverman in Lookout 46 are set along the windowsill, conveniently positioned

Light Touch  91

to capture the effects of daylight should it be reflecting into or around this studio. Indeed, several of her images remind us of the historical origins of photography in exploration of ways in which light could be deployed to create ‘photo-graphs’ (with the associated problem of chemically fixing the image). Lookout 75 perhaps recalls Fox Talbot’s first ‘photogenic drawing’, ‘The Oriel Window, South Gallery, Lacock Abbey’ (1835). This was recently revisited by the artist Floris Neusüss whose photogram ‘Homage to Talbot: The Latticed Window, Lacock Abbey, 2010’ depicts the same window. In Neusüss’ life-size rendering, it appears not as a point of light ingress so much as a barrier between the dark of the interior and the blues of the outdoors at night illuminated by lamps.13 Silverman’s photograph evokes the earliest days of photography and fascination with light as a means of image-making. Here, external space is indicated in the line of treetops traced on the opaque glass whilst the solitary light bulb, no lampshade, suggests a stark interior. Overall, the series suggests a complex interaction of light and dark, natural and artificial light, exterior and interior, window as outlook and window as barrier, apartness, solitude. Silverman’s aesthetic sensibilities have a lineage in modern (mid-twentieth c­ entury) concerns with the image in itself, and with reflection on phenomena, whether everyday or extraordinary. Silverman’s projects have included reflections on the disorientating experience of the Australian outback where it is impossible to locate oneself in terms of the horizon because openness and flatness means that all sense of distance is lost, or, thinking about the shapes formed by electric cables and telephone wires in everyday urban dwellings.14 Her work, always monochrome, reminds us that the grey scale was integral to the early photographic print; color only became commonplace in the second half of the twentieth century. We talk of black and white photographs, but as anyone who has sat in the Rothko chapel in Houston (Texas) will know, perceptually there is no such thing as pure black; rather, as with all print tones, there are extensive variations of hue, surface and density that contribute to the ‘mood’ of an image.15 Monochrome emphasizes form. As in her many previous series, Lookout is characterized by a minimalist visual economy. Nothing distracts from contemplation of inside-outside, the function of walls and the complex associations of windows that let us look out whilst they let light in, but that also hold us alone, separate from the world outside. This is perhaps more poignant when we consider that this series was made whilst travelling, including for artist residencies in places such as Prague where there is additionally a language barrier. Even as a longterm visitor she would not be fully integrated within the social space she occupied, although in other instances she returned to English speaking places more familiar to her – Australia, Britain, and USA. Her concern is with mobility and identity, with inside/outside, and with the interrelation of artificial and natural light – although in her pictures the single, tungsten light bulb or table lamp hardly offers the benign solace and replenishment that we seek from the sun. The solitary table lamp, centrally positioned within the window on the external world, looks out into an expansive landscape within which it is utterly insignificant. Frank Hallam Day more overtly engages social and cultural themes. In RV Night, made in the tropical forests of Florida, he operates as a nocturnal flaneur observing

92  Phenomena

ways in which people cocoon themselves from nature at night, holing up in tents or camper vans. Previous projects have included pictures of the hulls of boats, and of shipwrecks. His subject-matter is diverse, ranging from Cherry Blossoms in Washington, DC to East Berlin panoramas, to adverts for Ethiopian beauty salons or shop Mannequins photographed in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle-East. What links his various series is, first, that he makes work where he lives or travels, cataloguing phenomena that catch his attention, and second, authorial style. His work is characterized by a certain sociological detachment. He investigates aspects of human culture sometimes revealing quirks, for example, the poses of the mannequin dolls constantly not catching our eye, or delights, such as the craft skills evident in deteriorating hulls of ships or the delicacy of spring blossom. He observes and catalogues phenomena creating collections of images that, through repetition, point to more than might be remarked in any single image. His methodical approach perhaps echoes typologies associated, for instance, with the Bechers and their Düsseldorf School students. In common with them, aesthetics are deployed strategically not to create pictorial affects so much as to effect a direct communication, uncluttered by too much detail. In RV Night, his concern is very directly with human behavior and ways in which we construct spaces for ourselves that shut out the natural world at night. Holidaymakers no doubt come to these Florida woodlands to explore and enjoy the trails and waterways. Yet at night they are so immersed in their interior shelter and in their TVs or video electronics that they have no idea that that the photographer is there, outside, surveying them unobserved. We are reminded of the extent to which things occur without attracting our attention as we bed down in our houses, boats, or caravans, experiencing the world only as it impinges on us and unaware of wildlife – or photographers – pursuing night haunts. Hallam Day was able to capture these emblems of contemporary culture without being furtive and without being observed, using 30 second exposures and placing lamps to create surreal effects in nocturnal glades. This makes his ability to work unobtrusively even more extraordinary. Where once travelers might have camped round a fire for light and warmth, keeping it burning with wood collected locally, sharing stories, and listening for the sounds of wildlife, or of passing strangers, now we carry generators enabling us to seal ourselves off from the outdoors at whim.16 For audiences, there is a sense of the sublime. Leaves silhouetted against the night sky or the armature of the trees towering over us, perhaps bowing in response to the ravishing storms that sometimes lash the area, remind us of the immensity of nature and our relative insignificance. Spiky palm leaves cut into the space of the image, disrupting the gentle reassurances of the pictorial. Rather, we are reminded of the sense of threat that so often characterizes fairy tales. As Austrian psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim, observed in his critical analysis of their meaning of and significance, fairy tales speak to our fears; for Hansel, Gretel, Goldilocks, and a host of other mythical figures that we remember from childhood, woodlands are spaces of unease.17 Indeed, in Bettleheim’s account protagonists go into the transitional

Light Touch  93

space of the forest to test themselves, emerging in a changed state. By cocooning themselves from the woods at night, Hallam Day’s anonymous RV dwellers avoid any risk of unsettlement, of encounter with unknown aspects of their physical environment. The themes explored by each of the artists also remind us of existential presumptions whereby we experience – and by extension conceptualize – ourselves (humankind) as central within the global ecology. Of course, this may not be so. In geological terms human habitation is very recent. Yet cultural perceptions, including language, rest on such assumptions. For instance, sunrise and sunset are effects of the movement of the earth in relation to the sun within a complex planetary system; yet, human-centrically, we describe the shift from light to dark as if the sun is organized in relation to us. The sun does not ‘set’; the earth circles, thereby creating moments when we point away from our principal source of natural heat and light, and the earth tilts, thereby bringing one hemisphere closer to the sun at certain points in the annual cycle. The sun does not rise for us; we shift our position in relation to the sun. The distinction is significant. In depicting places, events, and circumstances, artists remark that which might otherwise be concealed, ignored, or overlooked. Art insists that we pay attention. The artist as observer prompts us, sometimes elliptically, to contemplate our responsibilities within complex social and environmental ecologies. In considering the transience of light and our relation to it, Light Touch invites us to reflect on our relation to natural light, on its effects, and on how it affects us. Liz Wells, 2014. Originally published in Liz Wells, Ed., Light Touch, commissioned by Maryland Arts Place, Baltimore (MAP), to accompany the exhibition, Light Touch, at Baltimore Washington International Airport, February – June 2014.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Dr Patrick Hunt, Stanford University, for his very clear introduction to the writings of Abbé Suger. https://web.archive.org/web/20160317182150/http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/ philolog/2006/01/abbe_sugers_theory_of_light_lu.html 2 This is, of course, culturally specific; for instance, traditionally white is worn for Hindu funeral ceremonies. 3 http://www.chrystellebas.com 4 The series has been shown widely, initially at the Museum of Nature and Hunting, Paris, and in Sense of Place, BOZAR, Brussels, 2012 (an exhibition of contemporary landscape photography from the 27 European Union countries – guest curated by Liz Wells). 5 This exhibition represents the North American première of Prosperous Mountain (2013). 6 The Global Seed Vault, latitude, 78.2382° N, longitude, 15.4472° E, is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen which forms part of the Svalbard archipelago about 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole. 7 www.hcmorstang.co.uk 8 www.marjapirila.com

94  Phenomena

9 www.marjapirila.com/interior.html; Marja Pirilä (2002) CAMERA OBSCURA interior/exterior, Helsinki: Musta Taide. 10 Sontag, Susan (1979) ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 11 http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/l/lady-clementina-hawarden/. Also see Virginia Dodier (1999) Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life 1857–1864. New York: Aperture. 12 Johannes Vermeer, ‘Woman Reading a Letter’, c1663/4, Rijksmuseum (oil on canvas, 46.5 x 39 cm); ‘The Milkmaid’ (c1660) Rijksmuseum, (oil on canvas, 45.5 x 41cm). https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/artists/johannes-vermeer 13 https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1240232/the-latticed-window-lacock-abbeyphotograph-floris-neususs 14 https://lynnsilverman.com/ 15 https://www.rothkochapel.org 16 https://frankhday.com/rv-night/ 17 Bruno Bettelheim (1976) The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing.

Note: Website references checked and updated, November 2022.

8 NO MAN’S LAND Antarctica and the Contemporary Sublime

As a preamble, I’d like to comment on the notion of ‘no man’s land’. I was active in the women’s movement during the 1970/1980s, and one line of my research has been on women, land, and environment. It follows that I normally pay attention to neutralizing gendered language. In the case of the Antarctic, however, the gendered notion of no man’s territory seems apt. There have been some remarkable expeditions by women; for example, Ann Daniels, from Devon, was selected for the first all woman team to walk to the North Pole, and later, in 2005, undertook a solo trip.1 British polar explorer, Hannah McKeand, skied solo to the South Pole in 2006, setting the record for the fastest journey (man or woman).2 I have no idea how anyone arrives at the fitness, grit, and determination to take on such a challenge. However, in terms of gender, this is recent. Historically, exploration has been a male domain, as has the other no man’s land of the military battlefield (nurses notwithstanding). Typically, explorers have been pictured as heroically tackling uncharted territories. There is some sort of association between challenge, nationalism, masculinity, and heroism that failure doesn’t dent. In 1912 Scott and his team reached the Antarctic second (after Amundsen, the Norwegian) and never made it back to the base camp; yet all over Britain we are celebrating his centenary, although, of course, we are also celebrating his earlier ventures, for example, in 1901/4 when he captained Discovery and led the 1902 expedition that made it to 82o 11’ South (on Dec 31st 1902), further than anyone else had reached hitherto. So, in characteristically British manner it is not about winning, it is about playing the game. What I am suggesting is that this game of claiming no man’s land or staking out a no man’s space between territories is a masculine game. This doesn’t mean that women never play it, but we play under slightly different rules and, I would suggest, our relationship to this culturally constructed game differs. Despite the number DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-11

96  Phenomena

of intrepid women artists and writers who have visited and made work in Polar regions, this remains masculine territory.3

The Antarctic as No Man’s Land So, in the case of the Antarctic, I don’t want to argue for ‘no person’s land’ or for ‘no woman or man’s land’. No man’s land seems to me to be exactly what has been at stake historically as various nations have sought to map, explore, and exploit this terra incognita. The scale is daunting; the Antarctic is the size of the USA and Mexico combined. Since 1959 it has been constituted as an international zone belonging to no specific nation and regulated via the international Antarctic Treaty.4 The various research bases congregate around the edges of the region, operated by small teams all year round but increasing in population as scientists congregate in Summer (Winter in the Northern Hemisphere) to pursue a range of enquiries relating to wildlife (particularly penguins and seals), botany, physics, geology, and, increasingly, questions relating to glacier stability. Nowadays the region is increasingly viewed as a source of indicators of climate change. The South Pole itself is a locus of scientific measurement in various registers; it is accessible by plane, but too cold and too inaccessible to be a major base station (although the Americans annually build a road there across the ice). The Antarctic is a space of geographical imagination, with the South Pole an emblem of remoteness. Most of us haven’t been there. But stories and visual imagery contribute to ways in which we picture this increasingly ecologically fragile region. This talk offers an opportunity for me to reflect upon notions of the sublime in relation to art, historically and now. This lends context to a current project, namely, an exhibition of work by artists who have undertaken residencies in the Antarctic commissioned by the British Antarctic Survey through a residency programme from 2002–9. Landscapes of Exploration is the first full group exhibition of this work. Shown in February/March 2012 in the Peninsula Arts Gallery it formed part of Plymouth’s Scott centenary celebrations. The show is multi-media, including painting, sound and sculptural installation, video, and photographic work.

Sublime One of the concepts repeatedly referenced in relation to the Antarctic is that of the sublime. David Stephenson, Professor in Photography at the Art Academy in Hobart, Tasmania, has made work in the Antarctic.5 Some of his photographs are narrative; indeed, from broader research it seems that narrative photography is a prominent thread within Antarctic art, not only historically but also contemporarily. Other images of Stephenson’s from his investigation some 20 years ago directly engage the vastness of the landscape.6 There is a lack of a sense of distance to the horizon that is disorientating. But he stresses interest in reconsidering notions of the sublime, not only in visual terms but also in relation to sound, which can be

No Man's Land  97

extraordinarily momentous.7 For example, in his book on Captain Scott, Ranulph Fiennes notes: A phenomenon which frightened men and dogs when first they experienced it was christened the ‘barrier hush’ or ‘shudder’. One man described it as ‘the most eerie sound you can imagine’. The worst such quakes I [Fiennes] came across in Antarctica were close to the Pole. When snow builds up into a patch of wind crust several inches thick, whether as big as a sports arena, or merely room-sized, the pressure of even a dog’s foot can be enough to trigger a sudden collapse of the whole suspended mass. Never more than a few inches, but it is enough to spark off thunderous sound waves for several seconds. (Fiennes, 2003: 91/2) Many of those who have worked in the Antarctic reference the wind, the sound (and smell) of the penguins, the creaking of ice cracking or the whispering of ice melt. This is not the pristine silence of the geographic imaginary but immersion in the sometimes subtle and sometimes overwhelming noises of nature, for example, the brutality of high winds. All of this is also occasionally punctuated by voices and machinery (small aircraft, snowmobiles, ice-drills…).

Sublime as a Concept Historically To consider what is meant by contemporary sublime it is useful to look back on the origins of the notion of the sublime, which refers to the momentous. In A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1759) Edmund Burke located the sublime by distinguishing between pleasure and pain (a binary familiar from Plato). He asserts that pain is the stronger emotion. His summary exposition remains useful: The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. The passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions. (Burke, 1759, Section XV111) Given our instinct for self-preservation he suggests that death is the one thing worse than pain. However, what is of interest in an arts context is the notion of the delight in vicarious experiences of pain or danger. Masochistic fantasy is sublime. Art may be sublime. The sublime in art has been particularly associated with imagery of threat or danger – J.M.W. Turner’s swelling seas engulfing a ship, e.g. A Disaster at Sea (circa

98  Phenomena

1835), or the mists rising over the mountains in ‘The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich (1817/18). Again, to quote Burke: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of ­horror…. Astonishment…is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect. (Burke, 1759: Part Two, Section 1) In Burke’s formulation we are so overcome by an object or experience that we lose our reasoning abilities; hence we experience the sublime as ‘irresistible force’. He clearly states that nothing ‘so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear’. We experience Turner’s seas as over-whelming, as indeed they would be were we sailing. We tend to associate the sublime with scale. But fear is not necessarily induced by the size of an object. Rather, maybe, we are concerned with our sense of threat. For instance, we may fear insects, small mammals, or reptiles. Knowledge of the power to inflict pain (or death) is a key aspect of the sublime. The sublime incorporates both the momentousness of the scale of nature and the unfamiliarity of certain species. There is, of course, a link with the Freudian notion of sublimation: the unconscious repression of that which is difficult to reconcile with our sense of self. Psychoanalytic therapy offers methods of helping us deal with that which is subjectively challenging. There is some sort of synchronicity with geographical exploration in that both involve coming to terms with enormity or with the unexpected, whether physical or emotional. In terms of the sublime as defined by Burke, a link can be traced in science fiction or horror in which ‘the return of the repressed’ often figures, and, of course, the Surrealists, in emphasizing automatic writing (in which I include drawing, the photographic, painting) acknowledged the working of the unconscious whilst offering, from an audience point of view, sublime delights. Exploration takes psychological resolve. Overcoming that which is repressed is not quite the same as overcoming fear or, indeed, being fearless in response to challenge. But both implicate some sort of determination, a refusal to dodge the difficult, that commands respect. This is perhaps why the sublime has so often been associated with the heroic. Extreme exploration takes courage. Explorers experience actual dangers. There was something heroic – if not foolhardy – in early Antarctic expeditions aimed at mapping and geological discovery, with resources severely limited by the standards of today. In 1901–4 Scott and his crew lived through two polar winters to further British efforts to chart the region, using the time to plan and to upgrade equipment ready for use on various long expeditions across the ice shelf in the Summer (December/January–March). Reading about these early voyages, Burke’s discussion of our instinct for self-preservation and his suggestion that death is the one thing worse than pain seems very relevant, as does the idea that we are pleasurably astonished by images and stories of such challenging expeditions.

No Man's Land  99

Burke’s formulation is distinct from, and slightly muddied by association with, that of the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant distinguished between evidence based on sensual experience – sight, hearing, etc. – and conclusions reached through philosophic reasoning deriving as much from the system or philosophic method as from actual experience. For Kant, mind, and human power of analytic reasoning, was more important than experience. As Philip Shaw comments: ‘With Kant and his followers in the German Idealist tradition of philosophy, the emphasis shifts decisively away from empiricist or naturalistic theories of the sublime and towards the analysis of sublimity as a mode of consciousness.’ (Shaw, 2006: 6). In the Kantian model the sublime relates to incomprehensibility, that which cannot be understood through rational measurement or debate. In this respect, Kant’s approach seems idealist, lacking the material basis of Burke’s insight. In Kant there is also a link between the sublime and the romantic. This is symptomatic of the notions of enlightenment with which he was associated, within which man was romantically posited as existing in harmony with nature yet superior within the order of being. Kant remains central within aesthetic theory. This is perhaps in part because the idealist model synthesizes with the work of Rene Descartes, familiar in art history for his binary distinction between the act of seeing, and what we see. Preceding Kant, Descartes insisted upon the separation of mind and senses, arguing existentially that the relationship between thinking and being is fundamental: ‘I think therefore I am’. More particularly, Cartesian dualism posits a binary distinction between mind and matter which, by extension, positions mankind ego-centrically within the order of things. I mean mankind – it is precisely this sort of thinking that feminist theorists such as Kristeva and Irigary have challenged. As Kristeva has suggested, poetics (the feminine) subverts logic (the masculine) including the mathematical principles that for Descartes fundamentally explained the order of things (Moi, 1986). For contemporary French theorists such as Kristeva and Foucault, emphasis on logic is symptomatic of the character of a particular culture (claims of enlightenment, patriarchy, empiricism, Darwinism). Hence Foucault’s insistence on a need for an archeological approach to knowledge historically. (Foucault, 1972). For the post-modern French thinker, Jean-Francois Lyotard, the Kantian formulation removes what he sees as a key point in Burke’s analysis, namely that ‘the sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening’. (Lyotard, 1991: 99) In other words, there can be pleasure because there is no actual terror; rather, an allusion to that which is awesome occurs in the symbolic order. Things may be momentarily frightening or astonishing, but they are under control. By contrast, terror is a response to actual threat to safety involving fear of loss of life or loss of our sense of self. Core to the experience of the sublime is that imagery alludes to something that cannot be shown. Lyotard’s interest in the sublime stems from distinguishing between the role of art, and what he refers to as the culture industry (in which he includes teaching). He comments that artists must respond to the question, what

100  Phenomena

is it to make art? (Lyotard, 1994: 135–143). If we take it that art involves form and matter (possibly explicit subject-matter), then we can see contemporary art in terms of modes of expression – what is being communicated and how it is being communicated. For Lyotard, art is about approaching matter, and about timbre and nuance: implicitly referencing Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the fluidity of meaning, he suggests that sounds differ and defer between modes of expression (for example, the difference between the same note on a piano or a flute). He suggests that form, a regime of the mind, may limit openness to timbre and nuance. He doesn’t use the term regimentation but there is an underlying implication that form may be restrictive; his point is that we need to explore new means of expression. He comments that art ‘turns towards a thing which does not turn towards the mind, that it [art] wants a thing…which wants nothing of it’. (Lyotard 1991: 142) He asks, ‘How can the mind situate itself, get in touch with something that withdraws from every relationship?’ noting that matter may be ‘unpresentable to the mind, always withdrawn from its grasp. It does not offer itself to dialogue and dialectic’. (loc cit)

Contemporary Art and the Sublime There seems to be a desire within contemporary art to hold on to notions of the sublime, especially in relation to natural phenomena. This is evident, for instance, in the work of Keith Grant who was one of the first artists to visit the Antarctic under the auspices of the British Antarctic Survey artist residency programme.8 He had already worked extensively in the Arctic when the opportunity for an Antarctic residency arose. For him this was a chance to consider elemental differences between northern and southern polar areas. His oil paintings figure intensity of colour and the immensity of natural geometries, for example, the enormity of icebergs. Romantic symbolism is drawn into play, for example, in his studies of albatrosses. In many respects his interests fit more traditional sublime concerns with overwhelming aspects of wilderness, drawing attention to that which is astonishing. Arguably the lure of the sublime rests in the articulation of the analytic and the symbolic; without the descriptive element there is nothing that is awesome, but the moment astonishment or fear enter in then so does myth heralding specific symbolic associations that contribute to the lyrical dimensions of the pleasures of the sublime. Of course, artists and writers, in the challenge of making work, are in a different position to audiences – or, indeed, curators. Artists working with environment at some point experience the elemental, getting closer to no man’s land than the rest of us. Artists mediate phenomena for our sublime delight, accepting degrees of personal discomfort or risk (for example, Turner allegedly lashing himself to the mast to experience a storm at sea). In addition, artists may act as pioneers exploring new subject matter and innovatory means of visual engagement. In the latter part of the twentieth century notions of the sublime extended to encompass new theatres of exploration, for example, the industrial sublime wherein undesirable, and possibly

No Man's Land  101

unwarranted, legacies of modernity impact on our environment. Again, however detailed, and ostensively objective or analytical, there often remains a lyrical sense of awe, in this instance at the immensity of the legacies of human construction. Derelict industrial wastelands, or sites of nuclear fallout, may seem monstrously beautiful, albeit paradoxically so. In the context of Antarctica, several photographers have depicted the import of the residence of humans, alien within space previously uninhabited except by wildlife. New Zealand artist, Ann Noble, who has made three trips to the Antarctic, is particularly interested in the everyday impact of people on place. For Spoolhenge (2011) she photographed large cable spools piled at the South Pole base, seemingly oddly located within this otherwise pristine environment.9 We realize that the cable from the spools must have been laid across the ice, that this remote region is now linked in terms of power lines. The title (given by workers at the base station) obviously references Stonehenge, a pre-historic site that still fascinates as we wonder how the stones were transported there and what the circular shape may have represented to those who constructed it. Given digital networking, such linkage leads us also to speculate on what the digital sublime might turn out to be – perhaps something to do with viruses, or with the incomprehensibility of the idea of a total global network and associated Orwellian socio-political implications. In the instance of the Antarctic, the notion of technological sublime is also useful. This might be characterized in terms of neo-Futurist awe at what technology, including digital systems, facilitates, including, for example, fully functioning air transport and internet linked, Polar work habitats. Cameras mounted on aircraft fly over the Antarctic offering bird’s eye views, eco-soundings reveal glacial formations and densities below the surface of the ice sheet, and satellite links facilitate speedy internet and phone communications. Whilst we might not ‘know’ the Antarctic, technological developments lend a sense of the possibility of knowledge, of being able to gauge and explain physical phenomena with increasing physical and mathematical accuracy. In this respect the work of Chris Drury, environmental artist, is particularly interesting. He used various technologies, from snowmobiles to digital echo sounders, to make work, for example, patterns created through driving across the surface of the ice.10 Sonar data, generated for scientific measuring of the depth and density of glaciers, forms the basis of a further set of images. We see both above and below the surface; the top section of each image drawn literally whilst the bottom section is generated from the sound wave measurements. In aesthetic terms, he offers an interesting marriage of logic and poetics, science, and art. In terms of the notion of contemporary sublime, the digital (data), the technological (machinery, for example, planes used to flyover glaciers to amass data readings) and the natural (the immense space of the Antarctic, and depth of the ice that constitutes it) together contribute to the sublime affects of the prints. The technological sublime is perhaps particularly paradoxical. On the one hand, scientific achievements and technological developments have impacted on knowledge, most particularly, on our sense of the potential for analysis and discovery.

102  Phenomena

One aspect of the Antarctic as a sought after no-man’s land, notwithstanding the Antarctic Treaty with its stress on co-operation, is the search for new energy sources and mineral wealth. On the other hand, it is now generally accepted that our presence and actions impact on the constitution of the physical world; scientific exploration is not without consequences. Also, whilst we might be able to measure and anticipate eruptions such as earthquakes and tsunamis, or the speed of glacier melt that is an indicator of climate change, there remains a sense, somewhere between awe and fear, that momentous earth movements are not only unstoppable but also defy artistic expression. Reflecting on legacies of modernity, the cultural critic, Fredric Jameson (1985), characterized contemporary culture, including art, in terms of parody and pastiche. Both involve contemporary ‘knowingness’, often taking contemporary cultural phenomena as object of reference, irony, or mockery. Chris Dobrowolsky, one of the final two artists to visit the Antarctic under the auspices of the British Antarctic Survey programme, assembled a collection of references to the Antarctic from plastic penguins to well-handled paperback adventure books detailing Scott’s expeditions in a manner designed to engender schoolboy imagination.11 Various items were later assembled as scenarios in boxes he found there; ones labelled ‘Manfood’ (as opposed to dogfood) are still used to transport provisions. The result is parodic. It also testifies to the complex inter-weaving of histories, geography, contemporary actuality, and myth. Whilst operating rather differently to the traditional sublime and taking human behaviour rather than wilderness as primary subject-matter, parody offers a means of distanciation (Brechtian alienation) that, like the sublime, can be construed as an aesthetic means of mediating the un-representable. As with the title ‘Spoolhenge’, with its complexity of connotations, contemporary art – and artists – may, following Lyotard, be attempting at least to bridge the gap between that which resists representation and dialogue, and the various questions of our relationship with the Antarctic. One dimension of the sublime is that for most of us the space pictured remains unknown, which means that it cannot be comprehended in any detail thereby resisting intellectual and emotional domain. Astonishment rests upon unfamiliarity and on curiosity. It follows that the more we discover the less astonishing events or phenomena seem except, perhaps, when we pause for existential reflection. Does it necessarily follow from this that the pleasure of the sublime is diminished? Arguably sources of sublime pleasures have shifted as detailed ecological findings astound us. If this is the case, then how can we think about the operations of the technological sublime, which derives from human pro-activity? And in what ways does this contrast with the romanticism integral to Enlightenment notions of the sublime? Burke referred to the sublime in terms of the object that ‘excites this delight’ that is, the experience of phenomena in circumstances when we are not personally endangered. The sublime is a response engendered in us that turns upon our experience of the object. It is relational, not absolute. It is also cultural, associated with familiarity or strangeness. Perhaps what has changed is not our astonishment at

No Man's Land  103

nature so much as our sense of our inter-relationship and ecological responsibilities. Contemporary artists are concerned to move beyond romanticizing the apparent grandeur of nature. Whether through detailed investigation and depiction, parody, or more elliptical modes of reference, the sublime has become associated with exploring the impact of humankind on our environment. Liz Wells, 2011 Unpublished symposium paper. Land/Water and the Visual Arts, University of Plymouth, 2011. Note: Antarctica, Terra Incognita, is a site of speculation, exploration, scientific investigation, and political territorialization. As a designated ‘International Zone’ it is a place of collaboration as well as contestation. In recent years a few artists and writers have undertaken residencies through polar programmes run by governments including Britain, America, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand. This previously unpublished talk offered me an occasion to critically consider in some detail questions of the sublime, and of the desire to ‘know’ remote and challenging places.

Notes 1 Ann Daniels lives in Devon (local to me). I heard her talk about two trips, one within a team of three women and one solo. She was very matter of fact about everything from frostbite to tearfulness, risks of falling into icy ravines to the achievement of reaching the Pole. However, she also noted that when on an all-women team tears were in order, whereas when on teams with men humour was used to respond to difficulties. 2 Since researching this in 2011, two more women have undertaken solo trips to the South Pole, Johanna Davidsson of Sweden in 2016, and British army physiotherapist, Preet Chandi in 2021. 3 In her interesting account of visits to the New Zealand, American, and British bases in the Antarctic in the 1990s, Sara Wheeler remarked that, except on the American base, women remained in a minority; she found the British base the least equitable in terms of numbers and atmosphere. (Wheeler, 1997) 4 See www.scar.org/treaty/. Of course, this is not entirely straightforward, as research teams need ease of access. One of the reasons for the Falkland’s War was that the island is strategically situated in the South Atlantic and the city, Port Stanley, is the principle point of departure for ships going to South Georgia and to the British Antarctic bases. The Antarctic itself is divided geographically into regions, usually with some geographical correspondence to nearer nations, for example, Australia or New Zealand, and the various national bases are situated accordingly. 5 The Australian Antarctic Programme is based in Hobart. Antarctic bound supply ships and places arrive and leave from the city port – the southernmost place in Australia. 6 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/artsets/ac3a87 7 Meeting with author, 24th March 2010. 8 Keith Grant is from Liverpool, lived in London, was teaching at Hornsea in 1968, but moved to Norway and, as a landscape painter, has focused on the elemental. https:// www.keith-grant.com/ 9 See http://vanishingice.org/anne-noble/ 10 Chris Drury travelled to the Antarctic through the British Antarctic Survey programme in 2006/7. www.chrisdrury.co.uk/ 11 Chris Dobrowolsky, https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/project/antarctica/

104  Phenomena

References Burke, Edmund (1759) from ‘A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful’ in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds) (1996) The Sublime, a reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Cambridge CUP. Section XV111. Fiennes, Ranulph (2003) Captain Scott. London: Coronet Books. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Trans. A. Sheridan. Original French publication, Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Irigarey, Luce (1993) je, tu, nous, Toward a Culture of Difference. London: Routledge. Originally published in French, 1990. Jameson, Fredric (1985) ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Hal Foster ed. (1985) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press. Kant, Immanuel (1952) ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon Press. First published in 1790. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1994) Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press. Originally published in French, 1991. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1991) The Inhuman, Reflections on Time. London: Polity Press. Originally published in French, 1988. Moi, Toril, Ed. (1986) The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Noble, Anne (2011) Spoolhenge. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press. Shaw, Philip (2006) The Sublime. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Wells, Liz (2012) Landscapes of Exploration. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press. Wheeler, Sara (1997) Terra Incognita. London: Vintage Books.

PART IV

Place

9 POINTS OF DEPARTURE Currencies of the Post-Industrial Sublime

Art is risk made visible.1

FIGURE 9.1 

John Kippin, ‘Monument’, 2010/12. © John Kippin.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-13

108  Place

John Kippin and Chris Wainwright experiment in modes of photographic practice. In Futureland Now, they re-visit places and issues that they first explored in the 1980s, and that continue to pre-occupy each of them. My title, ‘Points of Departure,’ references the artists’ questioning of starting points, methodologies and approaches to research and communication through art. It also references the post-industrial economy of the North-East of England. Ports linked by river to cities such as Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough had expanded and mechanized supporting international trade, offering points of departure and importation for cargo boats transporting people, goods, and raw materials internationally. Nineteenth century colonialism and industrialization were inextricably inter-related. The artists focus on the North-East, where both were living and working in the 1980s, and where post-industrial shifts and decay were particularly marked. However, questions raised through their work relate to other regions in the UK and elsewhere in Europe – Clydeside, Belfast, Avonmouth, Rotterdam, Marseilles. Given the global re-location of centres of industrial production, especially to Asia, formerly thriving harbour areas fell into decline. In many cases (in the 1980s/90s) estuary warehouses were used for enterprises such as temporary galleries and artists’ studios. Now, often through public partnerships with property developers, most have been transformed into marina housing and leisure areas, albeit often also including arts initiatives (for example, in Gateshead, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Sage Music Centre). Such transformations symbolize a shift from industrial production as a primary economic base to secondary economic activities led by public sector provision (including museums and galleries, hospitals, schools, universities) and consumer service sectors. Associated with this has been the loss of cultural affiliations such as trade union clubs, traditional workplace networks and camaraderie. Practical skills and family relations typical of the industrial era have also disappeared as sons and daughters no longer follow fathers, mothers and grandparents into factories or onto the docks. My primary concern is not with the geographies of industrial heritage, discussed by Mike Crang (2012), but with processes of investigation, response and communication through visual practice. My focus is on thinking through art, photo methodologies, aesthetics and contemporary currencies of the sublime, particularly notions of industrial and post-industrial sublime.

Sublime as Concept In order to consider what is meant by ‘industrial sublime’ and, indeed, ‘post-industrial sublime’ it is useful to return to the origins of ‘sublime’ which first emerged as a notion referencing astonishment at the momentous in nature and to remind ourselves of some of the several strands of thinking about our relation to environmental phenomena that have pre-occupied aesthetic philosophers.

Points of Departure  109

The sublime in art has been particularly associated with aspects of nature that are dangerous, beyond our control. Often cited examples from painting include the mists rising up the mountains in ‘The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by German artist, Caspar David Friedrich (1817/18) or many of the works of J.M.W. Turner  – who famously allegedly tied himself to a ship’s mast in order to experience storms phenomenally. The writings of 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant remain central – and contentious – within aesthetic theory as do the existential propositions of French thinker, René Descartes. Preceding Kant, Descartes insisted upon the separation of the mind and the senses, arguing that the relationship between thinking and being is fundamental: ‘I think therefore I am’. In this formulation humankind is considered as apart from other species, cast in the role of rational observer rather than as integrated within natural ecologies. Descartes is particularly relevant to aesthetic philosophy for his binary distinction between the subjective act of looking, and the object that is perceived. This obviously relates to analysis of painting or photography in terms of point of view, optics and cultural perception, in other words, ways of seeing. Kant’s model fits with the Cartesian formulation in that the human ego and consciousness is centrally situated. In particular, Kant distinguished between evidence based on sensual experience – sight, hearing, etc. – and conclusions reached through philosophic reasoning deriving from the particular system or philosophic method as much as from actual experience. For Kant, mind, and the human power of analytic reasoning, was more important than material experience; in this model, the sublime relates to incomprehensibility, that which cannot be understood through rational measurement or debate. Kant’s formulation is distinct from – although often associated with – that of Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke. Burke defined ‘beauty’ in terms of matters of taste, of cultural acceptability. For him ‘beauty’ was considerably less momentous than the sublime. We are not astonished by beauty; we enjoy it, but we take it in our stride. In his treatise, A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful, Burke particularly distinguished between pleasure and pain asserting that pain is the stronger emotion: The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. The passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions. (Burke, 1759: 47) Given our instinct for self-preservation he suggests that death is the one thing worse than pain. In an arts context it is the notion of pleasure in vicarious experiences of pain or danger that is of interest.

110  Place

Burke adds: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror…. Astonishment…is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect. (Burke, 1759: 53) In Burke’s formulation we are so overcome by an object or experience that we lose our reasoning abilities, hence we experience the sublime as ‘irresistible force’. He clearly states that nothing ‘so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear’. We tend to associate the sublime with scale, but the sublime relates more to a sense of threat that may emanate from natural phenomena, for example, gales or storms at sea, or the sheer extent of a mountain range. Fear is not induced simply by that which overwhelms in terms of monumentality or wildness; it also relates to familiarity or unfamiliarity. In Freudian terms, sublimation references that which we unconsciously opt to repress (especially that which is difficult to reconcile with our sense of self or of how we ought to feel, behave and respond in given circumstances). Mountains that we may find awesome are familiar everyday summer workspaces for shepherds. Likewise, cultural artifacts, such as the feats of engineering implicated in industrial environments, may come to seem everyday although, given pause for reflection, they are equally astonishing. Indeed, cultural perceptions are socio-historically specific. The sublime is not inherent to phenomena that astonish us. Rather, the sublime emanates from our responses, for instance, to the implications of human action past and present. But the key point is that the sublime is an effect of representation, of the virtual, of phantasy, rather than of actual danger. The post-modern French thinker, JeanFrancois Lyotard, has commented that the Kantian formulation discounts what for him is a key point in Burke’s analysis, namely that ‘…the sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening’. (Lyotard, 1991: 99) This is not as paradoxical as it might seem. In other words, he reminds us that we are free to enjoy an image or an experience because there is no actual terror; rather, an allusion to the awesome occurs in the symbolic order. Things may be momentarily astonishing, but they are under control; we do not have to engage directly with them. To experience a massive storm at sea is terrifying. Enjoying an imaginary set of circumstances represented in art or literature is a sublime indulgence, albeit one that may remind us that we live in hazardous circumstances and in an environment that we do not control. Sublime imagery surely epitomizes the notion that ‘art is risk made visible’. Perhaps one of the key differences between now and the pre-industrial 18th century, when Burke and Kant were debating ideas about beauty and the sublime, is that then there was a view of the natural world as somehow apart, God-given. For the Romantics this was a space of gentle replenishment. Romanticism, from the

Points of Departure  111

late 18th century onwards, responded to industrialization and urbanization, through harking back to earlier historical eras, particularly associated with classical (Greek and Roman) civilizations, and also through conceptualizing the natural world as a particular type of space of solace and spiritual replenishment. (Hobsbawm, 1962) Now we have a more holistic understanding of humans and the natural world of which we are a part. Human action has consequences. Many contemporary writers and artists, including Kippin and Wainwright, variously engage with this. In effect, they are making work that questions whether we will accept responsibility for our impact on nature, at what cost to ourselves if we do, and at what cost to ourselves if we don’t?

Currencies of the Post-Industrial Sublime If the classical sublime references our responses to nature, then industrial sublime refers to our astonishment at the form and scale of activities implicated in factorybased production plants and processes, including subsidiary older occupations such as mining or boat-building that expanded to support 19th century entrepreneurialism and the new spirit of modernity. The Capitalist model is simple: machinery and labour transform raw materials into saleable assets; the lower the costs (wages, research and development, investment in technology, transportation of goods, etc.) and the higher the sales price, the greater the profit margin for the owner/employer. The wheels of Capital are oiled by the profit-motive of the entrepreneur for whom the process, when it works well, is elegant. Such entrepreneurial developments were socially transformative. When Friedrich Engels, son of a German textile manufacturer, worked in Manchester in 1842, in the English branch of the family firm, he undertook a study of the living conditions of the working classes. In effect, he noted the consequences of the concentration of industrial labour for urban life, critically commenting on health and poverty. Likewise, strolling the streets as a flâneur in the mid 19th century, and writing about the expansion of Paris and the new central boulevards, the French critic Charles Baudelaire was excited by the city as a modern, energetic, social and political hub. (Baudelaire, 1863). Baudelaire’s focus was on bourgeois culture, including street life, by contrast, Engel’s concern was with living conditions, but the investigations of both were prompted by social change. Baudelaire also acclaimed artists, such as the painter Edouard Manet, for their focus on modern life; art played a key role in witnessing and reflecting upon the pace and form of social developments. In Britain, artists documented and variously expressed responses to engineering achievements, including the railways, steam transport, canals and bridges over waterways that constitute the inland infrastructure for shipping port operations. Retrospectively, the range and diversity of work may not easily be characterized as a specific art movement, by contrast, for example, with Impressionism in France. Artistic styles and themes were diverse as were the responses expressed. Where in ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ (1844) J.M.W. Turner celebrated the power of steam as the

112  Place

FIGURE 9.2 

John Martin, ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’, 1857. Print made by engraver Thomas Maclean for John Martin, © Christopher Wood Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

train cuts through the storm, Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Work’ (1852–65) depicted a chaos of craftspeople engaged in different forms of labour.2 John Martin, a key historical painter from the North East, created sublime paintings on biblical themes that might also be taken allegorically to refer to anger at the industrial ambitions of modernity. For instance, ‘The Great Day of his Wrath’, (1851–3) depicts a city being torn up, or ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’ (1852) shows Lot and his daughters rushing from the scene; an Old Testament story, referencing cities destroyed as a punishment for immorality. By contrast, in his ‘Industrial Landscape’ (1955) L.S. Lowry details an urban geometry of factory roofs and chimneys, in effect, a topographic investigation within which the presence of the industrial is normalized.3 We might also reference Bill Brandt’s photo-story Below Tower Bridge that includes images of places such as ‘The Wharves at Wapping’ or an apparently disused factory at Nightingale Lane. (Warburton, 1993: 66/73). Perhaps because his work was generated for photo stories about people, places and circumstances, rather than as single images, the number of photographs that he made in industrial locations is easily overlooked. My point is that, although the term ‘industrial sublime’ dates from the 1980s, enquiry into the socio-spatial effects of factory organization and transportation systems is much longer standing. But it is only with the benefit of hindsight that ‘industrial sublime’, like ‘modernity’ and social change in the 19th century became identifiable as a clear cultural lineage within visual arts practice. Art continues to engage with the contemporary. ‘Industrial sublime’ was a novel phrase in the 1980s that became incorporated as a sub-genre of landscape

Points of Departure  113

photography, urban as well as rural. In some respects, it is a very British genre (although not confined to British landscapes). As engineers of the industrial revolution, legacies of industrialism are historically deep-seated and therefore marked in Britain; visible evidence includes the expansive system of canals linking rivers for transportation of goods, the railways that came later, and the factories and warehouses that accumulated along the various waterways. Northern cities such as Manchester and Newcastle expanded exponentially in the Victorian era. Waterside areas facilitated movement and warehousing of fuel (coal) and raw materials for industrial production, whether regionally sourced or imported (cotton, rubber, non-native wood, and so on) and it is no accident that factories were developed along the banks of rivers and canals. Likewise it is no coincidence that industrialization and the British Empire were concurrent; they were fundamentally interrelated as colonialism facilitated access to raw materials. For Britain, as an island, shipping was the only means of international communications. Hence coastal ports harboured larger ships for passenger transport, mail, and movement of personal goods, alongside docks for cargo vessels. Industrial decline became a focus for Left politics of the 1970s and 80s in Britain. In some respects, debates romanticized an industrial past in ways that ignored the real historical relations and experiences of factory and shipyard work, although the desire to retain jobs, wages and familiar employment structures (however hierarchical and/ or draconian) is understandable. But in terms of radical art practices there was an address to that which had been repressed, for instance, in the industrial landscapes documented by Lowry, the engineering achievements celebrated by Turner, or Martin’s more cataclysmic allegorical response to industrialization and urbanization. A more complex post-modern critique re-framed the ambitions, achievements, losses and class relations of modernity. Many artists became interested in the histories associated with former industrial sites, ghosts of the past made manifest for present reflection. For example, John Podpadec’s photomontage series on mining in South Wales, made at the time of the miners’ strike, referenced work conditions, decay and industrial injury historically. (Podpadec, 1985: 20/21). Likewise, Alison Marchant‘s installation, ‘Wall paper History’, 1988, within her larger Heritage series, drew upon anonymous pictures and diaries to relate stories about industrial work conditions and the famous 1888 strike by Bryant and May matchgirls – the women employed at the matches and match-box factory in East London.4 Significantly, in terms of post-industrial redevelopment of former factory and warehouse areas, this site was one of East London’s first gentrification projects; it was re-named ‘Bow Quarter’ (an act of labour history erasure) and today encompasses private flats, landscaped gardens, a gym and pool, an on-site restaurant and a convenience store. Artists were exploring legacies and transformations dating from the industrial period, hence ‘industrial’ sublime; although perhaps post-industrial would have been more accurate as the phrase was coined to express something about legacies of the industrial era, not to mention cultural histories involving economic transformations and social change. Futureland, first staged in 1989, was in tune with questions that were being asked at the time, an era of political tension in Britain. (Margaret Thatcher was

114  Place

Prime Minister and the government mission included reducing the influence of the trade unions.) The exhibition also represented the Laing Gallery’s contribution to celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of photography in Britain. In keeping with the Gallery’s standing collection in which the North East is fore-grounded, the exhibition was intended to bring the region into contemporary focus. But the curator demonstrated broader awareness through selecting two artists whose approach to photographic practices is always experimental in terms of aesthetics, whilst socio-politically grounded in terms of places and themes, albeit not necessarily explicitly so. Both artists took the opportunity to explore new ideas and new picture-making methods, seeking points of departure for making work that would somehow engage themes differently thereby enhancing rhetorical impact. In this respect their work is in distinct contrast with the explicit story-telling mode of social documentary. The artists picture legacies of industrial arrangements – dockside warehouses at night (Wainwright), rusting cargo ships (Kippin) – juxtaposing this with, for instance, shopping malls, thereby referencing the move towards consumption as a newly prioritized economic force. A shift made visible. So the post-industrial involves a re-evaluation of the industrial with the benefit of hindsight. In terms of landscape aesthetics post-industrial explorations transcend the topographic, with artists operating not as observers but as investigators of land, culture, place and identity in terms of socio-historical formations. That this implicates enquiry into the sublime is indicated in the titles of many recent publications: Vanishing Landscapes, Imaging a Shattering Earth, Transformed Land. (Barth, 2008; Baillargeon, 2005; Mah, 2011). Likewise, writings about work by artists such as Edward Burtynsky (2009), whose profile rests on his interrogation of new industrial landscapes, include references to ‘toxic sublime’, ‘terrifying prospects’, ‘ecological disasters’ and ‘atrocity aesthetics’. (Battani, 2011; Cammaer, 2009; Giblett, 2009; Peeples, 2011) Waste disposal, gas emissions and other toxic hazards, are side effects of industrial concentration as is the pollution caused by transport infrastructures reliant on extracted fuels such as coal and oil. Over the years there has been extensive discussion of risks associated with living near nuclear power plants, chemical factories, and so on. Waste may be visible but toxicity usually isn’t, so it can be challenging to find ways of conveying risk photographically. Yet there is a sense of urgency: artists are re-thinking the sublime in ways that sidestep or transcend legacies of both Enlightenment thinking and Romanticism, so that nostalgia for a particular type of past is replaced by a more critical questioning of legacies that often interrelates past, present and future. This may also include reflections on the import and impact of digital technologies, and also research into dystopian consequences of industrialization, particularly climate change. As Allan Sekula has suggested, we are not so much in an era of the post-industrial, as in one of globalization facilitating a re-location of the industrial. (Sekula & Burch, 2010). But if, as I have suggested in relation to the Burkian sublime, the effect is context specific, then it is conceptually possible for the industrial, the post-industrial and the technological to co-exist as sources of wonderment, albeit differently inflected according to contextual histories and specificities. Kippin and Wainwright are among many artists who have engaged

Points of Departure  115

questions formed in part through reflecting upon the post-industrial West as related to emergent industrial centres elsewhere. New technological developments are integral within this. Hence, an interest in the technological, including awe at what can be achieved in terms of electronic communications. In many respects the welcome we accord to the technological is similar to that of 19th century entrepreneurs advocating industrialization and, later, Fordism (assembly line modes of factory organization). Contemporary skeptics are viewed as the luddites of the 21st century. Yet, where the industrial was once a matter of celebration, it now gives us cause for concern, certainly in terms of environmental trauma. On the basis of previous experience, in welcoming the electronic revolution, new technological achievements and looking to the future with high expectations, a note of caution might be advisable. For example, there is now a space observatory at the South Pole, which until very recently was one of few remaining wilderness areas. There are several telescopes, scientists and support workers living there for extended periods of time, planes fly in and out, provisions arrive and waste has to be removed, and the Americans have now built a roadway across the Antarctic ice which can be re-opened each summer (the Northern Hemisphere’s winter) for transport of equipment, laying of power lines, and so on. The Hubble telescope is used to investigate outer space, the landscape frontier of our time. But at what environmental cost? The changes are complex. The relocation of industrial centres has been partly enabled by the communications revolution. As we know from everyday encounters, such as phone calls to service centres or help lines, new technologies are also integral to global employment shifts within service sectors. Multi-national corporations have been quick to take advantage of cheaper labour costs and less stringent regulation in newer industrial regions. Although many in the West debate the toxic- and climate-related consequences of industrial pollution, ‘advanced’ nations nonetheless evacuate redundant ships and other waste to breakers yards located in poorer regions and take advantage of the cheaper prices facilitated in industries such as clothing or electronics. This is despite questions raised by campaigners, and even some governments, concerned at further pollution of waterways and increases in toxic emissions globally.5 In China, extensive urbanization and industrialization may be acclaimed, or may be accepted as simply the next step within a long march forward. Yet, socio-politically this is complex, with many differing interests at stake. The coverage of the Three Gorges dam project in 2011, including the number of photographers who travelled to China to document changes along the Yangtze River, testifies to international interest and concerns.6 This suggests a continuing fascination with the industrial sublime. Simultaneously, we may wonder at technical phenomena, often taking on board new developments in ways rather akin to Alice’s acceptance of strange events during her journeys in Wonderland. It is as if nowadays little is left that surprises, although were we to pause to reflect on it, much of everyday experience is somewhat sublime. For example, my Apple laptop, designed in the USA, assembled in China in order to maximize factory line skills and take advantage of non-union labour, is

116  Place

leased by the University that employs me under a rental contract that allows regular updates. Via codes founded in mathematic principles that I do not understand, the computer allows me access to a virtual environment that is so extensive and fluid that it would defy cartography should anyone ever consider attempting this. I have become totally dependent on internet access in ways that I should find astonishing, and that should also give me pause for thought given the extent to which the virtual world has become a site of exchange that is fought over in terms of freedom of information, democratic debate, censorship etc. Mostly I just use it. I can logon, seek out cameras based in the South Pole, and reflect on how momentousness the space of Antarctica is and the fact that I can view this live from home. I can shop online internationally or, via Google Earth, operate as a virtual flaneuse. All this ought to be utterly astonishing, but astonishment is somehow neutralized through the apparent ease of access. We marvel at technological change, and then it comes to seem normal.

Thinking Through Art Futureland is an exhibition of innovative large-scale colour images by John Kippin and Chris Wainwright. Through their images, they question and challenge social and political issues which are vital to an understanding of the present situation. These issues include unemployment, state control, regional stereotypes, militarism, consumerism and the exploitation and distortion of our heritage. Although located largely in the North East, where the artists live and work, these striking images give a national dimension to such major issues. (Collier, in Kippin & Wainwright, 1989: Introduction) Mike Collier, curator at the Laing Art Gallery when Futureland was staged there in 1989, clearly situates the exhibition within a national social context. As he suggests, for artists concerned with the implications of post-industrial shifts, the key challenge is to find aesthetic strategies that allow themselves as researchers to think through art and, invite similarly critical responses from audiences. Post-industrial sublime references a realm of questioning that also allows for experimentation in arts practices. What is it that is so astonishing and why was this not previously remarked? Wainwright and Kippin were pioneers in reflecting on the post-industrial shift and also on how to convey something of the enormity of shifting socio-economic circumstances. Kippin’s work was often referenced as contributing to the new British colour documentary movement of the 1980s. Wainwright became known for experimenting in, then, new digital print methods. Both artists test new means of making work as well as varying contexts of installation. The wry and sometimes ironic texts placed within the images by Kippin in his series Nostalgia for the Future was innovatory at the time.7 (Kippin, 1995) His work became centrally associated with that of a number of other British artists working with photography whose

Points of Departure  117

work came to be characterized as new British colour documentary. Imagery particularly pointed to legacies of the past as marked in the present, or re-ordered within, at the time, a burgeoning ‘heritage industry’. Some of his image-text montages are not particularly subtle, for instance, the use of red, white and blue for the text of ENGLISHISTORY/ENGLISH IS TORY; others are more elliptical so meaning is more fluid and viewers have to puzzle a little more. A key example would be the title image, with ‘nostalgia’ enigmatically referencing both the rusty boat and the notion of a family day out, epitomized by the caravan on the beach. Kippin no longer uses image-text in this way. If a strategy is used too often, or becomes too familiar, it loses its rhetorical impact. Exploring new strategies is imperative in order to retain both authority and cutting edge. His more recent work returns to the same subject but the mode of picturing is in some respects more forensic and more topographic; he currently constructs diptychs and triptychs, and thinks very carefully about visual juxtapositions within the image. He also uses video and sound installation. Likewise, in ‘The Navigation Series’ Wainwright questioned the future for a region formerly centred on its rivers and shipbuilding, now being re-imagined in terms of service and heritage. The mode is elliptical: the shadowy red figures staged in former industrial sites suggest ghosts from the past echoing towards an unknown future. The series of seven images was also innovatory in experimenting with a scanachrome printing method, now defunct, long superseded by newer digital processes that are nowadays orthodox. In terms of theme Wainwright continues to explore the sea as a means of transportation for humans and materials historically and as an ecological system constantly in transition, most particularly as a result of global warming leading to climate change for which ice melt and changing water levels act as an indicator. Red – a colour also characteristic of the work of the Victorian painter, John Martin, referenced above – frequently features within his imagery, often as an effect of torchlight ‘painting’ the sea, alerting us to look and reflect. Discussing photography as contemporary art, Charlotte Cotton, curator and critic, uses the notion of ‘deadpan’ in relation to a new, and anti-humanist, ‘turn’ in documentary practices. Commenting on the ‘monumental scale and breathtaking visual clarity’ of gallery prints, she remarks that this is moving art photography ‘outside the hyperbolic, sentimental and subjective’. (Cotton, 2004: 81). She cites Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky as key instances of artists working with land and environment, but adopting a deadpan aesthetic. Both make pictures that reference the industrial, for example, Gursky’s photographs of the Chicago Board of Trade, or the Hong Kong stock exchange, or Burtynsky’s documentation of the transformation of the Yangtze River, or his more recent three part series, Oil.8 Even though subjects may be emotive, the treatment is seemingly neutral. There is an ostensive democracy here: the artist- photographer presents a scenario as if simply mediating it for our response. As with any image there is a viewpoint, but the photographer’s perspective is not fore-grounded. For Kippin and Wainwright, both of whom would describe themselves as artists working with photographic media, not as photographers, this is precisely the limitation of documentary realism.

118  Place

Kippin and Wainwright both work within the gallery context. For audiences there is a reference to documentary as specific locations and histories form thematic starting points. As researchers they continue to explore new modes of photographic communication and their work always introduces an element of dissonance within the gallery context. Kippin increasingly explores the semiotics of scale and installation in gallery and site-specific locations. Recent work includes Coast, an exploration of change on the Essex maritime area, that was exhibited at the Minories Art Gallery, Colchester and subsequently at Jaywick, Clacton on Sea Martello Tower (a Napoleonic fortress). It also includes Compton Verney, in which something of the atmosphere of this former family estate is conjured up through large-scale prints on canvas depicting empty reception rooms, small prints detailing nooks and crannies of staircases and cellars juxtaposed with medium-scale images of birds in flight, the trees and the lake for whom life continues well beyond the point when the estate ceased to be a family home. Wainwright now works in video as well as the still image, continuing to take travel, including movement of traffic at sea, as key themes. Red Sea includes a performance element as the water is ‘painted’ with light during the course of exposure. Some Cities particularly explores aesthetic effects of the diversity of artificial light that saturates contemporary urban centres. The series implicitly invites us to reflect upon the sensual congestion of such man-made environments. Both artists thus regularly engage and question landscape and environment through their respective practices. Sea, ports, waterways and docklands form the core thematic link between Wainwright’s work and Kippin’s. Within this, each artist deploys very different methodologies; varying thematic preoccupations and aesthetic concerns are also evident. Wainwright stages events. His images are pre-conceptualized, performed and tested. Kippin’s pictures start as documents of places and moments of historical significance, which are re-inflected through processes of editing and captioning. On the relatively rare occasions when people appear within the frame in such a way that we know he will have had to ask permission to include them, there is always a sense that the event would have occurred without the presence of his camera. He thinks through making pictures, with deep understanding of symbolic resonances. For example, at one level his video of the Ark Royal leaving harbour simply records a stately naval ship being escorted out to sea by a pilot boat. But there is much more in play. For a start, the Ark Royal was the fifth Royal Navy ship to carry this name, the first being the flag ship for the fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, at the height of the first Elizabethan reign. Second, the ship was built by Swan Hunter on the River Tyne and launched there in 1981. As such, it references the significance of boat building as an industry for the region. Third, due to recent Ministry of Defence cuts, it was decommissioned in 2011, five years earlier than originally anticipated. A further symbolic blow to Tyneside pride! As to its future, possibilities under discussion include sinking it as a diving wreck in the ‘English Riviera’ off Torbay, a commercial heliport in London, a casino in Hong Kong or a School or nightclub in China.9 Whatever the final decision, on the basis of these

Points of Departure  119

proposals an undignified future seems probable. So Kippin’s video, at one level ‘straight’ documentation of a final departure, carries a range of historical references that together lend a wistful sense of pride and loss as this enormous ship dwarfs its surroundings en route to its own transformation. Ironic, perhaps, that the ship’s motto in naval times was ‘Zeal does not Rest’! As the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht famously observed, a photograph can detail the outside wall of a factory, but that tells us little of the socio-economic relations that obtain within. Footage may show a ship leaving harbour, but this does not in itself say anything about the circumstances of its departure. The challenge to artists concerned with socio-historical or with environmental issues is finding ways of moving beyond documentary that invite an audience to perceive and reflect on broader histories and circumstances beyond the image itself. In the case of the Ark Royal video, the exhibition context is crucial. Kippin can be confident that the regional clientele of the Laing Gallery grasps the contemporary symbolic reference to ship building and industrial decline, even if they don’t know of the link back to the Spanish Armada. Likewise, the triptych that depicts horses being ridden across the edge of the tide past coal shale deposits higher up the beach. Just in case you don’t ‘get it’ from the image itself, the reference to mining, fuel and energy sources is re-affirmed through the caption, ‘BLAST FURNACE’. The form of the imagery is traditional in terms of landscape aesthetics with the horizon centrally across the image, the riders caught centrally within the image, a sense of movement from left to right, the direction in which they are riding but also, of course, the direction in which we read. The work is in colour, but the tonal range is muted. There is no specific sense of location or precise date, even decade. As such it becomes a palimpsest referencing the pre-industrial past, within which horsepower fuelled agriculture and trade, together with the industrial as signified by the shale (a form of industrial waste) and with the future as the riders saunter forward. At first glance, the rhetoric may seem to contrast hugely with the approach taken in a further image-text piece, ‘AMERICAN COAL’, in which we see a foreign barge travelling past a new housing estate located at the riverside, perhaps where warehouses once stood. The ferry leads the barge upriver, past houses with roof tiles in grey slate or terracotta orange, in this context referencing local industry; but as an example of ‘coals to Newcastle’ this image again offers a wry observation that references transformation and a sense of loss. The point is that the complex juxtapositions already exist; caught wryly within the same frame due to judicial selection of photographic viewpoint. The visual rhetoric is considerably more complex than it might first appear. Chris Wainwright has a particular interest in historical dockland areas and the post-industrial. Much of his work is made outside of the UK, particularly in Asia, former Eastern Europe, and the Arctic, although he has also used moving imagery to explore the (former) docklands areas of the River Thames where he now lives. Thematically, he is particularly concerned with environmental decay and with

120  Place

globalization in relation to shifting economic structures. He is also interested in the experiential. His approach is phenomenological. He notes: Travel transforms us into anonymous strangers viewing the intensity of particular cities with fresh eyes, alert to detail that may escape attention in surroundings more familiar to us. The images detail effects of light and shade, often at twilight, noting human presence but emphasizing the sensual rather than the semiotic.10 Ensuing work is often relatively abstract, poetic, although the photographic origins imbue the images with references to actual phenomena. He defines himself as an artist working with still and moving imagery. He works in colour, usually making large-scale pieces that respond to space, rather than detailing in any literal manner. Much of his work is opportunist in the sense that if he finds himself in a place (usually due to his work in senior management within Higher Education) he will explore the city streets and waterways, often at night. In this respect his approach reflects that of Baudelaire’s flâneur, wandering, observing, and noting transient impressions of contemporary phenomena. Other series are pre-conceptualized, frequently performance-based, involving some form of intervention such as ‘painting’ an environment with light, which is almost always red. Recent work from Arctic expeditions included sets of semaphore signals performed for the camera. Although the Arctic may seem far from post-­ industrial Tyneside, they are linked in terms of ice melt signaling global warming which is in part a consequence of industrial emissions. They are also linked through transportation systems. Semaphore, the optical sign system designed to convey short messages, for example, from ship-to-ship or from one hillside to another, predates Morse code (first developed for Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph in the 1840s, and subsequently replaced by the international Morse code that has been used for radio communications since the 1890s). The principles are the same; a specific combination of arm (or flag) signals indicates a word. In using semaphore Wainwright references a mode of communication that was global, predates current digital communication modes, and, most particularly references seafaring. As with any coded system, it relies on familiarity on the part of those encoding and decoding for understanding what is being said (although in the gallery, for those not able to read semaphore, the message is in the caption). The coding operates literally as a method of inserting text within the image whilst linking this as a strategy which also becomes a motif, with his broader exploration of the affects of artificial light within natural twilight or moonlight, especially as the red light spills over to create a red line in the sand at the edge of the sea. A barrier? Danger alert? In one image the title, ‘What Has To Be Done’ references ‘What Is To Be Done’ by Joseph Beuys made in 1980. It was made at Aldeburgh, near Sizewell Nuclear Power Plant, in 2011 as a performance to celebrate what would have been Beuys’ 90th birthday. (Beuys co-founded the German Green Movement in 1979,

Points of Departure  121

FIGURE 9.3 

Chris Wainwright, ‘Error, Sunderland, UK’, 2012. © Anne Lydiat.

and, later, the German Green Party.11) In the gallery context, regardless of whether we get the reference to Beuys or can read the semaphore, once we have worked out that there is a coded statement, there is the related effect of starting to interrogate other images in terms of systems of meaning, for instance, the lights of the fishing fleet at night suggest a Morse message where none is particularly intended. In essence Wainwright is concerned to respond to varying places as changing or fragile environments and to reference transformations wrought by human actions. By contrast, John Kippin has worked mostly in Britain, using photography as a means of interrogating ways in which landscapes have been constructed and used. In many instances series have resulted from residencies, for example, exploring legacies of the American missile base at Greenham Common in Hampshire, or responding to Compton Verney, the large house in Gloucestershire that, significantly, was the venue for several appeasement negotiations in the run-up to World War 2 in Europe. Indeed, his work is always concerned with the socio-political and the economic, and ways in which histories resonate in the present, although the references are often indirect. Kippin produces colour images for a gallery context and for book publication; he also frequently takes work out of the gallery, onto hoardings or into public nonart gallery sites. He often incorporates texts or uses captions not simply to anchor the meaning of the image but to extend it. Indeed, for both artists contexts and modes of presentation are crucial. There is an enormous difference between experiencing Kippin’s or Wainwright’s series as full-size exhibition prints, installations, or images on billboard hoardings, or, reproduced small scale, contained within a

122  Place

book, that may well have a different surface finish. Crucially, both books and galleries situate work within a broader context. The aesthetic pleasures, as well as the socio-political implications, are accumulative. Given shifts in gallery practices and in technologies, features such as colour saturation, large-scale photography, and image-text integration that formerly had radical import in the original Futureland are now commonplace. Indeed, previous aesthetic tactics may now seem merely stylish or, even, outmoded. As is evident from Futureland Now as artist-researchers both Kippin and Wainwright constantly explore new modes of expression. As Brecht observed, ‘Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change’. (Brecht, 1938: 492). As artists, both Kippin and Wainwright are always concerned with new points of departure. Liz Wells, 2012. Originally published in John Kippin and Chris Wainwright, Futureland Now. Plymouth: UPP, 2012

Notes 1 Email signature of artist-photographer, Arno Rafael Minkkinen. 2 J. M. W. Turner, ‘Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway’, 1844, Oil on canvas, 91 x 122 cm, The National Gallery; Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65, oil paint 137 x 197.3 cm, Manchester City Galleries. 3 John Martin, ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’, 1851–3, Oil on canvas, 196.5 x 303.2 cm, The Tate Gallery; John Martin, ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 1852, oil on canvas, 136.3 x 212.3 cms, The Laing Gallery/Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums; L. S. Lowry ‘Industrial Landscape’, 1955, oil on canvas 114.3 x 152.4 cm, The Tate Gallery. 4 See Variant, No. 5, Summer/Autumn 1988, p.15. 5 See the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. http://unfccc.int/ key_documents/the_convention/items/2853.php (accessed June 2012/October 2022). 6 Examples include projects by Edward Burtynsky, www.edwardburtynsky.com; Steven Benson, www.stevenbensonphotographer.com; Nadav Kander, www.nadavkander.com. 7 Initial examples were included in Futureland, 1989. 8 Edward Burtynsky’s series, Oil, is in three parts: Extraction and Refinement, Transportation and Motor Culture, The End of Oil. It was brought together from materials researched and photographed for over twenty years. Shown at the Photographer’s Gallery, London, May–July 2012. 9 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-16382411 (accessed June 2012/ October 2022). 10 Chris Wainwright, Some Cities, 2004 – artist’s statement (for Futureland Now proposal). Also see www.chriswainwright.com. 11 Dates given are taken from ‘Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama’, interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1981, re-printed in Carin Kuoni, compiler, (1990) Joseph Beuys in America. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.

References Baillargeon, Claude, Ed. (2005) Imaging a Shattered Earth, Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate. Oakland: Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Oakland University and Toronto Photography Festival.

Points of Departure  123

Barth, Nadine Ed. (2008) Vanishing Landscapes. London: Frances Lincoln. Battani, Marshall (2011) ‘Atrocity Aesthetics: Beyond Bodies and Compassion’ Afterimage 39: 1/2, July, p. 54–57. Baudelaire, Charles (1863) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Baudelaire (1964) The Painter of Modern Life and other essays. London: Phaidon Press Ltd. Trans: Jonathan Mayne. Brecht, Bertolt (1938) ‘Popularity and Realism’ pp. 489–493 in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood Eds. (1992) Art in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Burke, Edmund (1759) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Re-published (1990) Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford’s World Classics. Based on the 2nd edition, 1759. Burtynsky, Edward (2009) Oil. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl. Cammaer, Gerda (2009) ‘Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Creating Moving Still Images and Stilling Moving Images of Ecological Disasters’. Environmental Communication 3: 1, March, p. 121–130. Cotton, Charlotte (2004) The Photograph as Contemporary Art. London: Thames and Hudson. p. 81. Crang, Mike (2012) ‘The Remembrance of Nostalgias Lost and Future Ruins: Photographic Journeys from Coal Coast to Geordie Shore’ in Kippin, John and Wainwright, Chris (2012) Futureland Now. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press. Giblett, Rod (2009) ‘Terrifying prospects and resources of hope: Minescapes, timescapes and the aesthetics of the future’ in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23:6, p. 781–789. Hobsbawm, Eric (1962) The Age of Revolution. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Ch. 14 on ‘The Arts’. Kippin, John (1995) Nostalgia for the Future. London: The Photographers’ Gallery; initial examples were included in Futureland, 1989. Kippin, John & Wainwright, Chris (1989) Futureland. Newcastle: Laing Art Gallery. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1991) The Inhuman, Reflections on Time. London: Polity Press. Originally published in French, 1988. Mah, Sérgio (2011) Terre transformée/Transformed Land. Paris: Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation. Peeples, Jennifer (2011) ‘Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes’. Environmental Communication 5: 4, Dec., p. 373–392. Podpadec, Jennifer (1985) ‘Mining in South Wales’ Camerawork 31, Spring, Sekula, Allan and Burch, Noël (2010) The Forgotten Space, 2010 (film). http://www.the forgottenspace.net/ Warburton, Nigel, Ed. (1993) Bill Brandt, Selected Texts and Bibliography. Oxford: Clio Press. First published in Lilliput, March 1946. Wells, Liz (2011) Land Matters: landscape photography, culture and identity. London: I. B. Tauris.

10 QUESTIONS OF DISTANCE

I am writing from a distance. *** My task? To consider the work of Elizabeth Hoak-Doering and Marianna Christofides in relation to each other, to art practices internationally, to themes of history, identity and memory that complexly permeate Cypriot culture and pre-­ occupy many of us as we precipitate towards an uncertain future. *** So, what can be said from elsewhere? How to situate the work of two artists exploring and interpreting Cypriot culture and experience, whose own critical distance derives from living and studying away from Cyprus (America, and Greece/ Germany)? Both artists are familiar with and draw upon the language and currencies of contemporary art internationally. In the context of Venice Biennale, the three-way dialogue between artists, installation/subject-matter and audience is central and notions of fluidity of meaning and interpretation are axiomatic. Yet, both have deep connections to Cyprus and make work that has specific regional resonance; their practice is anchored in Cypriot histories yet brings into play a reflexivity influenced by broader debates, perceptions and events. In an era of global communications no island is insular. Hoak-Doering and Christofides each take everyday phenomena and experience as a starting point. They situate their investigations historically, not from nostalgia but rather from understanding that it is impossible to say anything about Cyprus now without some reference to partition (some forty years ago) not to mention the deeper histories of the Classical era, Early Renaissance Venetian influences, and the Ottoman Empire. Christofides focuses on people and place, whereas HoakDoering’s approach is more phenomenological. Together they invite us to reflect DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-14

Questions of Distance  125

on history and memory in relation to contemporary Cypriot culture and to the complexities of Cypriot identity. Elizabeth Hoak-Doering starts from what she finds, investigating everyday myth, objects and elemental phenomena, often incorporating processes akin to the alchemical within her working methods. She comments that she has ‘become interested in the idea that the art work, the visual communication, is already “out there” and that the artist’s job is to notice it, and to make it real in terms of imagery’.1 She trained as a sculptor, but philosophically her approach has much in common with observational drawing or documentary modes in film and photography, reflecting her initial studies in anthropology. Her work usually relates to specific places or events, and often results from artist residencies. For instance, in 2001 she spent six months based in the Monastery of the Archangel Michael at Monagri outside Limassol, then in use by Monagri Centre for Contemporary Art. The project brought together material from discussions with Cypriot ex-patriots in Astoria, New York, no longer able to worship in Cyprus, and comments from Cypriots recalling places where, since partition in 1974, they can no longer congregate. The process was research-based in exploring disjunctions of time and unearthing memories. Church of Memory took the form of a series of twelve icons (the twelve apostles?), each including extracts from one of the recorded interviews thereby bridging a gap between absence and presence. The stands are plain wood, covered with local earth which lends symbolic emphasis. In addition, the artist devised an installation of 66 objects, suspended on fishing wire, rendered from everyday materials such as beeswax, feathers, plaster, foil, egg and bone each associated with recollections recounted. As a manifestation it testifies not only to people of Cyprus but also to Michel Foucault’s insistence on the intellectual value of archeological approaches to knowledge. Suspended in the church the layering of references highlights aspects of their past complexly inter-woven and resonating within the present. That the objects are doubled through shadows on the gallery walls intensifies the metaphoric presence. The project points to the centrality of the Orthodox Church in Cypriot culture historically, and to ways in which people (and churches) adapt to changing circumstances. Her video, Leaving the Harbor of Haloes, 2010, also references the storytelling role of the church; the animations of the stately ships, proudly setting out to sea under full sail, draw on frottages taken from outlines of ships inscribed on what remains of the walls of the now derelict Medieval Gothic Church of St George of the Greeks, overlooking the harbour in Famagusta. The artist remarks, at least 30 ships are still visibly engraved in the interior of the church. The ships range from carracks to feluccas, clipper ships and men-of-war; none is inscribed with a name, none bear identification save for a few Ottoman flags.2 Whilst precise authorship and dates have become shrouded, the historical significance of shipping and seafaring for Cyprus as an island nation is clear.

126  Place

This is not the only time that Hoak-Doering has been commissioned as artist in residence in a church context. In 2002 she responded to 9/11 through her sculpture, Initiation, created for the garden of the Episcopalian Cathedral in Philadelphia, her home city and place of birth. On June 22nd, mid-summer and Mary Magdalene day, she poured molten pewter into holy water, repeating the act 65 times to acknowledge the number of babies born in the city on September 11th, 2001. That the holy water was from Cyprus forged an important personal link for the artist. The creative process was reflective, not only through the precision of the number, but also the ritual of repetition as the gesture of melting, pouring and setting was enacted, then repeated a further 64 times. The symbolism is multi-layered articulating reference to repentance (Mary Magdalene) with emphasis on renewal (new life). Hoak-Doering also poured pewter into the Atlantic 45 times, testifying to the number of people who died on the fourth flight when it crashed in Western Pennsylvania, diverted from its original destructive purpose. The total 110 variously shaped pewter pieces were hung over the baptismal font; a formal dedication took place on the first anniversary of 9/11. For the artist the process referenced ritualistic ceremonies of pouring melted metal into cold water that embody the idea of spiritual re-birth through baptism. Drawing on the alchemical, rather than exercising sculptural autocracy, is interestingly random; water temperature, movement, and chemistry – rather than the artist herself – play the key role in the shaping of artifacts. Allowing for chance and contingency in the interaction of natural elements is central to her artistic method. In this respect Hoak-Doering’s work is in keeping with the emphasis on phenomenal investigation in contemporary art practices that often involves controlled experimentation. For example, British artist Rachel Whiteread explores everyday artifacts through pouring materials into moulds (a house, a bath, a library) unable to precisely anticipate the shapes and textures that emerge. Hoak-Doering also explores alternative methods of documentation, often leaving aspects of the process to chance. This is most obvious in messagefield, an evolving series of site-specific performative events.3 Drawings are generated in response to the movement of wind, water, trees or other environmental elements. Resulting imagery formed into four relatively distinct groups: lunar/meteorological, historical/biographical, location-specific, and the liminal. Sometimes a particular date or duration is significant, for instance, a day that commemorates a particular public figure, or the time-frame of the turn of the tide or an eclipse of the moon. Questions of authorship arise since the artist, responsible for constructing an instrument of recording, is not necessarily present during the process of re-coding movement into marks on Mylar.4 For the wind drawings she experimented with graphite in a stylus attached to sails above the plastic sheets.5 The resulting marks trace the direction and intensity of the wind, also kinetic momentum as the pendulum pencil swings or settles, anchored via its point of attachment to the sail. Although location, date and length of time during which the apparatus was exposed to the wind may be included in the caption, once distanced from the original place of generation and

Questions of Distance  127

situated in a gallery context they become more about the visual intensity of ‘taking a line for a walk’ (Paul Klee). The artist remarks, In some ways I felt like a photographer, catching wind (rather than light) to honour or record an occasion or a site. Usually if the site or occasion was important I had to judge for myself when a drawing was “complete” – in the sense that there was a fullness of marks, but not so many that they covered themselves over. And if the date or time were important, I used that as a guide – I started and stopped according to the clock/calendar/moon … no matter what the drawing looked like.6 In this respect the work may be seen as an emergent collection of data not based on scientific logic but on an inter-relation of the elemental and the aesthetic. The technical – electronic – has a more central role in things, witnesses!, drawings generated through suspending household items that are at least thirty years old, collected – significantly – from both sides of the political border bisecting the city of Nicosia. The objects, such as chairs, a piano stool and even a metal bedstead, are animated through sensors responding to the movement of people through the gallery. A pencil (graphite in a stylus) attached to the edge of the furniture reaches to a sheet of Mylar on the floor below. The ambition is akin to work by Rebecca Horn (who, notoriously, slung a grand piano from the ceiling in Tate Britain as Concert for Anarchy, 1990). But Horn’s work is mechanical, whereas Hoak-Doering’s drawings respond to occurrences. The initial series title acknowledges the role of furniture as historical witness, inarticulate but nonetheless present at family events and inscribed by traces of human bodies accumulated over many generations. In 2009, re-titling as amanuensis emphasized processes of transcription.7 A line re-traces a letter, an idea or, in this case, movement, but does so in a different mode. Thus, the bedstead ‘draws’, making its mark. For the viewer the experience is at least twofold: on the one hand, movement, shape and density of graphite is fascinating. On the other hand, the suspension of familiar objects casts them into a different perspective; each piece of furniture appears animate, seemingly having its own volition. In Wanderlust, a collection of inter-related essays, Rebecca Solnit comments on the value of walking or, more precisely, on walking as a means of creating space for reflection on the philosophic, the literary and the artistic. The title of one ­chapter, ‘The Mind at Three Miles an Hour’ rhetorically asserts the value of slowing down (a recipe for reflective thinking that parallels other ‘slow’ movements, for instance, ‘slow food’, initiated in Bologna). Her musing on walking reminds us that, although phenomenology has only been formalized as artistic methodology relatively recently, insistence on openness, responsiveness, serendipity, chance and reflexivity has centrally characterized artistic practice at least since early modern movements in the Nineteenth Century. Contemporary artists’ residencies offering a degree of solitude and space for thinking and making work not only encourage detailed investigation but also reflect a long-standing tradition of (visual) exploration that insists on the specificities of situation and locality.

128  Place

In common with Hoak-Doering, Marianna Christofides takes the everyday as her starting point. Central to her practice is a concern with fragments and memories that become materials with which she works. Her 2009 video, Pathways in the Dust, explores and re-traces the life of her father. It developed through visiting places where he had lived and interviewing people that she had not previously encountered in order to piece together a fuller understanding of his experiences, of which, inevitably, she only had partial memories. The video’s sub-title, ‘A Topography out of Fragments’ indicates something of her method; fragments of information and images are woven together to create a complex, resonant and evidently incomplete account and testimonial. The form of the video supports the methodological premise, namely, that no-one’s experience can be fully re-constructed or understood, even by those closest to the person portrayed. Places, objects and emblems resonate as viewers recognize references to Cyprus, Athens and England where he travelled and worked. Filmed sequences and narrated text, written by her, based on the interviews and her memories, but spoken in a male voice, inter-relate complexly rather than forming a single narrative. This again enhances the sense that such accounts are inherently fragmentary. As British theorists David A Bailey and Stuart Hall have remarked, Post-structuralist thinking opposes the notion that a person is born with a fixed identity… It suggests instead that identities are floating, that meaning is not fixed and universally true at all times for all people, and that the subject is constructed through the unconscious in desire, fantasy and memory. (Bailey and Hall, 1992: 20) This seems particularly pertinent in the context of contemporary Cyprus defined by Laura J Padgett as ‘at the center of a vortex where space is contested and alternative narratives abound’. (Padgett, 2010). Born in Nicosia, Christofides has lived and studied in Cologne and Halle (Germany), London and Athens. That she negotiates at least three languages and four cultures, inevitably experiencing insider/outsider tensions, perhaps explains the observational distance that characterizes her work, even when, as in Pathways in the Dust, the title is evocative and the subject-matter is personal. Her films document something of the lives of others, often strangers, deploying a range of sources and methods. In dies solis (Sundays in Nicosia), 2010, groups of immigrants, particularly women, many wearing saris, gather socially on their day off in the area between the Venetian Wall and the UN Border. That this district is bounded by one wall referencing a history of Venetian seafaring and another dating from the more recent incursion reminds us of Cyprus’ strategic situation in the Eastern Mediterranean. The film is striking for the intense colours of garments, and for the sociality observed. But it also indicates congestion and limited space, literally and symbolically. Questions of identity and alienation arise. Is there any respect in which, for these workers, Nicosia can feel like home?

Questions of Distance  129

Taking central Nicosia as a locus and focusing on a gathering of people perceived as ethnically different sets up a set of questions that resonate for Cyprus now as, along with other European Union nations, it considers policies on immigration. Like Spain, Cyprus attracts second homeowners from the distant (and colder) north; also migrant workers from former Soviet regions of Europe as well as immigrant Asian labour. Given the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), and reconciliation processes in the north of Ireland, Nicosia is now the only overtly divided European city. Relatives remain unaccounted for since the inter-communal troubles of 1963/4 and, more particularly, the Turkish invasion of 1974 that resulted in the ‘green line’ no-go zone between north and south.8 Distance dislocates. Many moved from north to south or vice versa, or emigrated overseas, forced to abandon land, property or family. To be Cypriot is to belong to a nation with a fractured history and a split identity, to live with a sense of loss of people, place and community that remains potent. Nicosia is also central to Blank Mappings, 2010–11, in which the old town viewed from above stretches horizontally as if on a chart table, backlit from below. The project is explicitly geopolitical. Maps contribute to constructing our sense of place. But cartography is neither objective nor neutral; charts denote territory and reflect existing knowledge, points of view, and degrees of distance or overview. In Blank Mappings the viewing distance means that we have difficulty making out detail, and each version includes a blank sector, symbolically refusing information about a selected zone within the city. Viewing distance crucially reveals – or masks  – ­information that appears very different in photographs or charts than in the intimacy of everyday experience; compare satellite imagery such as Google Earth with the experience of walking regularly in a particular place observing detailed seasonal changes whilst navigating via familiar landmarks. Exhibiting the maps along with dies solis draws attention to different modes of phenomenological perception and raises epistemological questions relating to types and qualities of ‘knowledge’. Interrogation of ways in which documentation influences and limits perception and, by extension, imagination, is also central to Christofides’ series of photo inlays through which she explores the fragmentary nature of history in visual documentation. The found images invite us to think beyond the photographic frame. Yet, as we wonder about sources and narratives referenced, at the same time we know that fluidities of meaning and interpretation are in play. The project rests not on the indexicality often ascribed to photography, but on pleasures of speculation. What if…? Historical method stresses analysis of information as ‘evidence’. Here, Christofides points to the limitations of historiography. Instead, in Proustian fashion, she characterizes photographs as fragments provoking memory, fantasy and re-invention. Likewise, through her collection of reconstructed stereoscopic views she questions ‘the diverse space that these images – exemplary of every found object – may have occupied, shaped and created’ in order to ‘address processes like intention, production, distribution, usage, discarding and recycling’.9 In effect, she wants to draw attention to histories of images as material objects. The glass slides are handtinted, each therefore unique. They form pairs that are not quite identical; slight

130  Place

disjunctions in colour, framing and qualities of light unsettle the image. Again, the artist points to fractured histories and to photographs not as images but as material objects that have been handled, enjoyed, forgotten or discarded. Critical distance allows for reflexivity. Both artists not only investigate phenomena and experiences in order to offer new insights and ways of seeing, but also seek to reflect upon processes, media and materials through which art is produced. Distantiation (or alienation), as characterized by Berthold Brecht, relates not only to methods of encouraging reflection on the part of audiences but also to artistic enquiry, making, situation and contextualization. Both artists immerse themselves in the culture of others, responding through the visual and the tactile. Yet, at the same time, both retain a sense of critical distance, standing back from their subjects, exploring phenomena, researching histories, considering aesthetic strategies that invite audiences to see differently. Art can be intense and immersive, but if the role of art is to provoke new ways of seeing and thinking, then strategies inviting criticality are crucial. Christofides and Hoak-Doering both operate with empathy for people and place, histories and identity, yet hold themselves slightly apart from their subject-matter. Arguably the affective import of their work emanates precisely from this reflective distance. Liz Wells, 2011. Originally published in Yiannis Toumazis Ed. Temporary Taxonomy. Nicosia: Republic of Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture for Cyprus Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011. The two-person exhibition included selected works by Christofides and Hoak-Doering.

Notes 1 Hoak -Doering, amanuensis, Nicosia: Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art, Sept 2009. 2 Email from artist, 1.4.11. 3 The series was first conceived in 2002 for the sixth international Armenian Biennale. 4 A sort of transparent, plastic drawing material. 5 ‘Wind apparatuses began with a sail and a pencil, basically, but rapidly developed so that the various points on the apparatus were flexible enough to make unique drawings in all kinds of winds. The apparatuses are portable: a lucite base and (in sailing terminology) a lucite mast, a flexible steel boom attached to a Mylar sail that is stiffened with spring steel batons. The end of the spring steel baton holds a stylus with graphite and sometimes a lead weight. At one point I had around 15 such apparatuses that I used in different kinds of winds, and the specific apparatus used is noted on the drawings.’ Email from artist, 28.3.11. 6 Ibid. 7 Amanuensis: transcribing from dictation or through copying of manuscripts, repeating words written by others but inevitably in a distinctive ‘hand’. 8 Green was the colour of the ink used to draw a line from East to West, coast to coast, via the centre of Nicosia, creating a United Nations monitored internal border. 9 For instance, medieval myth postulated a flat earth, and it is not that long since British world maps painted Cyprus pink (denoting British Empire).

Questions of Distance  131

References Bailey, David A. and Hall, Stuart (1992) ‘The Vertigo of Displacement: shifts within black documentary practices’ in Bailey, D.A. and Hall, S. Eds. (1992). Critical Decade. Ten/8 2:3. Birmingham: Ten.8 Ltd. Foucault, Michel (2002) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. Hoak-Doering, Elizabeth (2009) ammuensis. Nicosia: Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art. Hoak-Doering, Elizabeth (2001) Church of Memory. Monagri: The Monagri Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art. Padgett, Laura J. (2010) ‘Entering the Vortex: Considering the Work of Marianna Christofides and Pavlina Lucas’. Conference paper, unpublished. Solnit, Rebecca (2001) Wanderlust, a History of Walking. London: Verso Toumazis, Yiannis (2009) ‘Scribes of Time and Space’. Nicosia: Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art www.ehdoering.com www.mariannachristofides.com

11 PHOTOGRAPHY, NATION, NATURE

Introduction What is ‘the Spanish Landscape’? What does it mean to talk of ‘Austrian landscape photography’? Historically there have been numerous publications with titles such as German Photography or British Photography in the Nineteenth Century.1 Every such publication encounters a problem of parameters. Is the collection based where photographs were taken? Is the nationality of the photographer (whose work might be international in theme and locations) a key criterion? Or is the book focusing on specific movements, eras, or regional traditions?2 In addition, national boundaries have changed historically; the shape of ‘Europe’ differs from that of Europe in 1839, the year of the first photographic print.3 Photo-historians may research national, regional or private archives but their focus is often on locality, or on the history of a particular collection of photographs, or the provenance and profile of specific images. Where questions of photography and nation arise, it is often in relation to the deployment of photographs within nationalist sentiment; for example, the mountains of the west coast of Norway were heralded iconically within the Norwegian nationalism movement of the late nineteenth century. (Aarnes, 1983). In bringing together photography made in Europe by photographers based in Europe, this publication might be viewed as risking similar rhetorical claims about Europe as a continent and, more particularly, the European Union as an alliance that transcends the political and the economic. That is not the intention of this publication or the exhibition that it accompanies. Rather, in line with the motto of the European Union, ‘In varietate concordia’ (‘united in diversity’) the exhibition and publication bring together examples of work by practitioners from different regions to consider, on the one hand, historical and topographical differences and, on the other hand, semiotic currencies within contemporary art photography that transcend specificity of region. The resulting selection is intentionally diverse; in DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-15

Photography, Nation, Nature  133

this respect no artist can be said to specifically represent his or her country. This also reminds us that each artist’s biographical experience and subjectivity is a key formative influence on subject-matter, aesthetic style and the way projects are researched and produced. Landscape photographers investigate places and phenomena. Resulting images show us what they observed but also reflect something of a particular photographer’s way of seeing; two photographers standing in the same place at the same time would each make different images, their choice of focal subject, framing, composition, and depth of field all contributing within the poetics of the image. As such, pictures may be viewed as rhetorical interpretations of specific environments and circumstances. Taking contemporary European landscape photography as its focus, this essay explores notions of ‘landscape’ in relation to our sense of place. The intention is to complement and contextualize the images included in this (exhibition) publication through thinking further about the making of the landscape and its representation. Landscape photography is concerned with interrogating and communicating something about our environment, thereby inviting audiences to consider the nature of place.

Europe and Place Relatively few parts of Europe are untouched by human presence. Although nature is in many respects cyclical, self-regenerating, and seems somehow ‘outside’ of culture, we increasingly acknowledge the ecological impact and implications of technological developments, for example, as manifest in noise pollution or climate change. The nineteenth century utopian vision of industrial modernity, particularly in northern Europe, turned out not to have been the panacea once idealized. Human geographers view ‘place’ as constituted through stories told, whether historical or visions for future development. (Massey, 2005; Relph, 1981; Tuan, 1977). Such narratives may be contested; different perceptions may be at stake. Stories turn spaces into places through foregrounding particular accounts of habitation and land use, whether urban or rural.4 Place is inextricably linked with our sense of identity. In English the term for attachment to place (or within specific social groups) is belonging – be/longing. Our sense of self, of who we are, is reassured through allegiance to homeland. There are paradoxical aspects: as Yi-Fu Tuan has remarked, ‘Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other’. (Tuan, 1977: 3). The key point is that identification with place is psychological as well as physical or practical. ‘Home’ may operate as a fulcrum from which we venture and to which we return. To be in ‘no man’s land’ is to be in wasteland. To be ‘landless’ is to be disenfranchised. To be displaced is to be dis-located, or ‘out of place’. This resonates emotionally in terms of personal family and community, also in terms of region or nation. ‘France’ is a geographic notion, but La France is la patrie, a place of hereditary lineage. For the French, the notion of terroir transcends reference to agriculture and the material composition of the soil. Likewise, in German, heimat is more than simply where someone lives.

134  Place

It follows that our sense of place is about roots, and about the biographical routes that we have taken, especially if we, perhaps, find ourselves at a distance from where we spent our childhood. In his book and television series, Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama, took his personal history as one starting point for examining physical, socio-historical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects of places.5 (Schama, 1996). He challenged views of land as primarily a resource for human use, drawing attention to myth, metaphor, and allegory, and pointing to the role of histories and modes of storytelling within social consciousness, especially in terms of allegiance to specific landscapes. He comments that, ‘national identity…would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland’. (Schama, 1996: 15). Land and landscape are inextricably involved in sentiments and expressions of identity, whether experienced in individual terms or asserted politically. W J T Mitchell has suggested that ‘landscape’ is most usefully considered as an action or verb, ‘to landscape’. (Mitchell, 1994). Humans shape the land, for instance, through positioning roads and buildings, creating vistas, identifying agricultural areas, conserving wilderness areas, or facilitating tourist developments such as coastal beach strips or mountain ski resorts. Settlement in Europe (as elsewhere) has been determined by transport possibilities; we can track histories of human mobility, including trading and commerce, through tracing shipping links, ancient pathways, and modern motorways. Vegetation types may shift, and natural contours may erode; they also adjust to accommodate agriculture, urbanization, railroads and highways, industrial and military bases, airfields, and so on. Physical legacies of previous land use offer visible evidence; for example, slagheaps indicate mining activity. As the British-Israeli photographer, Ori Gersht, commented when making pictures at sites of holocaust massacres, spilt blood blends with the earth. He remarks: Our sense of time as human beings is limited to 70 or 80 years but all these landscapes spread over a cosmic or geological perception of time. Some of the trees are hundreds and hundreds of years old; they bear with them the memory of all previous events and at the same time keep a certain silence and are impenetrable. (Gersht, 2005: 4) Landscape is not timeless; nature evolves and changes both in itself, and in response to human action. Histories are literally absorbed into the soil. Landscape paintings, drawing and photography contribute to shaping the way we look at land. Pictures detail specific places from particular perspectives, offering a source of information and influencing attitudes and responses. As we know  – for example from tourism advertising – pictures do not represent all there is to know about a place. But if we are not personally familiar with a place, photographs become our primary visual source of reference. Yet imagery may be highly romanticized, for instance, the idealized agricultural scenarios typical of labels and advertisements for food products, especially at the high-end of the market.

Photography, Nation, Nature  135

To talk of Europe is to talk of a continent, with deep geological and geographic formations, which is constituted in terms of nations, regions, and places. Culture and nature are inextricably inter-linked. Our relationship with place centrally contributes to the many myths and allegories that inform our understanding of phenomena and circumstances. The Karevala in Finland (a nineteenth century epic poem based on oral myth with prehistoric roots) or legends of the Anglo-Saxon King Arthur in Britain, are but two such examples. ‘Europe’ also articulates complex histories of conflict. Discussing identity choice in Europe now, Hopkins and Dixon note that the founders of the ‘European movement’ after World War II regarded a common European identity as an antidote to antagonisms fostered by ethnocentric nationalist loyalties. It was hoped that European institutions would generate a broader sense of community facilitating further governance integration. (Hopkins and Dixon, 2006). Yet, as Citrin and Sides, suggest, ‘…given the linguistic, religious, and ethnic heterogeneity within Europe, the cultural basis of a sense of common identity is elusive’. (Citrin and Sides, 2004: 162). So, who and what are included – or excluded? Conceptual definitions are constructed in part through exclusions: not Africa, not Asia. The Eastern border of Europe is highly symbolic not because the land changes dramatically from one side of it to the other but because to be to the East is to be not a part of Europe. Benedict Anderson famously referred to national identity in terms of ‘imagined communities’ that bring together people who don’t know one another through articulating a sense of common interests, affiliation, and identification. (Anderson, 1983). Affiliations are complex, involving social and economic power, links, and lineages. For example, despite territorial tensions, historically there were common social class interests between the various royal families in Europe. For many groups, a strong sense of belonging to particular places is important; for others, including migrant groups such as the Roma or the Sámi, sense of place and identity transcends national borders.6 National identity contributes to our sense of social identity, not only in terms of formal documents such as passports but also in terms of our sense of who we are. Europe is multi-tiered, with Norway, Switzerland, Russia, and the Balkan region included geographically, although not within the European Union (EU) of 27 nations. At the time of writing (January 2012) 17 of these are in the Euro-zone. Contemporary Europe might be viewed as an alliance of nations with distinctive political histories, geographies, socio-cultural traditions, religions, and lifestyles. Our relationship with the land is central within all of this. It follows that how we think about land crucially influences our sense of what it is to be European.

Landscape Photography: Themes and Aesthetics Landscape imagery, particularly photography, contributes to re-affirming, or questioning, our sense of place. Photo-graphy literally means writing with light. Outdoor photographs date from the very early days of the medium for the principal reason that (chemical) photography was dependent on natural light.7 Henry Fox Talbot

136  Place

(UK) referred to his earliest work as ‘sun prints’.8 Initially the exposure time required for the land was longer than that for the sky where the light is more intense. But photographers could make two plates from the same camera position, process the images in their darkroom tent or wagon, and later print them onto one sheet of paper, using masking devices to hide the seam.9 Photography did not supplant landscape painting, but, from its inception in 1839, was generally accepted as a more detailed and more topographically accurate impression of places and vistas.10 Landscape photographs were influenced by the pictorial aesthetics of landscape painting; early photographs tended to echo the composition, framing, and the geometry of the ‘golden’ rule (whereby sky and land each occupied between one- and two-thirds of the picture). In Europe, the key historical influences within landscape aesthetics were Italian themes dating from the Renaissance and Flemish painting from the seventeenth century onwards; eighteenth century German Romanticism later became important, especially in terms of ideas about our relation to our environment. Renaissance painting typically referenced classical myth (Greek or Roman) or Christian (Old Testament) stories, which were viewed as proper philosophical subject-matter for serious contemplation, instruction, and moral guidance. Scenes such as Jan Brueghel’s ‘The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne’ (Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels) or of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ (Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan) carried allegorical overtones. The scale of painting in these two examples differs markedly; viewing the Brueghal, 45 x 67cm, involves an intimacy that contrasts with the imposing effect of the 870cm width of the da Vinci mural. But the narrative and symbolic intentions of such paintings were similar. There was also a strand of ‘prospect paintings’ depicting agricultural landscapes; these were commissioned by landowners to celebrate ownership and successful harvests. Examples date from the Medici era in Florence later featuring, for example, within the emergent English landscape tradition in the eighteenth century. Scenes more overtly symbolizing mercantile success, with canals, windmills, and merchant ships as regular iconic elements within harmonious pictorial compositions, became typical of the so-called Golden Age of Dutch painting. As in advertising nowadays, one effect of such imagery was to assert the desirability of products or social circumstances: in this instance, economic prosperity. Historically, then, whilst the influence of Renaissance themes and styles was widespread, by the nineteenth century there was also a thematic tendency in some areas of the north of Europe related to venture capitalism and industrial developments, whilst in the south nature and classical myth remained a primary focus. This is perhaps not surprising; there is a crucial geological divide between north and south relating to mineral resources such as coal (and North Sea oil) needed to fuel factories and transportation. As we are reminded – for example, by Jem Southam’s 1980s exploration of The Red River in Cornwall, England, where residues of tin mining stain the water, or by the systematic photographic studies of Bernd and Hilla Becher (Germany, 1959 onwards) – much industrial enterprise has depended on the ability to extract resources from the earth. (Lange, 2007; Southam, 1989). Such enterprise marks the landscape more-or-less permanently, for example, leaving

Photography, Nation, Nature  137

slagheaps or mine shafts. In picturing the land artists draw attention to legacies of human action not simply through subject-matter but also through aesthetics. Celine Clanet’s choice of viewpoints for documenting the impact of hydro-electric dams in mountain areas in Savoy, France, contributes to emphasizing how construction has been synthesized within the landscape and, indeed, is becoming naturalized as plants and wildlife colonize edges of concrete. Exploring and contemplating landscape, particularly through literature, poetry, and the visual arts, has been associated with Romanticism. In the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’ in Western Europe in the eighteenth century there was a pre-occupation with questions of natural and social order. Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke, associated the sublime with astonishment, for example, at the momentousness of aspects of nature. (Burke, 1759). In Burke’s formulation we are so overwhelmed that we lose our sense of logic, experiencing the sublime as ‘irresistible force’, something to be feared. For his German contemporary, Immanuel Kant, the sublime relates to incomprehensibility, to that which cannot be understood through rational analysis. Crucial within debates about the sublime was the idea that, whilst actual encounters with difficult circumstances may indeed be exhilarating or frightening, the representation of such encounters through literature or art allows for pleasurable contemplation of the extraordinary (Burke) and its rational analysis (Kant). The sublime later became associated with the heroic as adventurers set out to conquer mountains or explore hitherto uncharted areas of the world (for instance, the Arctic). Perhaps in response to Enlightenment emphasis on the analytic, the Romantic movement of the turn of the nineteenth century emphasized more spiritual encounters with nature. For the late eighteenth century German philosopher and poet, Johann von Schiller, aesthetics, and the experience of beauty were linked with morality, as art contributes to refining human perception and emotion. Eric Hobsbawm, historian, comments on the difficulty of being precise about the tenets of Romanticism. (Hobsbawm, 1962). He dates the movement from the end of the French Revolution and suggests it was particularly marked in what he terms ‘the revolutionary era in Europe’, between 1830 and 1848. This is not to associate romanticism with revolution per se, although some writers and artists were involved; rather, he associates romanticism with an era of questioning political authority and challenging social structures. Hobsbawm comments that this was a young man’s movement (including some young women artists and writers) that brought together art and idealism. For some, romanticism was anti-bourgeois as well as being opposed both to logical philosophy and the classicism previously reflected in art practices. As he suggests Though it is by no means clear what Romanticism stood for, it is quite evident what it was against: the middle. Whatever its content, it was an extremist creed. Romantic artists or thinkers in the narrower sense are found on the extreme left, like the poet Shelley, on the extreme right, like Chateaubriand and Novalis, leaping from left to right like Wordsworth, Coleridge and

138  Place

numerous disappointed supporters of the French Revolution, leaping from royalism to the extreme left like Victor Hugo, but hardly ever among the moderates or Whig-liberals in the rationalist centre, which indeed was the stronghold of ‘classicism’. (Hobsbawm, 1962: 259) His examples are largely British or French, but the characterization has broader relevance across northern regions of Europe. Indeed, people from the north commonly travelled south seeking intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. Of course, this was restricted to those from wealthy families, or bohemians and wanderers (such as artists and poets); such trips for pleasure and enlightenment were obviously beyond the aspirations let alone the income of the majority of people. For classicists, travels took the form of a grand study tour including cities such as Rome and Athens. For romantics, although destinations may have been similar, the search was for spiritual enlightenment; the south was seen idealistically as somehow closer to nature (for Christians, closer to God). As geographer Peter Davidson has suggested, in many cultures, especially those within range of the Arctic Circle such as Britain or Scandinavia, the notion of ‘north’ is associated with a harder more challenging place; by contrast, ‘going south’ carries suggestions of leisure and pleasure. (Davidson, 2005). Landscape ‘views’ became popular not only because of the information that photographs convey but also because for those who did not live there, they contributed to reinforcing romantic notions of the ‘otherness’, for example, of Mediterranean and Adriatic places. The development of photography also coincided with the height of European empire building. Many photographers not only made pictures in Europe but also travelled extensively elsewhere, bringing back what then must have seemed exotic views. Islands such as Malta or Cyprus were strategically placed in terms of shipping routes and trade between Europe and the Orient. But travellers often photographed colonial places in a romantic vein. For example, the English photographer John Thomson visited Cyprus, photographing people and places in terms of a rural picturesque that, it has been argued, offered a very selective and romanticized view of the circumstances of life on the island at the time. (Papaioannou, 2010). Landscape photographs – urban, rural, or coastal – reference particular places and phenomena that might be very familiar to the photographer or may have involved a journey of discovery. They also inherently reflect the photographers’ particular interests, pre-conceptions, and ways of seeing. For example, Irene Kung focuses directly on the shapes of trees, each filling the frame so that we see them almost as architecture, and there is little to distract our focus; that they are photographed early in the morning or towards the evening adds an evocative luminosity. Some photographers particularly address consequences of human intervention. Thomas Weinberger superimposes two photographs of the same place, taken at different moments in the day, to create an archetype of the place in which the light seems unnatural, and edifices appear sublimely monstrous. His pictures are usually printed large-scale, thereby emphasizing the impact of human designs as the city

Photography, Nation, Nature  139

suburbs edge their way out in erstwhile rural areas, for example, in ‘Zone 30’, where the intense red of the orderly flower bed by the road suggests a hyper-reality. By contrast, in tracking the border between Bulgaria and Turkey, the eastern edge of Europe, Vesselina Nikolaeva offers quieter observations detailing the impact of people on place through more domestic scale imagery. Both photographers are concerned with human occupancy, but the aesthetic mode of expression sets up a different viewing position and mode of reading the images for audiences. The scale of Weinberger’s work encourages us to stand back, whereas we move close to look into Nikolaeva’s photographs, following the borderline as each image in turn offers insights that enhance the overall import of the sequence. Other photographers operate in more direct documentary mode. For example, Jackie Nickerson explores a small rural Irish community within which there is little sense of change. The overall series integrates portraits of people as well as detailed documentation of the agricultural landscape, although here the emphasis is on the apparent timelessness of rural farming areas. Gábor Arion Kudász observes the effects of human action on the Hungarian land and landscape. The individual pictures offer apparently neutral descriptions but together create a series that portrays degradation of a rural landscape appropriated for a range of purposes. Likewise, in Agraria, which draws on two series, Marginalia and Countryside, Czech photographer Pavel Banka creates a complex and detailed portrayal of rural phenomena that combines close-up observation with a more formal interest in the contours of the landscape. Maros Krivy overtly comments on invasive landscape practices, using image titles to draw attention to the impact of industrial concerns such as mining and commercial transportation. Szymon Roginski travels widely in Poland, often noting the visual drama of artificial light spilling across night-time landscapes. Tudor Prisăcariu takes us on a journey around Romania where we likewise witness the everyday banal interplay of functional buildings and machinery, and nature, for example, an airplane flying over an orchard. Nikos Markou documents scenarios from football to coastal leisure in contemporary Greece, portraying a complex range of scenarios through his picture portfolios that subtly link different views through similarity of colour. Visual resonances pay little attention to specificity of place as colour connections transport us from, for example, the stark hyper-intense yellow of airport check-in desks to the softer yellows of artificial lighting in a port area at sunset, or the range of green and blue tones that characterize different types of vegetation or waterscape. Rather, the overall import of his documentation of contemporary Greece as place acknowledges fluidity of connections that are made through an aesthetics of colour as well as through subject-matter. In more traditional documentary mode, Gerry Johansson investigates specific Swedish rural locations using black and white photography and grouping images, thereby encouraging us to pay attention to detail. Likewise, the import of Peter Koštrun’s investigation of rural Slovenia invites us to look closely as his images accumulate, thereby extending our sense of this region. Nicos Philippou is particularly interested in marginal urban spaces of southern Cyprus that may be appropriated, for example, by teenagers building Easter bonfires or by those, including his family,

140  Place

seeking refuge near the sea. Somewhat paradoxically, the area now used for informal holiday shacks was previously owned by the (colonial) British Government, so was not available to the holiday property and hotel developers whose enterprises elsewhere colonized and transformed the Cyprus coast. This information adds extra meaning to the images. Indeed, as with all pictures, knowing something of the circumstances and context of making can enhance our appreciation. Anthony Haughey’s photographs of property developments aborted before completion, because of the recent economic crisis in Ireland, are starkly striking due to the visual effects of photographing at twilight. But when shown in Dublin in 2011, they shifted from what might be taken as a negative comment on the Celtic Tiger (Irish) boom and bust crisis, to a more positive emblem of collective solutions, as architects and others responded pro-actively with proposals for new and sustainable ways of utilizing the abandoned sites. The purpose of this essay is to give a general overview, and to consider some questions relating to the idea of Europe, and what we might mean by ‘European Landscape’ over and above literal geographic formulations. It follows that it is not possible to pay specific intimate attention to image and meaning. But it is worth remarking that there are two levels of interpretation involved in every image. First, there is the photographer’s creative interpretation of sites, circumstances, or scenarios. Photography is often mistakenly conceptualized as a sort of window on the world whereby images are taken from what can be seen. But this conceptualization fails to pay attention to artist-photographers as unique viewers investigating phenomena, researching specific places, and responding in terms that reflect their particular interests and insights. As Robert Adams famously remarked, every landscape picture involves geography, autobiography, and metaphor. (Adams, 1996: 14). Photographers make pictures, actively selecting subject-matter and determining focus, composition, and depth of field; in other words, the photographic coding of the image. Second, there is audience engagement with, and interpretation of, images which integrate literal depiction and rhetorical mode: the visual poetics. Composition, use of available light, tonal and colour contrast achieved both at the point of shooting the picture and through decisions made when printing it, all influence responses, as do the interests, experiences, and pre-occupations of those viewing pictures. Without light there is no image. This has both aesthetic and thematic implications. Photographers elect to shoot at specific times of day or year, maybe when light is diffused, or, perhaps, when there are sharp shadows and highly marked tonal contrasts. Poetic emphasis emerges; dramatic contours and heightened colours and shadows may suggest excitement or foreboding, while gentle gradients of tone, whether shot in colour or monochrome, may suggest ecological harmony. The apparent harmony in Per Bak Jensen’s photographs exploring rural areas, particularly the Danish coast, emerges from his decision to photograph on calm days (avoiding the high winds typical of Denmark), from muted light and colour tones, and from image-composition. Likewise, Jem Southam avoids the intensity of summer light, preferring a softer daylight that reveals more of the surface of the rock

Photography, Nation, Nature  141

faces that he is investigating. Similarly, in Theodoros Tempos’ moving imagery, soft light reveals detail, and the gentle rippling of the water expresses the fluidity and fragility of small Greek river estuary islands formerly used as fishing bases; the film suggests a certain lack of specificity of time, as such places and pastimes fade into communal memory. The aesthetic is very different to that of, for instance, the melodrama of Bruno Baltzer’s fairground at night harshly illuminated by artificial lights, or the blue skies and sharp shadows that contribute emotively to Gerardo Custance’s Spanish landscapes. For other photographers the effects of light itself may be the theme explored. For instance, in her series, Etudes Bel Val, Chrystel Lebas looks out over a lake in in the Ardennes, France, from the same point of view over a period of 24 hours, showing ways in which colour and intensity of illumination evokes emotion as it contours the land. Likewise, repetition is a motif and method in the photographic work of Danish artist, Olafur Eliasson. His blocks of images use direct photography, within which light intensity is muted, to emphasize similarities in the shapes of the land. For Pedro Cabrita Reis light is crucial, represented in his work by the intense amber used to paint out half of otherwise serene, softly lit, harmonious images. For him in Portugal, this intensity of the amber light on the left stands for the intensity of sunset over the Atlantic in the far West of Europe. Each one of these explorations in some way draws attention to diverse effects of the varying intensity of the rays of the sun which are, of course, seasonal, latitudinal, and further heightened through reflection in water, snow, or ice. Light is one of the aspects of topography (and landscape photography) that renders regions within Europe distinctive from one another. Landscapes are often seductive and beautiful, satisfying spiritual desires inherited from Romanticism. But, like thorns concealed on the stems of roses, beauty in landscape may obscure the brutal, for example, histories of conflict and disruption. Gina Glover’s pictures of now disused airfields are softened through her use of a pinhole pictorial, wherein picture edges are not sharply defined, and the uniqueness of each image lends a sense of value to the photograph as object. But the Cold War (tensions between the Soviet Union and the West for four decades from the late 1940s on) felt harsh and dangerous to those who lived through that era. Bart Michiels’ pictures of battlefields remind us that military engagement contributes to determining the course of history; many major conflicts have figured within Europe historically, both within classical periods and more recently. Whilst not necessarily immediately evident, the legacy of such history remains marked symbolically through the naming of battles and locations. Flo Kasearu and her colleagues imagine a large black ball bouncing around Estonia, which is perhaps frivolous. However, in one instance the ball apparently rests where there used to be a statue of Lenin – but you probably have to be Estonian and familiar with Tallinn to get the joke. Legacies of previous land use remain marked in contemporary contours and remnants, but landscape imagery can only trace the visible surface. Hence photographers adopt differing aesthetic strategies to suggest feelings about place, and

142  Place

to extend our sense of the implications of what is seen in the image. Observations may note the behavioural; for example: Massimo Vitali draws attention to the mass occupation of the coast by sun worshippers, to the extent that the Italian coastal strip has become a stage for holidaymakers. In Alexander Gronsky’s single images from Latvia, groups of people in effect posed for the camera through pursuing everyday activities despite the presence of the camera. Artūras Raila’s approach is explicitly performative, as the photographs document ritualized staged events in, for example, the woodlands of Lithuania. Several photographers work with moving image as well as still photography. Their work tends to be observational rather than narrative driven (these are not ‘films’ in dramatic mode), but there is a sense in which the further animation of documents about place enhances insight and responses. Elina Brotherus commonly works with her own body as model. In The Black Bay Sequence, shot over one summer in rural Finland, she draws us into identification with the experience of immersion in water, a phenomenon that is, of course, highly symbolic in Pagan and Christian cultures, as well as suggesting the ecological harmony of human oneness with nature. This contrasts with other examples of moving imagery, for example: Alves da Silva’s road movie. Here, rather than observing pictures of Iberian rural areas, we are drawn into sharing the experience of driving down unmade paths through the countryside, as the camera (positioned at windscreen level, which echoes the position from which we would see were we in the front seat) suggests a constant observation of that which might otherwise be overlooked. For photographers, making images is a method of exploration; photographers think through doing, testing out visual effects. Some explore innovatory ways of seeing, offering different viewpoints that may shift our perceptions of the lie of the land and our relation to it. For instance, Gerco de Ruijter photographs from the air, using kites and pre-conceptualizing resulting imagery through calculating the effects of wind and lights on the ground. Through this he creates what, at first glance, appear as abstract patterns. It is as if we are descending through the air, hovering at the point before we can discern specific features on the land. Given the contribution of history to our understanding of specificity of place, it is not surprising to find several photographers bringing past references into the present, thereby reflecting on memory. (For former Soviet bloc nations this may be a relatively recent focus.) This is perhaps at its most apparent in the Adriatic and in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire region. Yenny Huber’s panoramas from Vienna and from Ljubljana symbolize ways in which changes and memories are multiply layered; the soft tones of the imagery lend a sense of fondness and, perhaps, regret. Marianna Christofides regularly works with found objects and imagery including old photographs, slides, and maps symbolically and evocatively reminding us of aspects of Cypriot history, now faded into memory as a currently divided nation. In both examples there is a sense of sublime sadness in hankering for histories now past. In avidly exploring the buildings and monuments of Malta, Nigel Baldacchino likewise draws attention to residues of previous eras. But intensity of colour effects in some of the pictures, and online assembly of imagery as a visual

Photography, Nation, Nature  143

blog, rather than more traditionally as a carefully edited selection of telling images, render a more operatic impact. Baldacchino is not alone in experimenting in new technological tools and internetbased communication methods. Almost all photographers now publish work via a website of their own or that of an art gallery. One effect of this is that the image in itself, rather than the tactile qualities of prints on paper, or the experience of leafing through a book, becomes emphasized. From the comfort of our computer screen, we easily forget that there have been several moments of transformation in the chain of photographic communication, whether exposure transformed the chemical coating of glass or paper or is encoded as a set of digital binaries. For Joan Fontcuberta, digital transformation is itself a matter of curiosity. His 2005 publication, Landscapes without Memory – a title that might be viewed as a direct response to Simon Schama’s interest in Landscape and Memory – brings together images created through using software programmes created for the interpretation of maps; that is, information coded in accordance with cartographic conventions. The images generated are based not on maps but on other phenomena, including paintings, decoded then recoded as landscapes. The ensuing landscapes seem somehow false, pointing both to the limited vocabulary of software developed to perform specific functions, and to the extent to which – perhaps in a culturally deep-seated way that seems unconscious – we seek representations that testify to actual complexities of land and landscapes. But we are reminded that all representations of landscape articulate the virtual and the fictional with the topographic and the symbolic. There is a certain sense of urgency in reconsidering not only our sense of place but also our sense of responsibility to place. Through his series title, Museum of Nature, Finnish artist, Ilkka Halso, reminds us of the extent to which the natural has been appropriated for human purposes thereby becoming artificially tended, tamed, and contained. In even more cataclysmic mode, the title of Belgian photographer Carl de Keyser’s series, Moments before the Flood, suggests that there is no stemming of the waves and no stopping the effects of climate change. That this should be seen as a nemesis, punishment for previous moral and social irresponsibility, is clear from the allusion to Old Testament myth. Yet, simultaneously, the rivers of Europe flow on. The Rhine and the Danube are among the great rivers of Europe, standing metonymically for continuity with the transit routes of many centuries. For Andreas Gursky, the Rhine is an abstract linear form; legendarily, he removed everything that he viewed as extraneous to create an immense image within which it is composition rather than literal detail that is of the essence. But in the context of this exhibition and publication, the Rhine is important as a symbolic link between the north and the central mountains through which it is necessary to pass to reach the south. In the context of the European Union and, indeed, of previous European tensions over national boundaries, the river forms the border between France and Germany. Likewise, the Danube, as explored by Andreas Müller-Pohle, symbolizes a key link within the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and, more recently, between Western Europe and Eastern European nations associated with the former Soviet bloc. The flow of river water, and irrigation of the

144  Place

lands around it, pays no attention to national borders or other boundaries. While human development may draw upon or pollute rivers, the ineffable flux of water suggests continuing possibilities for change and renewal.

European Places This exhibition and publication bring together examples of work from across Europe. It has been organized in terms of six regions to bring areas of the continent into focus, and to make apparent the visual contrasts between regions, from north to south and west to east. Such contrasts include qualities of natural light and seasonal change as well as the varied topography, textures, and colours of differing terrains. There are similarities of questions and subject-matter, and all photographers are concerned with aesthetic strategies, with how visual stories can be told. Whether expressed in documentary mode, more abstractly, performatively, or inter-actively, symbolic affects crucially influence our response to place. Taken as a group, the imagery offers a sense of Europe as a congregation of different types of place and activities within them, from rural communities to urban edges and seaside tourism, from agriculture to leisure, from military scenarios to expressions of our very direct involvement with the natural. Not surprisingly, the range of imagery also testifies to topographic differences within and between regions, and to ways in which local lifestyles and economies reflect the potential that physical geographies offer: seaside, industrial development, agriculture, and so on. To consider photography, nation, and nature is to reflect upon a combination of natural effects of geography, land use, cultivation, climate, weather, and light, both in terms of socio-economic subject-matter and in terms of image aesthetics. It also involves political considerations in that landscape imagery has been articulated with specific ideals, whether as emblematic of a particular rhetoric of nationhood or as questioning attitudes to land and views of natural resources for human usage. But, cutting across considerations of specificity of the articulation of landscape imagery within socio-political developments is the fact that photographers tend to be inveterate travellers, bringing particular questions, aesthetic style, and methods of working into play as they roam beyond their homeland. In addition, as artist-photographers, they operate professionally within a global art market. (Several of those included in this publication live between two or more places.) While national boundaries may be more-or-less settled geographically, photographers remain itinerant, exploring unfamiliar locations as well as those close to home. Furthermore, all post work online, rendering imagery accessible world-wide. The internet knows no national limitations. Likewise, audiences may have travelled widely. It follows that our sense of place may operate at different levels of depth, articulating memory and current experiences variously according to where we are and our relation to this place. We may also have a false sense of familiarity with specific regions or icons of place generated through frequent reference in visual and other media. The Acropolis, the Eiffel Tower, the Black Forest, the Alps, and Hadrian’s Wall all conjure up images and stories, regardless of whether or not we have actually been to any of these locations.

Photography, Nation, Nature  145

Our sense of place thus draws upon physical geography, botany, aesthetics, but also on biography and the psychological. It articulates patterns or changes in human behaviour with natural morphology. Our experience of nature is filtered through cultural perceptions. We cannot envisage or speak of the natural world without recourse to symbolic languages, whether spoken, written or visual. Landscape photography may tell us more or suggest a new way of perceiving familiar places; it may also offer insight into the unfamiliar. Through considering a range of examples we are reminded of the very varied emotions and complexity of circumstances that characterize people’s relation to place and nature in Europe. Liz Wells, 2012 Originally published in Sense of Place: European Landscape Photography (exh. cat. Bozar – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels), Bozar Books & Prestel, 2012. Note: Sense of Place: European Landscape Photography, which I guest co-curated for the Centre des Beaux Arts, Brussels (BOZAR), formed part of the 2012 Belgian Summer of Photography festival, for which that year’s theme was landscape. The exhibition included work by 40 artists (working in photography or moving imagery) from 27 countries of the European Union, thereby acknowledging the significance of Brussels as the location of the EU headquarters. This catalogue essay briefly references work by each of the artists to pursue a discussion of the constitution of a sense of place. Given the number of artists and works involved, it was not possible to include examples of the work in this anthology. The great majority of the artists, all of whom are mentioned in this essay, at some point, have a web presence.

Notes 1 For example, Klaus Honnef, Rolf Sachsse and Karin Thomas, eds. (1997) German Photography 1870–1970 – Power of a Medium. Bonn: Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik; Mike Weaver (1989) British Photography in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2 A recent series of publications, the Exposures series from Reaktion Books, London, sidesteps the problem through focusing on Photography and Italy or Photography and Ireland. This allows for comment on perceptions of, for example, Italy by those visiting from elsewhere as well as contextualization of home-based work by, for instance, Irish photographers through reference to other series made elsewhere. 3 When photography was first announced in 1839 national boundaries in Europe did not parallel those that now obtain. For instance, Italy and Germany as we now know them were congregated from mosaics of smaller states; parts of Prussia and Poland were in the Russian Empire which also included Finland, and the three south Baltic states; Norway was part of Sweden; and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a major alliance and force in Central Europe. Photographers moved between Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and elsewhere. 4 ‘Place-making’ features nowadays as an aspect of regional planning; the term may be relatively new, but the concept is deep-seated. Historically the role of churches, town halls and other civic organizations in developing and maintaining ‘congregations’ is well established. 5 Schama’s family roots are central European, but he was born in Britain, and, as an adult, migrated to New York. Like many Europeans, his relationship with family history and identity is complex.

146  Place

6 Lapland runs across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia but is a region rather than a nation; the Sámi remained marginalized within the dominant cultures of each of these four countries. Conversely, in the far south-east of Europe, Nicosia is now the only European city with a dividing wall: the ‘green line’ that separates Cypriots living in the South who identify as Greek from Turkish Cypriots in the North. (The border is currently open.) 7 Photography was announced by both Daguerre and Fox Talbot in 1839 but resulted from experiments in printing pursued over several decades. From an optical point of view the potential for photography was much longer standing. The Greeks knew that sunlight channelled through a chink in a cave could reflect an image from outside; lenses were developed by mediaeval astronomers. 8 Much of the earliest nature photography was intended as botanical illustration, often made through contact prints: for example, a leaf would be laid on chemically treated paper which, through exposure to the sun, retained an impression of the leaf whilst the rest of the paper changed colour, for instance, to the blue of cyanotypes. 9 See, for example, Mark Haworth-Booth (1992) Camille Silvy, River Scene France. Malibu, Ca.: The J. Paul Getty Museum. 10 As is evident from comparing examples of photographs with paintings subsequently produced, photographs were also used by artists as studies for oil paintings later made in their studios. See, for example, Peter Galassi (1981) Before photography: painting and the invention of photography. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

References Aarnes, Sigurd Aa (1983) ‘Myths and heroes in 19th century nation-building in Norway’ in Eade, J.C. ed. (1983) Romantic Nationalism in Europe. Canberra: ANU Humanities Research Centre, Monograph No. 2. Adams, Robert (1996) ‘Truth and Landscape’ in Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture. Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Rise of Nationalism, London: Verso. Burke, Edmund (1759) A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, first published in this version, 1990. Citrin, Jack & Sides, John (2004) ‘More than Nationals: how Identity Choice Matters in the New Europe’ in Richard K. Herrmann, Thomas Risse & Marilynn B. Brewer, eds. (2004) Transnational Identities – Becoming European in the EU. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Davidson, Peter (2005) The Idea of North. London: Reaktion Books. Gersht, Ori (2005) Interview, in Great 63. London: The Photographers’ Gallery. Hobsbawm, Eric (1962) The Age of Revolution. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hopkins, Nick & Dixon, John (2006) ‘Space, Place and Identity: Issues for Political Psychology’. Political Psychology, Vol 27, No. 2. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc. Lange, Susanne (2007) Bernd and Hilla Becher, Life and Work. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Massey, Doreen (2005) For Space. London: Sage. Mitchell, W.J.T. ed. (1994) Landscape and Power. London & Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Papaioannou, Hercules (2010) ‘John Thomson: Through Cyprus with a Camera, Between Beautifying and Bountiful Nature’ in Philippou, N., Stylianou-Lambert, T., & Wells, L. (2014) Constructing Identities, Cypriot Photography in Context. London: I B Tauris. Relph, Edward (1981) Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. London: Croom Helm. Schama, Simon (1996) Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press. Southam, Jem (1989) The Red River. Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977) Space and Place, the Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

12 A MAN OF THE NORTH

FIGURE 12.1 

Esko Männikkö ‘Untitled’ from Harmony Sisters, 2007. © Esko Männikkö. (Original in colour).

Esko Männikkö was born in the north of Finland, the setting for many of his photographs. He lives in the outer region of the city of Oulu towards the Finnish section of the Arctic Circle, thereby experiencing inhospitable weather in winter and the remarkable ‘white nights’ of summer. He is very much a man of the north. However, his interest in circumstances and lifestyles, that are in some ways marginal, resonates universally. DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-16

148  Place

Männikkö became known in Finland, and subsequently internationally, as an outsider artist. He did not emerge through one of the centres that those of us who live elsewhere have come to associate with Finnish photography, particularly, the Finnish Union of Artist Photographers, and The Helsinki School (although he has been a member of the Union of Artist Photographers since the 1990s). Rather, living in the north, his work developed independently and in relative isolation from established photography groups and institutions. Furthermore, although his pictures document people, places and aspects of everyday culture, his way of framing, grouping, and hanging his images is strikingly original – to the extent that this has become a signature for his work. As a British critic – familiar with, but not working within, the Finnish arts ­context – I find myself in the paradoxical position of writing about an outsider artist on the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the Kunsthalle, Helsinki, an art institution that, through showcasing the work of Finnish and international artists, has a key role in promoting contemporary art in Finland.1 In reflecting on his work, and on the character of his approach as an artist, I find myself referencing artists such as Duchamp, whose project was one of challenging the conceptual parameters of the gallery and the critical discourses that characterised the European art world of the modern era. However, Männikkö is not directly questioning conventions so much as ignoring them. There may be a game to be played, but he is not playing it. He has an astute relationship with contemporary art institutions whereby, on the one hand, he explores themes that interest him and presents work in original ways, when it suits him, refusing the norms of exhibition installation, and, on the other hand, uses the gallery – and publications – as his main means of representing his work and his subject-matter, nationally and internationally. Esko Männikkö was born in Pudasjärvi2, but moved to Särkijärvi village in Utajärvi commune at the age of five; he moved to Oulu3 in 1989. He lives in a rural area that forms part of the city but is far from the city centre. His interest in photography dates from his teenage years. One of the teachers at his secondary school ran a course, which included black and white darkroom processes, offered to students on a voluntary basis. Männikkö evidently had found his vocation: ‘the moment when an image began to appear on a paper was extremely magical. I got hooked at once and have been ever since’.4 His series of black and white portraits When Time Stops Still (1980/1982) portrays a family living without electricity on the outskirts of the village (Särkijärvi) where by then he had been resident for about twenty years. We wonder at the tenacity and resilience involved in such a lifestyle in the final decades of the twentieth century. Familiarity with his subjects lends empathy to the images, whether people, animals, huts, objects, or places. As audience we sense an intimacy that could not be replicated were a visiting photographer to investigate similar themes. As an artist Männikkö pays attention to detail because of his own immersion in the places and everyday cultures that he is exploring. He can also take time to get to know people, to return to places frequently, to explore locality through picturing it. Even on the rare occasions when he works away from home, his subject-matter

A Man of the North  149

is one for which he feels a strong affinity, always drawn to outsider situations and lifestyles.5 Examples include a commission that led to 100% Cashmere (2002) in which he portrayed workers at the cashmere wool factory in Innerleithen, Scotland, a small-scale mill and industrial set-up in a remoter area of the UK, or the residency in Texas for which he produced the aptly titled series Mexas (1996/97) wherein he depicted Mexican workers and their domestic situation as Hispanics living in the USA. Männikkö’s approach is studious; he spends a long time with the people and in the place that he documents. For him it is a question of looking, waiting, talking, sharing, thereby building trust. There is something deeply reflective about every one of his images, even the way in which he draws us into looking into the eye of a horse or reflecting on dead game birds hanging on ropes in the shelter of a tree. Each individual image has weight. He brings the images together into something that is a complex portrait of a place or community that is never uniform and sometimes unpredictable. His subjects are usually marginal – marginalised people, places, and lifestyles – not accustomed to being treated seriously through portraiture. Often, they seem unfamiliar to us as gallery audiences. Since the 1990s he has worked in colour, perhaps reflecting the more widespread shift in photographic aesthetics and rhetoric that emerged in part from post-modern critiques of the emphasis on medium, composition and photo eye that was central to modernist claims for photography as art. Black and white increasingly became associated with form and with notions of timelessness, whilst colour photography, at first associated primarily with commercial practices, attained a sense of immediacy that appealed to those wanting to emphasise the photograph as a particular type of document. For him there was also a specific concern with legacies of Finnish history. Black and white began to feel too romantic and bygone. My subjects were such that they immediately made people to think back about wartime (1940s), even though my photos were taken few days ago. When I began to take colour photos they understood that these images are actually newer. Nowadays I have shifted into a more and more frugal expression. I haven’t completely ruled out the possibility that I might get back to black and white.6 But there have been other shifts: from social documentary towards a more expressionist formal aesthetic, and from the more specifically located to a more generalised engagement with the nature of existence. The series Organized Freedom (1999–) perhaps marks the change of tone. He depicts details of the doors and porches of dilapidated rural timber cottages, some of which are striking for the colours – blues and browns – in which the houses have been painted, and sometimes with vegetation creeping its way onto the porch, or in winter encased by snow. In this respect the image documents what he observed. Lamps, curtains, and solid doors testify to former occupancy yet simultaneously suggest the inevitability of decay. A subsequent set of pictures, Organized Freedom  2, suggests potential for regeneration of these dwellings as homes for

150  Place

FIGURE 12.2 

 sko Männikkö ‘Untitled’ from Organised Freedom, 2001. © Esko Männikkö. E (Original in colour).

recent immigrants to Finland. In these staged portraits, individuals, evidently not of Nordic ethnicity, pose for the camera in the otherwise empty and derelict sheds and houses, in effect pointing to the increasing complexity of the cultural landscape of the north. The series and exhibition title, Flora & Fauna (2002), connotes still life, a genre that traditionally offers compositions inviting us as audience to observe, admire and wonder at nature. Historically it reminds us of the early interest in photography as a means of empirically cataloguing phenomena that, in British histories of photography, dates from the cyanotypes of the English botanist, Anna Atkins (1799–1871).7 But for Männikkö the interrelation of humans, animals, plants, nature and culture is inextricable. As such the title critiques the genre, both in terms of the abstract formalism with which it has sometimes been associated and in terms of the objectification of specific botanical species. Here, the title, Flora & Fauna, operates as a more symbolic reference to the natural world and to ways in which we might picture it. The series consists mostly of photographs of animals. But these are not portraits. Subjects are not named and individualised. Rather, the images testify phenomenologically to presence and to physical form and detail. Our attention is drawn

A Man of the North  151

to light, colours, and textures, but we are also reminded of our environment as a space mediated by animal as well as human occupancy. Recently he has pursued projects away from home, in Italy, and even further south in the sub-tropical Cape Verde archipelago (in the Atlantic, some 570 km off the coast of West Africa). The decaying statues that figure in Blues Brothers (2009–) are from European cemeteries. The faces, shot in close-up against neutral backgrounds, with no clues as to place or setting, appear to hover somewhere between the actual and a haunting that emanates from age and dereliction. Where once there may have been a specific mythical reference or rationale for commemoration involved in the commissioning of the masonry, now there is a more general sense of mutability, loss, and decay; of the passing of time; and of the fragility of cultural memory. In referencing ‘the blues’ – in English associated with personal depression and in America with themes of desire and loss so commonly central to ‘singing the blues’ – the title conjures up melancholia as we remark detail in the muted colours that tinge and transform the greys of the weathered stone faces. His imagery may have become more minimalist, lending itself to more metaphoric or existential modes of interpretation, but his interest in the everyday clearly underpins all of Männikkö’s projects and may account for the empathy that he brings to his portraits of people, particularly The Female Pike (1990–95), the series for which he first became well known internationally. Here he portrayed working men of the north, bachelors living solitary lives, all in some respects involved in the hunting, forestry and fishing cultures that characterise rural life. An interest in masculine aspects of everyday culture surely also fuelled the set of portraits of decaying cars that forms a part of Organized Freedom. The vehicles are presumably valued more for their function than their status, their condition, like that of the empty houses, implying something of the harshness of the climate, lifestyle, and economy of the region. From an audience point of view his subject-matter attracts attention as the people and places depicted are remote, even in Finnish terms. Definitions of ‘north’ are geographically relative. In his discussion of The Idea of North, Peter Davidson traces notions of the north in history and myth especially in the Northern Hemisphere. (Davidson, 2005). Specific regions considered include Britain, Canada, Japan and China, and Scandinavia. Finland – not part of Scandinavia – is not foregrounded, but his critical analysis of complexities of attitudes to the north, through discussion of selected paintings and films, suggests some of the themes that characterise Nordic concerns. He comments on the harshness of the north, a masculine space relative to the sunny welcoming ‘south’ (for instance, the Mediterranean region). In Finland itself, a view of the north as peripheral persists in the south of the country; the Arctic is somewhere to explore in summer but relatively inaccessible in winter.8 Männikkö thus lives in a region partly defined by its distance from Helsinki, Turku, or Tampere, and characterised by the limited light of the long winter, something that obviously influences photographic seeing. Given that the great majority of Finns live in the south of the country, within Finland, Männikkö’s work offers social documentation of people, places, and the atmosphere that infuses the region, in effect showing the north of Finland to the Finnish.

152  Place

Davidson’s discussion of ‘northness’ culminates with an epilogue on ‘Keeping the Twilight’, wherein he describes his own experience as a writer settling back to work at nightfall on a winter afternoon in Scotland (in terms of latitude, more than 8° south of Oulu9). He specifically references the Finnish ritual of keeping silence as light falls and treasuring nightfall as a moment of contemplation. Concern with light, its effects and affects, is typical of Finnish landscape art. For instance, in her Black Bay (video) sequence (2012) the artist, Elina Brotherus, depicts herself calmly entering and exiting the still waters of a lake at different times of day including twilight, a form of baptismal immersion that speaks spiritually to affinities with nature. The pace is slow, contemplative. Discussing photography from Finland artist-­ photographer, Jorma Puranen, characterises methods of working as performative and reflective, suggesting that ‘One way of locating Finnishness might be trying to trace poetic possibilities found in silence’. (Puranen, 2007: 223; also see Chapter 6). In effect he is suggesting that ‘keeping the twilight’ is embedded within attitudes to land, light and space. Männikkö’s framed colour picture, ‘Kuhmo’ (1990)10, of a man, alone outside a shack, drinking out of a bottle, silhouetted against the sunset, perhaps sums up something of the imperative to respect the fading of the sun and the move towards the mystique of night and moonlight, although in this instance the hint of 19th century romanticism suggested in the ornateness of the embossed frame in which this image is presented is undercut by the clear silhouette of the bottle from which the man, sitting on his porch, is drinking. My own experience of visiting Rovaniemi, on the edge of the Arctic Circle, in 2004, was illuminating. It was only early September but there was already a sense of a town closing in on itself after the summer (tourist) season. Restaurants and shops were relatively empty. One day, for about an hour, I was the only visitor at the art museum (where they were hosting a retrospective of work by Jorma Puranen). Davidson comments that, Everyone carries their own idea of north within them. To say ‘we leave for the north tonight’ brings immediate thoughts of a harder place, a place of dearth, uplands, adverse weather, remoteness from cities. A voluntary northward journey implies a willingness to encounter the intractable elements of climate, topography and humanity…. (south) brings associations of travelling for pleasure – leisured exiles in the world before ‘the wars’. (Davidson, 2005: 9) As something of an aside, he adds that the idea too easily becomes gendered, with ‘north’ associated with the masculine – by contrast with the feminine (warmth) of ‘south’.11 Such gendered discourses are complex to unravel, but certain associations persist despite the extensive acknowledgement of the presence and contribution of women within cultures of the north. Indeed, Männikkö is also a hunter, a traditional pastime for those based in rural areas. Finnish photographer and lecturer in visual culture, Juha Suonpää, has explored the social significance of wildlife photography, suggesting that we view

A Man of the North  153

the camera as a substitute weapon and noting that the tracking, waiting, and pursuing of wild animals renders the image as ‘trophy’, the picture standing in for the success of hunters in former years. (Suonpää, 2002 – see Figure 3.5) In studying the behaviour of nature photographers Suonpää also questioned gendered aspects of Finnish hunting culture, like Davidson, noting the historical association of traditional pastimes of the north (such as hunting, forestry, and fishing) with the masculine – which is not to say that women never participate, but rather to point to legacies of gendered discourses deriving from a traditional domestic division of labour. Finland is one of the areas of Europe where city dwellers retain a strong affiliation to familial roots (often expressed through ownership of a summer house) which means people remain linked in with specific histories. In terms of subjective, gendered, and familial identity, notions of ‘home’ and belonging, region and place, are complexly interwoven. As Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo observed in their extensive historical and contemporary exploration of forest areas and the power of myth, people (men and women) acquire a strong sense of place through identification with specific woodlands, groves, or even specific trees, for example, yard trees might be viewed as family guardians presiding over many generations. (Kovalainen and Seppo, 1997/2006 – see Figure 19.1). The folkloric and the mythological contribute to contemporary perceptions of place and change – even if only to underscore a sense of loss of traditional ways of life, the forest as refuge and possibilities for solitude. To imagine the rural, as opposed to living in a rural area all year round, especially given Nordic climate and weather conditions, is, of course, different. Suonpää is among several photographers who have explored Nordkapp (Norway) as a summer destination.12 He was interested in tourism and the symbolic importance of travelling north and marking the fact of having done so, in this instance, the tourist photograph standing as souvenir. Suonpää documented patterns of behaviour, for example, people repeatedly posing for photographs on a platform silhouetted against the sea beyond. (Suonpää, 2006) Similarly, in his picture ‘Curiosus Naturae Spectator’ (1997), Puranen remarks a caravan park on the cliffs for use by those making the summer pilgrimage in motor homes. His concern is with perceptions of the north – he has photographed extensively in the Arctic particularly Greenland and Lapland (including Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia). In terms of geographic imagination and ‘the north’, the focus is on snow, ice, glaciers, and the idea of a pristine Arctic Sea, yet, as suggested in ‘Terra Exagitatorum’ (1995 – see Figure 6.3 on p.79), Puranen reminds us that the north is also an industrial space; we see pylons, and industrial plant and chimneys billowing smoke, that is, the realities of mineral excavation in the north. (Puranen, 2000: 8–11). Männikkö’s earlier work likewise was fuelled by desire for critical intelligence as he explored the everyday realities for those who live in the north of Finland and across the Russian border in the Kola Peninsula, a remote area that was industrialised and militarised during the Soviet period. Pemoht/Remont (1989–1995), by Männikkö and Pekka Turunen, pictures a community surviving there despite a legacy of ecological damage and contamination from military nuclear waste.13

154  Place

FIGURE 12.3 

Installation. Time Flies, Kunsthalle Helsinki, 2014. © Esko Männikkö. (Original in colour).

Männikkö’s deep-seated experience of the rural, including hunting, may account for the intimacy that he brings to his portraits of animals, sometimes cropped to emphasise a particular anatomical feature. For instance, there are several examples of extraordinary close-up engagements with the eyes of animals (horses, a baboon) looking directly at the camera, clearly unruffled by the presence of the photographer. (Figure 12.1) This series, Harmony Sisters (2004–) was made on farms and in zoos, but in each case the calm response of the animal testifies to the artists’ empathy with animals, whilst his unflinching gaze draws us as viewers into a more detailed scrutiny than we might otherwise experience. For example, a close-up of the back of the neck and head of a swan suggests a bird that has not panicked, that was prepared to stay still for the camera; it was possibly shot in wider frame and then cropped to create a shape that is pleasing in formal terms, but also emphasises the smoothness of the skin of the long neck as if inviting us to stroke it. Indeed, every photograph in this series, and in other series, captures detail. As Roland Barthes suggested, it is often a particular element in the image that attracts attention and proves memorable, ‘A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’. (Barthes, 1984: 27) For the spectator encountering Männikkö’s work in a gallery context each photograph exists as a single photograph yet is simultaneously part of a block of pictures or a band of images lined up along a wall, their frames abutting one another. In publications his pictures often appear grouped on the page, for example, in the catalogue for the Deutche Börse Photography Prize, 2008, each page includes two photographs from different series side by side with no space in between. His picture framing is crucial, with frames selected to complement a particular image in some respect, perhaps picking out a colour or texture within the picture or referencing

A Man of the North  155

traditional genre such as the use of the ornate 19th century style frame for the Kuhmo landscape (the man on the porch observing nightfall). In Cocktails (2007) he brought together images from several series interspersing people, places, and animals within an apparently random (although surely very careful) selection; the amalgam of frames, all different, that touch one another, significantly contributed to the impact of his work. Indeed, in many examples of writings about his work, illustrations include the picture frame – although this was not the case for the catalogue of the Deutche Börse exhibition, thereby missing part of the point. Using ornate frames more associated with paintings than with photographs also contributes to undermining the documentary characteristics so readily attributed to the photographic. Aside from its function to secure glass and protect the edges of a picture from damage, framing has been viewed historically as a way of enhancing the affects of an image, perhaps claiming status for it through ornateness or emphasising the (modernist) notion of medium as message through using a minimal frame. In his reflections on art and on the gallery as the context of viewing, brought together within The Truth in Painting (1978), French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, considered the frame as ‘Parergon’ (an ornamental accessory; addition; embellishment14) noting the fluidity of the relationships that obtain between the picture, the frame, and the wall. He suggests that the frame has two bases (fonds): on the one hand, the wall from which it distinguishes the picture and, on the other hand, the picture, held away from the wall by the framing. Thus, along with its aesthetic and rhetorical functions, the frame acts as a prop for both the wall and the picture – not, as in theatre, ‘prop’ as property (of the actor/role), but inversely as always apparently the property of the other. When considering the picture, the frame merges into the wall, and conversely, from the point of view of the wall the frame distinguishes the art object. The picture frame thus delineates image content and positions it in relation to the wall (and by extension, networks of art ownership, institutions, and cultures regionally, nationally, and internationally). But positioned on the wall it also resonates with other pictures thereby establishing ‘conversations’ between images, whether as an authored series, a solo retrospective including differing themes and series, or in a group exhibition. If we accept Derrida’s concept of différance, meaning emerges from the interaction of imagery, juxtapositions, and interpretation, is therefore fluid, never fixed. For Derrida, the style of framing has aesthetic and rhetorical affects; picture frames are by no means simply embellishments, ornate or austere as any specific frame may be. Männikkö often recycles frames or makes frames made from old wood that may hang alongside those made from new wood. Seen through a Derridean lens the chaos of framing and hanging challenges any modernist emphasis on the integrity of the single image or series, especially as the subject-matter is mixed in terms of content and theme and there is no hierarchy. The hang further extends the affects of the frame: the horizontals at the top and the bottom of the frame may reference ‘not wall’, but adjacent pictures, each individually framed, sit either side of what becomes a doubling of the vertical edges; furthermore, the heights of pictures differ

156  Place

so the pictures jag upwards and downwards from one another. The affects of this further level of relations between the framed images, particularly in Cocktails, resists definition, but the mixing and juggling of relations within and between series creates a 40% proof jolt that, whilst it risks obscuring precise sources and subject-­matter, speaks to the phenomenological complexities of contemporary image culture. In Männikkö’s vision of the north a polyphony of elements of place and community, brought into relation with each other, testify to the complexities of everyday living circumstances and the extraordinary cacophony of people, animals, material objects, botanical or industrial constituencies, textures and colours with which we are surrounded, even in the most makeshift of circumstances. Moreover, perhaps testifying to the insidiousness of communication media and the influences of globalisation, his pictures made in Finland, or made elsewhere, come together as a jumble of images; there is no hierarchy of people, animals, or objects, of culture and nature. The touch of one frame to another operates within the blend yet, through the individuality of the frame, contributes to retaining distinctive thematic and visual textures. As such Männikkö’s work stands as a clear example of différance, of intertextuality, and of the unpredictability of visual references and connections that we might make. It is this that renders his work immediate, memorable, and existentially challenging. Liz Wells, 2014 Originally published in Esko Männikkö Time Flies, Helsinki Taidehalli/Finnish Art Society, 2014.

Notes 1 Founded in 1928, Kunsthalle (Taidehalle), Helsinki brings together contemporary art, artists, and audiences offering exhibition opportunities for both young and more established artists. http://taidehalli.fi/ 2 Pudasjärvi is a village in an inland rural area just south of the Arctic Circle, an hour’s drive from the city of Oulu and the Gulf of Bothnia (between Finland and Sweden). 3 Oulu is on the West coast, geographically nearer to Umea, the largest city in the north of Sweden, than to Helsinki, Turku or Tampere, the cities that form the economic triangle of the south of Finland and home to the great majority of the population. 4 Email correspondence with Liz Wells, July 2013. Translated from Finnish to English by Maija Koskinen. 5 Männikkö emphasised this affinity when asked about this in discussion with Liz Wells at The Photographers Gallery, London, 8th February 2008, when shortlisted for, and later winner of, the Deutche Börse Photography Prize. 6 Email correspondence, op cit. Translated from Finnish to English by Maija Koskinen. 7 Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. More than 400 plates published between October 1843 and September 1853. Ref: Robin Lehman ed. (2005) The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 8 This is despite ways in which digital connectivity makes Finland, like elsewhere, fully networked and, consequently, less a marginalised nation of the north (one that is under one hundred years old as an independent state) and more a Nordic player within the European political economy. 9 Oulu, 65.0500°N, 25.4667°E; St Andrews, 56.3370°N, 2.7998°W.

A Man of the North  157

10 Kuhmo is a small town in the East of Finland near the Russian border (renowned for its annual summer international chamber music festival). 11 Davidson’s research is from a northern hemisphere perspective. 12 Nordkapp, on the Norwegian island of Magerøya, is more-or-less due north of Oulu and is the northernmost point of Europe that is accessible by road. (The actual northern point is to the west of Nordkapp at Knivskjellodden.) 13 Pemoht/Remont was brought together for exhibition at Nordenhake Gallery, Berlin, April–June 2013, where the project was described as setting out ‘to document the everyday reality of a disenfranchised community living on the margins during times of major transition. A haunting document of post-Soviet living conditions, Pemoht/ Remont captures this new reality with poetry, clarity, and grit’. https://nordenhake. com/exhibitions/2013/pemoht 14 Brown, Lesley ed. (1993) The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edition revised and enlarged. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

References Barthes, Roland (1984) Camera Lucida. London: Fontana. First published in French, 1980. Davidson, Peter (2005) The Idea of North. London: Reaktion Books. Derrida, Jacques (1987) The Truth in Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First published in French, 1978. Kovalainen, Ritva and Seppo, Sanni (1997/2006) Puiden Kansa/Tree People. Helsinki: Hiilinielu tuotanto and Miellotar. The Photographers’ Gallery (2008) Deutche Börse Photography Prize 2008. London: The Photographers’ Gallery. Puranen, Jorma (2007) ‘Interview’ in Timothy Persons, The Helsinki School: New Photography by TaiK. Ostfilden, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007. Puranen, Jorma (2000) Language is a Foreign Country. Helsinki: The Finnish Museum of Photography. Suonpää, Juha (2002) Petokuvan raadillisuus. Tampere: Vastapaino. Suonpää, Juha (2006) ‘Blessed be the Photograph: Tourism Choreographies’, photographies, Vol. 1.1, March. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge journals.

13 HIDDEN HISTORIES AND LANDSCAPE ENIGMAS

Photographers explore sites, researching detail and exploring ways of conveying a sense of their atmosphere and significance. Yet pictures can only reveal that which can be seen, although their stillness invites attention to detail that might otherwise be overlooked. As John Berger evocatively suggests, ‘Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place’. (Berger & Mohr, 1976:13). Wars are determined publicly and politically, but are also experienced personally in terms of death, injury, and domestic trauma. Public histories are often hidden, especially where a site has been changed through new buildings. Likewise, memories may be kept private. It follows that extensive research necessarily underlies serious pictorial enquiry. As Berger suggests, the land may give little away. For photographers concerned with questions of place and history the poetics of visual imagery and associated texts together articulate stories that invite audience engagement. This paper considers photographic strategies intended to unearth and, more particularly, convey hidden histories relating to battles or sites of execution. It evaluates photo methodologies and approaches to storytelling deployed by artist-photographers seeking to reveal historical sediments and to invoke reflection on legacies of conflict. Meaning emerges from a combination of research, photographic method, image, and context of viewing. Given the recent centenary of the first world war, 1914–18, that given the extensive carnage that resulted is often popularly, and over-optimistically, termed ‘the war to end all wars’, examples are drawn from European art-photography.1 However, considerations relating to research methods and photographic strategies are more widely relevant thematically, historically, and geographically.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-17

Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas  159

FIGURE 13.1 

 nthony Haughey, ‘Shotgun cartridges, Armagh/Louth Border’ from the A series Disputed Territory, 2006. © Anthony Haughey.

Some battlefield images acquire iconic status. For instance, in ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’, by British photographer, Roger Fenton, cannon balls suggest the carnage that must have occurred during the Crimean War, documented by him in 1855. In picturing soldiers deployed to fight, army officers, and campsite scenes, his work indicates the scale of the military endeavour. Another iconic example, ‘Royalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death’, made in 1936 by the Hungarian photographer, Robert Capa, shows a Republican soldier apparently falling having been shot during the Spanish Civil War. Military death is graphically depicted. There has been extensive debate as to whether this image was a set-up, but that pictures are staged does not detract from the symbolic force or the endurance of such imagery as indicators of the realities of battle. Indeed, pictures may suggest conflict through various means. For example, in his extensive project, Disputed Territory (1999–2005), Irish photographer, Anthony Haughey, explored territorial tensions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and in Northern Ireland. The cartridges strewn on the ground (Figure 13.1) remind us of Fenton’s iconic image, at the same time symbolizing the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack, suggesting that this is Unionist territory.2 Sites of battle or of military executions often figure as ‘late photography’, that is, images made after an event. David Campany has proposed that, whilst images made after the fact contribute within the construction of history, they are not traces of occurrences so much as ‘the trace of a trace of an event’. (Campany, 2006:124)

160  Place

He suggests that such pictures distance us from emotional implications, numbing us through becoming, as Campany puts it, ‘an undertaker, summarizer or accountant’. (Loc cit). Late photography can seem mute, animated only through familiarity with stories and contexts. Arguably this is photography at its most dispassionate and cerebral. Nevertheless, in all the examples discussed here, the photographer’s aim is to affect us, to remind us to reflect on the human implications of what once occurred. Places are defined through stories told and those yet to come. Through investigation and documentation of that which can be seen, photography makes a key contribution to storying locations.3 Yet, specific sites may give little away; histories are not necessarily manifest visually. The methodological and aesthetic challenge for photographers it to transcend the limitations of the literalness of the camera, to find ways of alluding to that which has occurred through depiction of sites not as they once were, but in terms of their appearance now, perhaps also suggesting something of ways in which a location has morphed into what can now be seen, whilst also referencing events that are no longer visible. Vistas may be enigmatic. As John Berger suggests, landscapes may veil the struggles of those who once lived or fought there. At the same time, in cases of relatively recent events, images may re-animate or re-articulate family memories (for instance, for British military personnel formerly stationed in the north of Ireland, or for their relatives and friends). In their extensive research into historic battlefields in Spain, Europe, and ‘Ultramar’ (across the sea), Maria Bleda and José Maria Rosa search out traces of human activity in public locations. (Figure 13.2) Their motivation is akin to visual anthropology; they seek to reveal and draw attention to that which might not otherwise be observed. Their interest in battlefields was kindled initially by ‘La Batalla de Almansa’, 1709, an epic painting based on a battle that had occurred two years previously.4 Unlike history painting, Bleda and Rosa are not concerned with a dynamic depiction of specific events; they are interested in broader historical

FIGURE 13.2 

 aria Bleda & José Maria Rosa, Calatañazor, en torno al año 1000, from M Campos de batalla, España, 1994–96. © Bleda y Rosa.

Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas  161

contexts. They note that wars in the Iberian Peninsula emerged from a challenge to the former hierarchical political order, one that reflected new liberal ideals. In this respect, their ambition relates to Michel Foucault’s enquiry into The Archeology of Knowledge wherein he reflects not on what ‘knowledge’ represents to us, but on the parameters, assumptions and founding principles that constitute, characterize and limit ways of thinking. (Foucault, 1972). Foucault’s intention was to inform historical understanding through analysis of historical thought, or, as we might express it now, the cultural discourses that obtained in a specific place and era. For Bleda y Rosa, landscapes are enigmatic yet have the potential to relate hidden histories, ones that they seek to unearth through photographic investigation and contextual research. Their approach is archeological in terms of investigating the layers of history that adhere to specific locations. It is epic in that each picture results from a journey researched and then made, whether travelling within Spain, Europe, Latin America or elsewhere. Preparation for each photograph involves attention to maps, engagement with local histories, reflection on broader socio-­ political histories, familiarizing themselves with issues that contextualized an event, making travel arrangements, acquiring any necessary permissions to access locations, determining photographic formats, film and equipment, and considering the light and weather conditions that they might encounter.5 Of course, this is common in land-oriented projects, but none the less represents intrepid navigation. Journeys become epic pilgrimages; each image represents a mission to find a location and to reflect on strategy; angle of vision, framing, light and tonal contrast contribute to conveying their interpretation of the mood of places. They adopt a rhetorical strategy that might be defined as academic picture-making, reflecting both the centrality of research in serious contemporary art photography and long-standing traditions in narrative painting. As with any hermeneutic concern with theory, method and interpretation, the pleasures of viewing, of engaging with their enquiry, reside in part in reflecting on the limits of visible revelation; features of the lands may resist explanation, with surface characteristics shaped as a result of events lost from historical documentation or local memory6. There are some indications of current use, for example, in Europe, the site of a territorial battle against an Islamic army of invasion now features a road linking the cities of Tours and Poitiers. Captions give locations, in some cases, evoking the history referenced. For instance, wire fencing that separates fields at Waterloo, Belgium, articulates current agricultural use with reference through the title, ‘Alrededores de Waterloo, 18 de junio de 1815’ to the famous defeat of Napoleon’s army by the British. The presence of farm labour is sometimes suggested, for example, there is a rough farm track and a windmill in the distance at Valmy, site of a civil conflict in September 1792 subsequent to the French Revolution. However, today’s actual agricultural workers are as absent as those who died on the battlefields; we learn little about what is going on now, let alone what went on then. Their first battlefield series was intended not only as an exploration of histories of place but also as a stand-in for philosophical and socio-political tensions that battles, as human struggles for or against power, almost always reflect. Battlefields

162  Place

FIGURE 13.3 

Installation, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, MARCO. Vigo, 2005. © Bleda y Rosa.

are sites of events whose significance wanes overtime, but that nonetheless represent historical turning points of greater or lesser significance. The works are presented as sets of diptychs. Central horizon lines unify two photographs within a single frame, 85 x 150 cm, constituting a panorama that, through the double width and the slight gap within each pair, suggests the openness of the spaces depicted whilst simultaneously drawing attention to the photographic act of selection, framing an image, and then re-framing for exhibition or publication. (Figure 13.3). In testifying to the former significance of locations, Bleda y Rosa’s imagery might be taken as distanced substitutes for physical onsite commemoration. Late photographs act as traces dislocated both in terms of temporality but also phenomenologically since they are encountered in books and galleries, not at actual historical sites of events. The reference is distanced, highly mediated as a means of seeing and telling. What was at stake for earlier photographers – particularly for Roger Fenton given that he was sponsored by the British Royal Family – were ideological currencies such as military leadership and the (masculine) ideal of sacrifice for a greater common good such as ‘the nation’, democracy, freedom. Recently, there has been a resurgence in interest in battles and battlefields, fueled by the centenary anniversary of the First World War in Europe, within which notions of heroism and nationhood have been re-evaluated as questions for address. For example, British photographer, Chloe Dewe Mathews, authored Shot at Dawn, published in 2014 and based on an investigation of First World War sites in Belgium where British army deserters were killed. Her research involved archive investigations and site visits to identify places that had been used for shooting conscript soldiers, often very young. (Figure 13.4) Identifying locations required a forensic approach to military and other sources

Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas  163

FIGURE 13.4 

hloe Dewe Mathews, ‘Private William Smith 06:30/14.11.1917 C Primary school, Reningelst, West-Vlaanderen’, from Shot at Dawn, 2013. © Chloe Dewe Mathews.

of evidence, as well as researching subsequent social histories of usage. In a few instances, sites have been subject to development; it is uncomfortable to reflect on the disjunction between, on the one hand, the everyday use of the playground and classrooms at the primary school, Reningelst, West-Vlaanderen, and, on the other hand, the executions carried out there some 100 years earlier. Tensions emerge from the inter-relation of images that are often banal, and picture captions detailing dates of executions and the names of those shot. Many of the muted colour photographs depict unremarkable edges of fields, now perhaps agricultural areas. Silent landscapes. In visual terms the story-telling strategy is minimal; nothing in the pictures tells us what happened there. It is the series title and image captions that resonate, inviting reflection both on the brutality of executing conscripts for being scared or traumatized, and on the reluctance of land to reveal stories of what occurred. Given the heightened awareness that accompanies the First World War centenary within which the pictures were commissioned and first exhibited, her adoption of a relatively low-key strategy is effective; whereas it might be less so if encountered outside of this context. The imagery points to the disjunction between what we see, and what should be known. It is timely in counteracting official war records within which such execution policies were not foregrounded – although wartime

164  Place

government records indicate that there was some awareness and questioning at the time.7 The series points to humanity’s inhumanity. As is evident from Dewe Mathews’ strategy of listing the names and ages of those executed, inhumanity is perhaps more evident, or has more impact on us, when it is personalized, when victims are identified. But conflicts do not necessarily take the form of overt military battles; rather, agendas may be fought out within communities, for instance, in the late twentieth century era of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. In May 1999 the British parliament agreed ‘The Northern Ireland Location of Victims Remains Act’ giving amnesty to those who could offer information about places where Catholics murdered by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) in the 1970s and early 1980s had been buried south of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. David Farrell documented burial sites on the border between the six counties of the north of Ireland and the Irish Republic. As the project title suggests, in Innocent Landscapes Farrell’s focus was on the concealing of human histories.8 He was interested in the atmosphere of the ‘Sites of the Disappeared’ and in the idea of landscapes disturbed by atrocity. He did not have to research locations; these had been made available via official investigation and the political process. His narratives commence with the roads to sites that had already been publicly identified. (Figure 13.5) The images detail journeys, and ways in which previously undiscovered burial grounds had by then already been marked, for instance, through signs and fencing, or, memorialized by friends and relatives, for example, with stones, flowers, or pictures. Were it not for the specific historical context, the locations and testaments would seem banal; official barriers or personal commemorations that might be noticed in any rural area. The six areas that he documented had revealed the bodies of 8 men and 1 woman. The project was realized as a publication as well as through an exhibition. Each section of the photobook includes a map, broader location shots and memorials sites, all rural and otherwise banal. We view land in ordinary agricultural areas, that must have been disturbed in order to conceal, then disturbed again for excavation. How many people knew, we might wonder? Footprints and tyre tracks as well as stakes or fences now mark once hidden spots. In contrast to the process of piecing together information to identify locations that characterized Chloe Dewe Mathews’ research, these places had already been rendered visible, transformed into informal sites of commemoration. In terms of storytelling, Farrell had visual evidence with which to work. However, by contrast with Dewe Mathews’ investigations, these are recent events. Seeking further information or corroboration, for instance through oral histories relating to the perpetrators, would have been challenging; they occurred within living memory, with political and cultural tensions still in many respects unresolved.9 Dewe Mathews’ use of archive materials lends documentary authority as does Farrell’s use of police sources and his inclusion of cartographic information alongside the visualizing of journeys to the various sites that, in this context, become his – and our – destinations. The project is disturbing not because of drama in the

Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas  165

FIGURE 13.5 

 avid Farrell, Innocent Landscapes, Oristown (Twilight), 1999. © David D Farrell.

images themselves but in provoking reflection on deaths and disappearances, on the likelihood that people unknowingly walked across, worked, or even picnicked in the fields, and on the impossibility of now ever visiting these locations without them offering silent and unnerving testimony to an exceptionally brutal history. As becomes clear through juxtaposing the work of Bleda y Rosa with that of Dewe Mathews or Farrell, questions of historical proximity or distance are salient. Drawing upon historical records available to them, Dewe Mathews and Farrell offer more detailed investigative contextualization wherein people and places are clearly identified. By contrast, Bleda y Rosa operate historically and conceptually from a more distanced perspective; their central interest is in the writing of history, in territoriality and in events that have been accorded significance through subsequent acknowledgement. It is the resonance of sites that once represented historical turning points, rather than the experience of individuals within conflict, that is their focus. The challenge that arises for evaluating visual representation in terms of aims and methodology is one of rendering investigations pertinent given – or despite – degrees of historical distance. For Foucault, this is manifest not through criticism of political reason at a macro level but through the more detailed analysis

166  Place

of processes and the manifestation of power relations in specific fields of experience. (Foucault, 1979). It follows that in critically reflecting on late photography, methodology, and the tracing of traces of events, it is useful to distinguish between ‘battlefields’ as a general concept, and ‘fields of battle’, that is, sites that lend themselves to specific investigations wherein the focus is on the particularity of contexts, circumstances, and events. In pursuit of his project, The Course of History, with its overall focus on fields of battle representing historical turning points, Belgian photographer, Bart Michiels, travelled extensively in Europe, including the Crimea (Ukraine) and Russia, and in the Far East. Large format colour photographs appear slightly muted because of flat grey or overcast skies that lend an ominous note to any reflections on sites of groundforce battles. He intended the series title to be ambiguous, remarking both the outcome of events and the teaching of history. Conceptually, and in terms of research, the project echoes that of Bleda y Rosa. Starting with limited information, each picture involved researching social and political histories to consider the significance of battles and to reflect on the political and military philosophies that contextualize events such as territoriality, heroism, cowardice, and power hierarchies. Journeys to sites were sometimes epic in distance, planning and realization; they were also physical and tactile experiences. In viewing images and reading accompanying essays in photobooks, it is easy to forget that the photographer smelt the place, listened to sounds and felt the intensity of sunlight or damp. Conceptual approaches and emotional responses to actual sites are reflected aesthetically; artists determine different picture-making strategies. As already noted, Bleda y Rosa take a cool academic ‘look’ at sites, working in diptychs that open up a space – metaphorically, a space for questions – in between pairs of images. By contrast, Michiels’ work resonates operatically, primarily through the series title and the conceptual scale of the endeavour, but also through large exhibition prints (152.4cm x 184.8cm) composed around a single viewing position.10 Relatively uniform image-content within each picture suggests that we should stand back rather than examining detail. Michiels offers a scenario, a place, a date – and leaves viewers to consider the awesome implications, including the banality of actual places relative to their historical status. However, arguably the high-quality technical realization and the intention that the pictures should ‘speak for themselves’ risk distracting from reflection on the human import of war. Sometimes the symbolism lacks subtlety, for instance, windfall apples strewn across and rotting on the ground at ‘Paschendaele 1917, Goudberg Copse, 2005’ in Belgium. (Figure 13.6) Captions simply reference place, although the title, The Course of History, implies that these should be taken as historical turning points, as well as suggesting a certain relentlessness of wars as historical phenomena. The final section of the series takes us to Eastern European sites of trauma and destruction associated with the collapse of the Third Reich and is named ‘Götterdämmerung’. The reference to Wagner’s opera infers the melodramatic, even though the visual resonances are subtle relative to the idea of turmoil and destruction suggested by this link. For instance, in ‘Stalingrad 1942, Volga I, 2008’, two distant small red buoys, warnings maybe, are isolated in what appears to be a shallow river or bay, or

Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas  167

FIGURE 13.6 

 art Michiels, ‘Passchendaele, 1917, Goudberg Copse, 2005’, from The B Course of History. © Bart Michiels.

in ‘Salamis 480BC, Cynosaura I, 2006’ crumbling rocks at the edge of an expanse of water perhaps convey a dissolution of information about this battle, one that must have changed lives some two and a half millennia ago for reasons now lost in the mists of time. The series foregrounds battle locations as lyrical landscapes, rather than sites of human trauma. Reflecting on genocide and the Second World War, Israeli-British photographer, Ori Gersht, deploys a lyrical but more explicitly rhetorical visual approach, using light as a primary means of signifying mood. He pictures woodlands and open spaces in Ukraine, sites of holocaust executions. The double meaning of the overall project title, The Clearing, is overt. The series includes a set of photographs, a video, and a publication. In the pictures, misty skies and snow-covered fields metonymically suggest that something has been veiled over, an implication further emphasized through the sequencing of images wherein sites become increasingly indiscernible as snowy gloom intensifies or light turns to dusk. In his artist statement, he reminds us that blood literally stains the land through being incorporated into the soil then absorbed into the trees and vegetation that now thrive there.11 The visual rhetoric is dramatic, but some image titles are restrained: given the context; ‘Fallen Rocks’, ‘Still Standing’ or ‘Melt Down’ are obviously metaphoric, but others such as ‘Red River’ or ‘New Horizon’ or ‘Galicia’ merely suggest location.

168  Place

FIGURE 13.7 

 ri Gersht, stills from The Clearing: The Forest, 2005. Video, 14:40 minutes O (filmed on 16 mm.) © Ori Gersht (Original in colour).

The Forest depicts trees being felled, one by one. (Figure 13.7) As the following statement makes clear, we hear the scrunching of leaves as they slowly crash to the ground, the tree felled at this site.12 As the camera glides through the dense, sun-dappled forest, a tree falls heavily, and inexplicably, to the ground; and others soon follow, continuing out of shot, or heard but not seen. Afterwards, the silence of the place returns and, amongst so much that is still standing, we cannot be sure what we have just been witness to. Entranced by the hypnotic beauty of the projected image, then shocked by the ear-splitting sound of trees crashing to the ground, our immediate perception of the place is challenged, forcing us to imagine what might have happened here before.13 The film was made in forests around Kosov, a site of a genocide (that included members of the artist’s family). The film is emotionally moving and memorable; as a full-wall installation in a dark gallery space the experience is immersive.14 Given the double meaning of the overall exhibition and publication title, it becomes impossible to view the forest as anything other than tainted by history; the imagery stands in for mass murder, conveyed primarily through visual poetics. The drama emerges not only in the slowness of the process of falling but also in the uncannily hypnotic effect of the silence that follows the crashing of the tree and precedes a return of forest sounds.

Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas  169

The Forest has been related to the sublime, a response that provokes consideration of aesthetics and photographic strategies as a means of engaging audiences if the intention is to provoke reflection on issues. The sublime is often discussed in terms of fear or a sense of threat that is mitigated and transformed into a form of aesthetic pleasure through the distancing effect of, for instance, engaging with paintings representing circumstances rather than with actual life-threatening events. Fear may be kindled, but we don’t have to do anything about that which the narrative suggests. So, if Gersht’s work, or Michiel’s, provoke reference to the sublime, does this indicate a distancing from the complexity of emotions and questions that should result from engaging with their work? Yet, if the gallery is a form of theatre within which resonance is articulated through installation and images perform informationally and affectively, the key issue is whether the research and historical understanding that informs such conceptually extensive investigations operates to mitigate against the emotional safety-net of the sublime. As noted in the introduction to this paper, Irish documentary photographer, Anthony Haughey, has worked extensively in Kosovo and Bosnia, as well as in Ireland. Haughey recently returned to Srebrenica, Bosnia, with a view to tracing people whom he had met and places that he had visited when first there nearly 20 years previously. The intention was to explore legacies of the conflict, and to reflect on processes of realignment and reconciliation that characterize the aftermath. Rather than work with single images and photographic series, he created what he terms an ‘experimental documentary’ video, UNresolved, 2015.15 Using moving image, with sound and extracts from interviews, allows him to tackle the challenge of conveying the complexity of circumstances within which there are many histories, many affiliations, and many sides to every story. The video includes eyewitness reports of massacres, and draws on Human Rights Watch archives as well as oral history, memories recounted to him on his research visits to the area, and the accounts of UN employees, Serb military officers and Dutch soldiers serving in Srebenica. In these respects, by contrast with, for instance, David Farrell’s work on the internal Irish border, Haughey was able to access a range of memories and perspectives. Through moving image and audio, he could explore the complexities of this highly contested history, juxtaposing images and varying witness accounts in ways that the single image, or a photographic series, could not achieve. The voices of those whose friends and families did not survive, juxtaposed with archive footage, are memorable. The time-based narrative of video, whether minimal yet allegorical, as in Gerscht’s The Forest, or complex in conveying contradictory histories, generates emotional response along with critical reflections. In other words, although their approaches differ, as photographers both Haughey and Gerscht effectively deploy the – literally and emotionally ‘moving’ – effects and affects of narrativity. Photography is an inherently visual medium; photographers centrally explore and respond to the visible. The challenge for photographers interested in investigating and drawing attention to invisible histories is one of unearthing evidence and indicating that which cannot be seen; of piercing the silence of the land. In the case of fields of battle and sites of execution, there is the additional issue of exploring

170  Place

strategies for conveying complex socio-economic events and consequences, from the failures of political negotiation that result in military engagement to processes of memorialization and reconciliation. If landscape veils histories, then the possibility of fuller historical reference relies on the effects and expressivity of aesthetic style as well as on titles, captions, and artist statements, and on photographers’ confidence in the curiosity of audiences willing to engage with imagery as touchstones provoking reflection. War is endemic to history, as are hidden histories and forgotten narratives. Stories are often invisible, which for photographers represents a challenge in terms of aesthetic strategies since they can only record what is manifest visually. This is not merely a question of what is pictured, but also how it is pictured, what can be revealed, and of the inter-relation of visual and other materials. History might not be of our own making, but photographic research can foster ways of seeing that invite us to reflect upon the implications of what once occurred. Landscape enigmas speak not only in terms of the past. Liz Wells, 2019. Originally published in photographies 12.2, Summer 2019.

Notes 1 The anniversary has attracted attention from many artist-photographers and curators in the UK and elsewhere. UK exhibitions included Conflict, Time, Photography at Tate Modern, 2014/15 or No-Man’s Land, Impressions Gallery, Bradford and on tour, 2017/19. UK-based artist projects include Susan Trangmar’s film, UNFOUND, 2016, that resulted from a commission by the French photographic artist agency Diaphane to make work in response to the Battle of the Somme, summer 1916 (see photographies 12.1, 2019) or, indeed, Shot at Dawn, by Chloe Dewe Mathews, discussed here, that was commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and was included in both No Man’s Land and the Tate Modern exhibition. 2 Haughey, Disputed Territory. Unionists, that is, Protestant militia, supported the north of Ireland remaining as part of the United Kingdom. 3 See, for example Tuan, Space and Place; Massey, For Space. Neither specifically discuss the contribution of photography, but the conceptual notion of places being ‘storied’ offers a useful starting point for reflecting on the contribution of visual media. 4 ‘La Batalla de Almansa’, 1709. Oil on canvas, 161 x 390 cm, painted by Buonaventure LIgli with the cartoonist Filippo Palotta. Prado Museum Collection, Madrid. In recounting a scenario, it is in the tradition of academic painting; it is also graphic in including very literal detail of men and horses engaged in fighting. Its original purpose was to tell a story, but viewed in the context of 21st century militarism, it invites us to reflect on the energy and manpower invested, on the slaughter of war, and, perhaps, to question notions of heroism implicated in fighting for principles, territory, or nationhood. 5 My grateful thanks to the artists for detailed discussion of their preoccupations and work methods during a studio visit, Valencia, September 2016. 6 For instance, family stories, folk songs, or myth. 7 Helen McCartney (2014) ‘Military Executions and Psychiatric Breakdown in the First World War’ in Dewe Mathews, Shot at Dawn, np. 8 Farrell, Innocent Landscapes,. The history had been a savage one of Catholic militia punishing individual members of the catholic community.

Hidden Histories and Landscape Enigmas  171

9 Legacies of tensions in Ireland have been foregrounded once again in 2018 as the border between the north and the Republic of Ireland has provoked tensions within negotiations over the UK’s proposed exit from the European Union. Farrell’s publication, along with that of Anthony Haughey, offers a timely reminder of the consequences of tensions in the region. 10 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993, defines ‘operatic’ as ‘extravagantly theatrical’ or ‘histrionic’, that is, melodramatic and intended to attract attention. 11 Artist statement, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2005. 12 Video, 14:40 minutes (filmed on 16mm). For a 1min 24 sec extract see, http://www.fvu. co.uk/projects/the-forest. 13 Statement, Film and Video Umbrella, UK, 2005. 14 For example, as installed at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, 2005. 15 UNresolved, Dir: Anthony Haughey, 2015; experimental documentary, hdv col., BosniaHerzegovina, 17.22mins. Extract, 3 mins, 10 secs, s. The film marks the 20th anniversary of genocide in Srebrenica; in 1995 more than 8000 men and boys were systematically murdered by the Bosnian Serb army. The title (ironically) references UN Security Resolution 819, passed on the 16th of April 1993, that declared Srebrenica as a ‘safe’ area for refugees. Information courtesy of Anthony Haughey.

References Berger, John & Mohr, Jean (1976) A Fortunate Man, London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. First pub., London: Allen Lane, 1967. Bleda y Rosa (2017) Campos de batalla. Valencia: Bombas Gens Centre d’Art. Campany, David (2006) ‘Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Problems of “Late Photography”’, in Green, David Ed. (2006) Where is the Photograph? pp. 123–132. Dewe Mathews, Chloe (2014) Shot at Dawn. Madrid: Ivory Press. Farrell, David (2001) Innocent Landscapes. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel (1979) ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason’, in Lawrence D. Kritzman ed. (1988) Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 58–85. Gersht, Ori (2005) The Clearing. London: Film and Video Umbrella. Haughey, Anthony (2006) Disputed Territory. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology. Massey, Doreen (2005) For Space. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage. Michiels, Bart (2013) The Course of History. Bologna: Damiani. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977/2001) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

14 HISTORIES AND IMAGINATION Narrative and Metaphor in the Work of John Kippin

FIGURE 14.1 

John Kippin, ‘Nostalgia for the Future’, 1988. © John Kippin.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-18

Histories and Imagination  173

The process of art acts as more like water eroding a stone rather than something that is hugely incisive or active. But, if we’re involved in it, it culturally positions us in a place where there is some possibility to think about values. And if art doesn’t become an embodiment of values, then it really doesn’t have much purpose. John Kippin, Futureland Now, 2012 The series Histories of the Imagination, an installation at Scarborough Castle, Yorkshire, accompanied by a publication, is an apt starting point for reflecting on the significance of John Kippin’s contribution to British photography over the past three decades. It alerts us to several starting points for his photographic explorations: that histories relating to places are fluid, that social circumstances are transient, and that images inevitably work by triggering memories or imagined associations. As an artist-photographer he interrogates changing social circumstances, often taking England and Englishness as a primary focus. Kippin questions what political scenarios and their legacies mean in concrete social terms. He often pictures cultural shifts in a somewhat wry manner, whilst also exploring the potential and limitations of art as a means of investigating them. As he argues above, art is a means of exploring our shared social circumstances and, through triggering sensitivities, draws attention to that which needs reflection. To date, Kippin’s work has been situated in terms of critical landscape practices and has been especially strongly associated with a strategy of subverting of the Romantic pictorial tradition. Even so, his work has always retained the potential for visual metaphor. When he first came to public attention, his work was situated within what became known as ‘new British colour documentary’ in the 1980s. His various series demonstrate complex engagements with the evidential power of photos, and their ability to reference histories both directly and elliptically. Throughout his career, he has explored different ways in which details complicate how we can reflect on what might have once occurred ‘here’. Whilst Kippin’s images have a powerful authority as single artworks, in part because of their seductive print qualities, and he has exhibited in major galleries internationally, arguably his greatest contribution to the field has been from publications. The print medium has enabled him to offer unexpected insights into the particularities of places and their circumstances that he has explored independently, or as a result of commissions or residencies. Kippin was brought up in London and moved to North-East England in 1978 working in the independent visual arts sector before taking up a lectureship at Northumbria University. We might say that this move shaped his work decisively not because of the subjects it offered, but because the new environment was intriguing in its relative strangeness, historically and geographically. It prompted him to set about investigating what was termed by fellow photographers Chris Killip and Graham Smith ‘another country’. The North-East has specific rural and industrial histories that are, or were, largely unfamiliar to those from the South. He subsequently worked at Cumbria College of Art and at Sunderland University.

174  Place

At Sunderland he fostered a number of national and international initiatives that have built an entire community of practitioners and thinkers; they continue to sustain internationalist perspectives about photography from that region. Kippin’s interests and approaches reflect the critical political context of the 1970s, when he studied art, and the fact that his move to the North-East coincided with the rise of Thatcherism in Britain. From a thirty-year distance, it is difficult to recognize how far the 1980s were characterized by mass social discontent, and how different the government was to any of its predecessors. Put simply, the circumstances were violently different to any Britain had recently experienced. Margaret Thatcher’s years of office from 1979 to 1990 encompassed civil strife in Northern Ireland; an increasingly articulate women’s movement keen to build on political gains of the 1970s; and a war (in the Falklands) that fostered a bizarre kind of jingoistic nationalism, and which happily distracted from economic strife domestically. Above all, there was a wholehearted determination to weaken what Thatcher labelled ‘the enemy within’: those institutions that were viewed as creating a powerful opposition to a more mercantile society, such as occupational trade unions. Class interests were at stake. The result was outright conflict in places like the mining communities of south Wales and parts of the north from Yorkshire to Tyneside. For liberal and socialist groups, the repeated clashes between workers and the police, who were seen as representing the government’s authority, became emblems of an open class struggle. This period, in which Kippin began to develop his mature practice, was an era in which artists undertook strategies of social engagement that had unprecedented complexity. Several groups of artists looked to what began becoming known as ‘post-modern’ forms of institutional critique originating in North America and associated in particular with October magazine. Such approaches were hostile to what was viewed by some as the ‘highbrow’ isolationism of modern art with its emphasis on the white walled gallery as a site of aestheticized autonomy, and with its pre-occupation with form, a given range of materials, and purely formal ‘experimentation’ within tightly defined limits. The modernist emphasis on the individual artist’s role as a unique creator was seen as antithetical to socio-political engagements. The novel development was that artists began to interrogate the social and political values implicit within modernist art, which had previously been merely intuitively correlated by many with broadly ‘progressive’ ones. With hindsight, the art of those years can indeed be seen as a bridge towards a fundamentally different, renewed, more culturally diverse, internationalism. At the same time, in the UK and elsewhere, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an emergence of an entire community arts movement that promoted the empowerment of groups by providing them with a public voice and opportunities for self-expression. It needs pointing out that this was fundamentally different to the tradition of amateur art that preceded it, being explicitly politicized. The stress was on the potential for self-awareness and forms of social development through creative activities and actions. A wholehearted commitment to social change acted as a motivator for many community-based artists and arts initiatives, along with the sense that many

Histories and Imagination  175

long-established communities had been disrupted by both post-war ‘redevelopments’ and under-employment. Although Kippin had studied fine art at Brighton Polytechnic and later to doctoral level at Northumbria University, he became ensconced in the photography world, along with that around the then entirely new medium of video. Alongside working in academia, he pursued independent arts initiatives, and involvement in these have continued throughout his career. He was not alone as an artist in the North-East in being politically active and in building self-organized initiatives in the 1980s, and the cohort of artists he worked alongside have continued to support each other. Neither was he alone in having relocated to the north. Members of Amber Film and Photography Collective, initially based in London, moved to Newcastle in 1969 with the aim of documenting life in the region. They founded a new space for photography, Side Gallery, in 1977, that was one of the first of its kind in the UK. It provided a focal point for photographers and filmmakers specifically concerned with documentary. They, like he, were interested in the regional histories particular to the North-East, both to explore the past, and to expose the circumstances facing entire communities. The changes could not have been more dramatic, or more rapid, for certain places. Those areas reliant on mining for generations saw the closure of pits and no obvious alternative forms of employment; multi-generational unemployment was one direct result. Another was that every local facility or business was affected. Amidst this, some individuals conserved historical documents of place and community, including photographs testifying to changes. One prominent example was the preservation of an archive of photographs from Consett, a mining town in County Durham. Photography gave recognition and a public voice to whole groups of people who increasingly looked to have none. Kippin’s response to such economic shifts was first manifest in the two over-­ lapping series that became Futureland, which was a collaboration with artist, Chris Wainwright, first exhibited at The Laing Gallery, Newcastle, in 1989, and Nostalgia for the Future shown at The Photographers Gallery, London, in 1995. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired prints from the second show for its permanent collection, and for some it is this work for which Kippin remains best known. These series are sometimes located in terms of the idea of an ‘industrial sublime’. This intentionally references eighteenth-century debates that form the origins of aesthetics as a separate domain of knowledge, and which gave rise to ‘art’ in its modern sense. These debates pivoted around attempts to define notions of ‘sublimity’, ‘beauty’ and ‘the picturesque’ in painting and in nature by questioning what pleasures they offered. As John Taylor has also noted, landscape is often associated with the ‘picturesque’: that which delights because it appeals to ‘good taste’, and which makes manifest an entire set of cultural conventions. The vogues for landscape architecture and landscape gardening were means of constructing ‘pleasing’ and ‘picturesque’ places and viewpoints from which they could be observed. In painting and photography these practices have their echo: a landscape artist necessarily must choose to locate themselves, or their camera, in relation to a space

176  Place

to document or re-present it. By contrast, the ‘sublime’ refers to that which is astonishing, awesome, beyond human control or, even, comprehension; the sublime must be sublimated precisely because it cannot be directly confronted. Acts of representation enable such processes of sublimation so that, through painting or photography, objects that are frightening or induce anxiety can be held safely at ‘arms’ length. Turner’s pictures of ships on turbulent seas enable us to imagine danger without being endangered. Associated with this, of course, is the fact that we do not have to do anything about it. So, in terms of the notion of an ‘industrial sublime’, the objects of our reflection might include factory buildings dominating rural spaces; power lines and pylons bisecting fields; rail and road infrastructures drawing lines between settlements. Such developments may have been viewed as beautiful in the sense of being testaments to economic prosperity or monuments of national success; in a post-industrial world they transform into relics from another era, evoking a set of histories about how we are ordered. In Kippin’s post-industrial images from the North-East of England what we encounter is akin to a ‘monstrous beauty’. We are introduced to pictorially striking, indeed aesthetically pleasing, images that are paradoxically unsettling. They remind us of what has been lost as much as what is visible: the loss of an era that, whatever workers’ labouring conditions, created a buoyant economy. John Taylor characterizes Kippin’s work in terms of ‘inversions (or willful distortions) of the idea of “Beautiful England”.’ (Taylor, 2018) Taylor also makes the prescient observation that Thatcherism inspired a return to ‘Victorian values’ and that this may partially account for Kippin’s interest in finding new, subtle ways of subverting the rural idylls represented in nineteenth century landscape painting. Arguably, this subversion operates primarily through content, that is to say, through what he chooses to include within the image – rather than through pictorial composition. Kippin often sets up an enticing tension between what we see, and the apparent harmony of a scenario suggested through aesthetic form. As Kippin states in the catalogue for Futureland, ‘These images {are} journey{s} through a landscape of change; a landscape of ownership and exploitation, pregnant with signs and metaphors’. (Kippin and Wainwright, 1989: n.p.) Indeed, Kippin’s grasp of the subtleties of processes of signification is the single most important characteristic of his work. For instance, in ‘Nature Reserve’ (1988), made at Cowpen Marsh in Teeside, we see cows, fenced in behind wire, grazing on soggy pastureland. They are foregrounded against a skyline of pylons and industrial chimneys, some of which are emitting clouds of smoke into the already overcast sky. The colour spectrum ranges primarily across greens and greys. Nothing bright or vividly coloured distracts the eye; rather we are invited to reflect on the overall scenario as if it were a harmonious whole. We are reminded that eighteenth-century landscapes were given order and meaning through artists’ exertions to make their palettes harmonious; and that this pictorial harmony was a metaphor for the unity and harmony of the rural order, with all of humanity and nature united under the eyes of God. Here, there is also a metonymic link between industrial edifices and the fact that the fence is metallic, rather than wooden as would be more common, suggesting the extreme artificiality

Histories and Imagination  177

of this ‘nature reserve’, and its partition by different owners. The question of whose herd of animals this is and why they can graze here is not answered. Rather, we are left with an intentionally generalized juxtaposition of animals and man-made constructions that are able to speak about bigger issues of ‘nature’ and ‘economy’. The image title is screen-printed centrally towards the base of the picture in upper case lettering. The compositional harmony is not disturbed, but the text draws attention to the paradoxically bleak setting, and the sparse grazing grounds of this ‘reserved’ nature. In another work from 1989, the text ‘SIMVLACRVM’ is equally direct, or seems to be so, inserted below a group of large model dinosaurs oddly situated in the foreground of a power plant where two furnace chimneys billow smoke off. At that time, this juxtaposition might have suggested that the coal industry risked becoming a dinosaur. The business of excavating relics, namely fossil fuels tens and hundreds of millions of years old, was itself becoming a ‘relic’ of an industrial age. Today, a more complex interpretative chain is possible. The link between dinosaurs and extinction, and the emissions of carbon from fossil fuels to our own extinction seems clear, with the irony that unlike dinosaurs, we are able to ensure our own annihilation on a planetary scale. Kippin is an artist whose method is to pursue a set of questions about place, and its ‘place’ in the wider society, through a whole range of various cultural manifestations. The flip side of the industrial decline that he had been exploring seemed, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, to be a heightened consumerism, or even rituals of the worship of commodities. He increasingly turned his camera on retail areas such as shopping malls, which were in their infancy in the UK. He also investigated ways in which those objects or places that get called ‘heritage’ can become transformed into a kind of mass leisure pursuit. Alongside these new directions, he also experimented in new approaches to image-making, sometimes refraining from inserting text in or alongside pictures. It is precisely the traditional pictorial qualities of his images that underpin their ability to resonate. Kippin’s engagement with landscape aesthetics, in terms of his use of colour range, focus, and horizon, is markedly muted when compared to the work of artists such as Martin Parr or Anna Fox, or indeed many others associated with British colour documentary from the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps this echoes longstanding traditions of subtlety within both English landscape painting and in landscape photography. The latter was a largely monochrome tradition even in the 1970s at the beginning of Kippin’s career, and the qualities that tradition valorized were careful attention to form and to the creation of a full range of grey mid-tones. His historical questioning of economic relations also underpins projects in which he investigates traces and legacies of military engagement. In 2003 he was invited to contribute within a set of artists’ commissions to explore the Essex Coast, pursuing a site-specific project at Jaywick Martello Tower, realizing an installation there in 2005. Named after the Martella Fortress in Malta, these were small round watch towers with thick walls for advance warning and defence in the case of invasion, in this instance, a standing remnant dating from the Napoleonic Wars.

178  Place

Typically, in terms of Kippin’s method and systematic approach to the challenge of a new enquiry, he sought out historical records, visual and written, and incorporated these within the on-site installation in the tower itself, now transformed into an arts venue. Similarly, again through a residency, he consulted documents as well as photographing extensively at Greenham Common for his investigation, Cold War Pastoral (2001), into legacies of the presence of American ‘first strike’ cruise missiles on land that was previously, and has now been returned to, ‘common land’, that is, a place of public recreational access. Given that this history was relatively recent, he was able to talk with activists from the Women’s Peace Camp pitched near the security fencing encircling the American base that endured nineteen years (1981–2000) becoming home for shifting numbers of activists and offering a springboard for attempts to break into the base – a tactic for generating news coverage in an era before mobile phones and twitter accounts. The camp became a focus for debates on unilateral versus multilateral disarmament (which continues to resonate in the Labour Party in Britain). Kippin was also able to discuss the role of the camp with the local government workers who were responsible for restoring the environment of the Common when the military forces had moved out. Of course, it did not become a ‘common’ at all, as his results testified, but part of it became commercial space, equally indicative of the times. The publication of Cold War Pastoral includes essays voicing the perspectives of those activists at the peace camp alongside those of an environment officer. This is typical of Kippin’s investigative approach. Appropriately enough, the exhibition opened at the Imperial War Museum, London. It needs restating that Cold War Pastoral was like East, focused less on the debates about disarmament, than on ways in which military has a presence in the world that goes unseen, and how that presence remains marked in the landscape. This included ways in which flora took its revenge on the site after the military departed; how security sightlines and wide tarmac driveways marked the site, the routes through it, and its parameters. There are obvious legacies of life on the base, from decaying abandoned buildings through to a solitary rubber tyre swinging from a rope in the trees, to a floodlight high on a pole, watching above woodlands. There are also intriguing observations of inexplicable objects: a metal casing almost buried amongst a pile of building materials, or a bunch of flowers on a fence post (that no doubt marks some event still remembered in 2000 but forgotten now). As such, the publication offered testimony to events that are now receding from memory to become part of competing historical narratives about Greenham and the Cold War. The third project within what, with hindsight, appears as a trilogy of investigations into sites relating to military histories, is Compton Verney (2004), once again based on an artist residency, this time at Compton Verney, an eighteenth century house in Warwickshire, now known as a historical estate with galleries, but last lived in when requisitioned during the Second World War for military residence, with the grounds apparently used for experiments in smoke-screen as a means of camouflage. Greenham Common and the Martello tower front-lining the east coast of England were locations for military personnel and equipment. By contrast, the

Histories and Imagination  179

Warwickshire estate was a place of negotiations conducted with representatives of various German factions in the run up to war. As such, it is not the military legacy that is symbolized; rather it is the complicity of trans-national interests characterising in failing to respond to the human rights issues implicated in German National Socialism (the Nazi Party). Stylistically, at first sight appeasement seems somewhat glossed over, with the clearest hints lying in the picture of a graffiti of a swastika on an exterior wall, and the evocative image of birds in flight soaring over the site silhouetted against storm-laden clouds. The architecture at Compton Verney is striking, both the interiors of the large reception rooms and the location of the house within the estate with its woodlands and lake. The challenge for the artist was to suggest something hovering from the past whilst acknowledging the pictorial affects of the location, now a place of leisure transformed into a regional art gallery. As in his project on Scarborough Castle, the images accumulate to suggest a deeper history. Ornate plasterwork, a reference to renaissance landscapes, an imposing gateway, the curves of a bridge over the lake, a small bronze statue, a chapel wall plaque, a pair of tombstones, all offer detail. Several other works are rendered uncanny, whether through the mistiness of natural daylight, or through a sense of something unseen occurring indoors as interior light cuts into the exterior darkness at dusk. The series offers an uneasy portrait of a place and its histories, as though emerging through a smokescreen. Across the body of work, little is made explicit. Kippin’s work is characterized by a formal precision that is aesthetically pleasing but that at the same time usually belies the complex histories involved. Take two projects, Nostalgia for the Future and Compton Verney, that at first encounter seem remote from one another, geographically and thematically. Each series is concerned with English history, and with ways in which histories are obscured, reclaimed, and represented now. If we compare the title image from Nostalgia for the Future with, for example, one of the empty rooms from the Compton Verney, at first glance the artist’s concerns and ideas appear very different. But in both instances, photographic precision invites us to look closely, and harmonious composition delineates a clear space within which we pay attention to what the photographer sees. The techniques are similar: each photograph is configured around a central point. In the first picture (Figure 14.1) we have a juxtaposition of objects (a disused cargo boat and caravan) shot from an angle that places both in the middle of the composition. Text acts as a third element in this paradoxical juxtaposition. The rusting cargo boat references industrial heritage and transportation as a means of economic exchange whereas, if we assume that the people who we associate with the caravan are weekenders or holidaymakers their presence references leisure. And by extension, it draws our attention to the macro-economic shifts in the North of England from heavy industries to service sectors and retail. (And this implies a shift from largely male dominated workplaces to a more mixed set of opportunities in terms of gender.) The use of capital letters for the written text emphasizes irony and the presence of the family gives us a point of human identification. Of course, we might not ‘get’ all of this from the single image, although the irony is not difficult to discern, but in the context of the overall series with its concern with how histories are represented in terms

180  Place

FIGURE 14.2 

John Kippin, ‘Beauty’, from Compton Verney, 2003–2004. © John Kippin.

of heritage, and the companion set of images of shopping malls in Newcastle and Gateshead, it lends itself to such an interpretation. The second image (Figure 14.2) is less busy in terms of obvious human reference, although those with historical knowledge of architecture and interior design may read the image in terms of faded grandeur. The larger principal doorways and the side doors indicate a public social space with private side rooms, and the plasterwork patterns on the walls suggest that tapestries or other wall hangings were once hung there within a stucco framing. The lack of furnishing and paintings lends an abandoned aura that is curiously unnerving. What happened here? What might this place have once been? Of course, in the context of the overall series, the chapel, tombstones, lake, and well-established avenues of trees on the estate suggest a stately home. However, its specific historical significance as the site of a 1930s pre-Second World War appeasement meeting is not as overtly referenced as the industrial shift that is central to the concerns of Nostalgia for the Future. Arguably this indicates a shift in strategy as the generally more direct statements of his earlier work give way to a more elliptical method of drawing us in to question what we see and what might be implied. This is not to suggest a reduction in concern with the poetics of the written word. The import of picture titles is carefully considered. For instance, in Futureland Now, 2012, a striking image of an isolated disused edifice in a muddy wet openmine landscape was initially indexed prosaically as ‘Coal Tower’, but later re-titled

Histories and Imagination  181

‘Monument’, thereby acknowledging the now disused mine and its workers whilst, given the status of public monuments, conjuring up a sense of significance that might not otherwise be attributed to an industrial remnant (Figure 9.1). A triptych in the same series tells a story about our post-industrial world by juxtaposing a monochrome close-up of denuded earth with a pair of tower blocks and a pair of factories with a horse and foal in the foreground. It develops a complex set of references to culture and to nature. Here he enhances the resonance with the phrase ‘The Secret Intelligence of the Silent’ inscribed within the frame below the three images. The overall title, ‘Regeneration’, adds a further dimension, suggesting not only that histories become forgotten, silenced, but that through the re-orientation of places, they may be actively obscured. Kippin is known as a photographer concerned with histories of place, politics, and culture, and for experimenting in photo-aesthetics. In Local: government, people, photography (Kippin and Kippin, 2009) he investigates ‘behind the scenes’ at Cumbria County Council, a government organization responsible for a largely rural region that includes the Lake District. The Lake District is, of course, one of the more renowned English pastoral environments. The County Council also administers a considerable stretch of the coastal land and related inland waterways, farmlands, and several areas historically dependent on mining or quarrying. Local offers a portrait of an office environment within a broader portrayal of the region, one intended to indicate the complexity of economic and cultural circumstances with which regional government is involved. Kippin was interested in investigating the invisible work of both county council employees and elected representatives, in a place marked by relative lack of interest on the part of the general public in regional decision-making processes. In the preface to Local he states that, whilst he does not think people should be required to vote, he finds it ‘difficult to accept that those who do not take part in the political process (that has been hard won by others on their behalf) see fit to offer their opinions and criticize others without participating themselves’. (Kippin and Kippin, 2009: n.p.) This suggests the respect for local democracy and for the everyday responsibilities of regional government. The impression the series gives is of a complex yet mundane array of tasks, made manifest particularly through the sequencing of images. Unusually in his work, people are foregrounded: there are several portraits of council employees. They are often engrossed in something on a computer screen. They sit staring at desktop computers that now look extraordinarily large and out of date – though may have been old even then. There is a sense of amusement in his documenting of, for instance, the cleaner’s note below the staff suggestion box asking people to wrap chewing gum before binning it. And in the printed note that rests on top of a computer wall socket proclaiming ‘Sarcasm: just one more service we offer’. Looking through the book, we repeatedly return to a group of elected counsellors and regional government executives seated in meetings behind piles of documents and notebooks. Jugs and glasses flanking them suggest that they might be there for the long haul. The meetings symbolize the actual workings of regional democracy and, within the photobook, anchor the otherwise more fluid

182  Place

visual account of people at work in a banal setting. Individual artefacts attract our attention: sachets to be used for a drinks machine, a bowl of wrapped sweets, a staff suggestion box. But the series is not simply about the workplace, it is also about the compass and responsibilities of regional government. The imagery therefore includes pictures of houses and related rural features that are more typical of Kippin’s work. For instance, a river flows over a waterfall, a car and a boat are parked opposite one another near the coast, and the coastal rail line with a two-carriage train convey something of the broader environment of the region, as does a horse, a farm, and moorlands. A field of electricity generating windmills asks us to think about sustainable ways of generating power in a region also known for nuclear power processing and decommissioning at Calder Hall and Windscale, the coastal station sites near Whitehaven. Waves crashing against the shoreline might be taken as a reference to climate change. A derelict navy helicopter, and cargo ships in port silhouetted against the lingering pinks and clear grey-blue of the sky at dusk reflected in calm waters provide other aspects of the portrait of this region. Kippin’s eye for the ironic is manifest; for instance, the exterior of a butcher’s shop proclaims that they sell local meat, whereas a few pages later we encounter a street shot of people outside a branch of McDonald’s, a global brand serving food farmed thousands of miles away. Kippin often develops projects, with others, enjoying the dialogue involved and the value of teasing out ideas and thinking through issues. Futureland and Futureland Now were both collaborations with Chris Wainwright, benefitting from a longstanding working relationship and friendship dating from early days in Newcastle (although Wainwright later relocated to London). Local involved his son, Henry Kippin (director of ‘Collaborate’, a political think tank, and a fellow of the Business School, Newcastle University). The series He, a reflection on sons and fathers, which concerns memories of childhood and the influence of his father, is co-­ authored with David Chandler (Professor of Photography at Plymouth University, former senior curator at The Photographer’s Gallery and founding Director of PhotoWorks, Brighton). Kippin’s images of places as remembered from his childhood intersect with Chandler’s unsettling journal-style notes on his family experiences. His written account is more explicit, and more disturbing in terms of the explicit authoritarianism that marked his formative years. Kippin’s photographs evoke the 1950s powerfully. Despite being made decades later, they effectively conjure up the post-war atmosphere and circumstances that prescribed and constrained their respective childhood experiences. In his foreword, Kippin remarks that it was after his father’s death in 2002 that he started making pictures responding to his recollections of shared events. The body of work exists somewhere between memory and actually revisiting places, four decades on. Of all his publications it is the one that most conjures up the ‘Englishness’ that then characterized the south-east: going for a drive, visits to parks, objects such as a paisley dressing gown hanging on the back of a door or a collection of model elephants, the largest with a soldier astride, curiously reminiscent of the dissolution of the British Empire. Of course,

Histories and Imagination  183

the car in the forecourt of the terraced house where, we assume, Kippin lived at some point, is a recent model, and the street sign offering a choice between turning left for Croydon Town Centre and right for Central London is more contemporary, but the bay windowed house, and the net curtains firmly excluding any view of what occurs inside, are all but unchanged. An unfortunate elderly woman in boots, drinking straight from a bottle as she walks past the camera, could be from another era. How Kippin caught that moment and why he chose to include it is, of course, an entirely different question. Many of the images invoke a landscape pastoral that suggests positive childhood memories of visits and play spaces. Significantly, given Kippin’s more established interests, an aging wooden boat, an airplane, a pagoda, are among items that prefigure much of his later work except that, conversely, given that He is a retrospective construction, maybe his significant childhood ‘memories’ implicate a strong element of projection of the more recent into the past. For instance, images of birds soaring above trees, and of a woman walking a dog viewed through a wire fence have echoes of Compton Verney and Cold War Pastoral respectively. In this respect the complexity and fluidity of memory is evident; we forge links for ourselves that allow us to make sense of personal histories in terms of who we have become. The family album is selective in what we choose to photograph, and which photographs are included; family memory constructed in hindsight is almost certainly even more skewed. The publication is hardbound like a private journal, with elastic holding it closed, although, in terms of post-war England in the suburban shadow of London, the images and references resonate more broadly, perhaps reminding us, as Kippin so often does, that although we experience life individually, we do so in the more collective ideological context of place and era. For Kippin art lacks purpose if it does not question social values. Photography offers a means of exposure, expression, and critical engagement, at its most effective when deployed with persistence and subtlety. In reviewing his work in England over the last 30 years, what is perhaps most striking is his sophisticated deployment of visual language to take account of the specificity of subject-matter for each investigation, and, to acknowledge audiences’ increased sophistication in terms of visual communications. Taken as a whole, his many projects and publications testify to the significance of John Kippin’s contribution to critically questioning histories of people and place through imagery that resonates with memory and imagination. Liz Wells, 2018 Originally published in John Kippin, Based on a True Story, New York: Kerber, 2018. Note: I first met John Kippin in 1985 when I was editor of Camerawork, London. I reviewed Futureland for the British Journal of Photography in 1989 and have referenced his work frequently in various lectures and publications. I was delighted to contribute an essay for Cold War Pastoral (2001) and to collaborate as curator with Kippin and Wainwright on the exhibition and publication, Futureland Now, 2012. (See Chapter 9) I was also very pleased to be invited to contribute this essay to his extensive retrospective publication, Based on a True Story, 2018.

184  Place

References Killip, Chris & Smith, Graham, (1985) Another Country: Photographs of the North East of England. Venues: London: Serpentine Gallery, Aug/Sept; Bristol: Arnolfini, Oct/Nov. Kippin, John & Kippin, Henry, (2009) Local: government, people, photography. Sunderland: Art Editions North. Kippin, John & Wainwright, Chris, (1989) Futureland. Newcastle: Laing Art Gallery. Kippin, John & Wainwright, Chris, (2012) Futureland Now. Newcastle: Laing Art Gallery (exhibition)/University of Plymouth Press (publication). Rogers, Brett ed. (1994), Documentary Dilemmas: Aspects of British Documentary Photography, 1983–1993. London: British Council. Taylor, John (2018), ‘John Kippin’s Bad Language’, in Robinson, Alastair, Ed. (2018) Kippin, Based on a True Story. Bielefeld: KerberVerlag. Originally published in Kippin, John (1995) Nostalgia for the Future. London: The Photographers’ Gallery.

15 SILENT WITNESS

FIGURE 15.1 

 scar Palacio, ‘White Fence’, 2002. © Oscar Palacio. Used as the cover O picture for American Places.

The German radical dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, aimed to create an ‘alienation effect’ that would detach audiences from empathy with characters or immersion in the flow of a story, making strange that which might seem familiar in order to encourage critical responses.1 Audiences were to observe, enjoy, reflect, and not take scenarios at face value. Photographers are usually witnesses rather than participants in events, so a certain distance and space for reflection is normal. Yet the notion of an alienation effect poses DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-19

186  Place

a particular challenge for photography (or the moving image). Photographs deal in surface appearance. Yet, as Brecht famously remarked, a photograph of the walls of a factory tells nothing of the institutional relations that obtain within. (Benjamin, 1972:24). For photographers as investigators, the critical challenge is finding strategies for implying or revealing more than that which is immediately observable; the photographer explores sites, histories and circumstances seeking ways of seeing differently. What might photographs reveal at second glance? The work of artists from elsewhere often points to aspects of cultures that might otherwise remain unremarked.2 Oscar Palacio was born in Colombia and relocated to Miami, Florida, at age thirteen. For Palacio, working photographically meshes with a more fundamental feeling of belonging neither in the US, nor in his home country. Of course, this is not to say that one cannot critically ‘stand back’ from one’s own circumstances; in many respects the ability to do so is core to contemporary art practices. But perhaps those less hegemonically imbued within culture have a better chance of retaining a critical I/eye. Palacio uses photography to investigate man-made landscapes, specifically, histories as marked on the land, and the dynamic interrelation of natural and constructed environments. For him, nature and culture are not binary opposites so much as systems brought into synthesis, within which the biodynamic survives with remarkable persistence. Palacio studied architecture at Miami University; it follows that he is interested in urban structures and in how people organise domestic patches of land. When he moved to New England for graduate studies in photography he encountered - and questioned - a new set of circumstances in terms of climate, space, and lifestyles. In first considering Oscar Palacio’s work, I slipped into readings that suggest an artist alien within his country of domicile. Perceptions are, of course, influenced by biographical experiences, so I find my interpretations premised on more-or-less conscious assumptions about the interests and experiences of a transplanted photographer. I had not yet discussed his work with him, so I ‘read’ him through the images, constructing the fence at Gettysburg as a barrier, now crumbling or broken but still asserting exclusion; or the cannon photographed from a point of view that effectively illustrates the threat of ‘looking down the barrel of a gun.’ Some form of barrier dominates many of the pictures: a fence, a closed door, a pathway interrupted by a dislodged clod of grass around which the viewer/photographer would have to walk because to cross it would be to transgress. As viewers, we are positioned via the photographer’s sense of himself as alien, positioned as it were within a Brechtian effect that is crucial to the power and import of his work. Unfamiliar Territory (2000–2006) had its foundations in his re-location.2 There is also a sense in which this initial cultural questioning morphed into the later series, History Re-visited (2006–2012), although the two projects are in many ways distinct from one another. The investigative ‘traveller with camera’ method that characterizes his work stems from the earlier period, when, by his account, he initially operated quite serendipitously, later becoming more purposeful in identifying places of

Silent Witness  187

historical significance and arranging to visit for visual investigation. Thematically his work invites us to question dominant accounts and ideologies, while in formal terms the composition is traditional, with imagery anchored around a centre point: a door, a chink in a wall, a tree stump. American Places, as an exhibition and publication, is the first occasion in which the two series have been brought together. As such, both continuities of theme and aesthetics, and distinctions between the more chance observations of the earlier series and the historical curiosity that fuelled the second series, are brought into focus. Here, Palacio’s strategy is relatively straightforward. The series titles are self-explanatory; his orientation is clear. Images are foregrounded; indeed, we encounter the photographs without necessarily recognizing locations. As such they may stand metonymically for a range of circumstances or types of event. In Unfamiliar Territory, Palacio invites us to reflect on the often incongruous ways in which human settlement coalesces with the natural. Man-made structures are superimposed on nature but botanical phenomena fight back. Landscape architecture often involves odd juxtapositions and attempted integrations. For example, ‘Grass over Asphalt’ shows a section of turf laid over a concrete slab; this is intended to resemble a natural grass lawn. But fundamental ecologies are superseded; water drainage, insect life, the tendency of animals to dig burrows in lawns have all been ignored, diverted, or brought under control. An apparently simple picture of turf shifted slightly out of place points to incongruities of landscaping. This anti-melodramatic approach results in little to distract us from reflecting on the implications of what is seen, the ways in which the image points to that which is not stated yet clearly present – in this instance, assumptions about the appropriateness of concealing human intervention through artificial re-instatement of ostensibly natural phenomena. Muted rhetoric enhances attention to the implied and the unexpected. Conversely, a concrete-filled doorway in a stone wall alongside a concrete path is evidently entirely artificial, a result of human demarcation of boundaries on the land, but our attention is drawn to the only animate object in the picture: a green weed heroically reaching up through the cracks, which takes on a highly charged, symbolic function. So what are we looking at? Metaphorically, the image is highly suggestive; the filled-in doorway constitutes a barrier. We – the photographer and by extension the viewer – are excluded from whatever once occurred here. On a grandiose scale, the Hoover Dam, a monument to American engineering prowess, was engineered to impress. Aside from the dam’s hydroelectric function, it was constructed to include a site for visitors to pause to view and admire the ambition and achievement of those who strived to harness water for our progress. Palacio’s pictures both acknowledge the immensity of the installation and draw attention to detail that might otherwise be overlooked as we respond to what is surely a sublime icon to modernity. In American consciousness, and certainly in American tourism, the dam seems comparable to natural wonders such as Niagara Falls; the Grand Canyon (through which the Colorado River flows on its way down to Nevada); or the impossibly tall narrow but intense waterfalls of Yosemite. Indeed, as Palacio remarks through close-up studies, rock held in place by heavy

188  Place

wire reinforcement contributes to making the structure of the Hoover Dam appear almost as if it is a natural phenomenon, even though it so evidently is not. Palacio wanted to see Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for himself because he’d seen it in movies and heard people refer to it. As Palacio remarked, there is something ‘haunting about [a] landscape’ which includes more than 1,200 monuments: soldiers from both Union and Confederate sides. ‘Landscape carries all this history yet there is an implicit silence, there is no dialogue.’ As a photographer, Palacio visits sites to, ‘dig out significance.’3 For him, photography contributes within the archaeology of knowledge, in the Foucauldian sense; his photographs point to that which begs investigation. (Foucault, 1972). Palacio’s next trip was to Salem, Massachusetts, another place imbued with myth, where he found a Christian cemetery next door to the site of the infamous Salem ‘witch’ trial, an historical tension commemorated through ironies of juxtaposition. Again, as we look through the gap in the wall at the Christian cemetery beyond and reflect on the anti-feminism explicit in various notions of witchery, the implications of his imagery accumulate. For Henry David Thoreau, the nineteenth-century philosopher-writer, nature was a space of self-replenishment as well as curiosity. Seeking regeneration through living in the wilderness, he resided at Walden for two years, an experiment in living harmoniously within a woodland environment. Both his account of this sojourn and the idea of harmony and replenishment through closeness to nature have become idealized within American culture – ironically, in part in response to urban intensification. Palacio’s photography reminds us of disjunctions between ideals of harmony with nature and manifest everyday experience. History Re-visited takes a different tack into investigating American culture and identity. For Palacio this series emerged as an investigation of public spaces, of American history and myth; he went to particular places to try to decipher histories through documenting the little that remains visible. Indeed, our sense of a place is constituted through stories told about it, stories that may become extended and contested through re-examination, bringing into play contemporary questions and perspectives. Discussing History Re-visited, Allison N. Kemmerer succinctly remarks that These photographs suggest that history is an ongoing dialogue between past and present, between traditional interpretations of events and the emergence of alternative perspectives, between the keepers of the eternal frame and those who wonder what other fires are burning underground, just outside the frame. (Kemmerer, 2009:70) Clues in photographs may be historical, as Estelle Jussim has observed, but we are deciphering clues and codes in the context of contemporary intellectual understandings. (Jussim, 1989:49–60). Names also explicitly designate connections: Plymouth Rock, which does not mark the actual spot where the Mayflower immigrants came

Silent Witness  189

ashore, was selected subsequently as a commemorative location. Histories are as much a matter of myth as of fact and may be reformulated in accordance with specific needs. Photography is frequently called upon as historical witness. Yet, as is evident in Palacio’s work, often photographs tell us very little. Furthermore, photography is not simply a matter of visual evidence. Seeing offers a false assumption of knowledge about the world and, as Susan Sontag reminded us, understanding ‘starts from not accepting the world as it looks.’ (Sontag, 1979:83). In Brechtian mode, Palacio draws audiences into more complex responses and reflections, discouraging any notion that things can be taken at face value. Liz Wells, 2013 Originally published in Oscar Palacio, American Places. San Francisco: California Institute of Integrated Studies, 2013. The publication consists of photographs from two series, Unfamiliar Territory (2000–2006) and History Re-visited (2006–2012).

Notes 1 For Brecht, Verfremdung, the ‘alienation effect,’ was a matter of making the familiar unfamiliar in order to re-appraise phenomena that might otherwise be taken for granted. Brecht proposed ‘Epic’ theatre to counter the then-contemporary dominance of naturalism, arguing for the importance of an anti-illusory device that interrupts immersion within narrative and emphasizes ‘realism’ rather than feeling. See John Willett, ‘The Theory,’ in The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London: Eyre Methuen, 1977. pp. 165–186. 2 Most famously, Swiss photographer, Robert Frank, spent many years travelling across the United States making work that would become The Americans. Robert Frank, The Americans. New York: Grove Press. 1959. 3 Unfamiliar Territory started after Palacio’s graduation from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Quotes are from a conversation with the artist, 11th January 2013, unless otherwise noted.

References Benjamin, Walter (1972) ‘A short history of photography,’ published in English translation in Screen. London: British Film Institute, 1972. p. 24. First published in 1931 in the Literarische Welt. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Original French publication, 1969. Jussim, Estelle (1989) ‘The Eternal Moment: Photography and Time’ in The Eternal Moment. New York: Aperture. Kemmerer, Allison N. (2009) ‘Oscar Palacio’, Contact Sheet, the Light Work Annual. No. 152. NY, Syracuse: Light Work. Sontag, Susan (1979) On Photography. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

PART V

Critical Spaces

16 SEEING BEYOND BELIEF Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analysing the Visual Co-author, Martin Lister

Introduction Cultural Studies Cultural Studies centres on the study of the forms and practices of culture (not only its texts and artefacts), their relationship to social groups and the power relations between those groups as they are constructed and mediated by forms of culture. The ‘culture’ in question is not confined to art or high culture. Culture is taken to include everyday symbolic and expressive practices, both those that take place as we live (and are not aimed at producing artefacts), such as shopping, travelling or being a football supporter, and ‘textual practices’ in the sense that some kind of material artefact or representation, image, performance, display, space, writing, or narrative is produced. As an academic field, Cultural Studies is interested in the enabling and regulating of institutions, and less formal social arrangements, in and through which culture is produced, enacted, and consumed. In practice, it is seldom, if ever, possible to separate the cultures of everyday life from practices of representation, visual or otherwise. The focus of such studies is normally of contemporary and emergent practices, studied within their formative historical contexts. There are mainly those of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the ‘modern’ period of industrialization, the formation of the nation-state, the rise of the type of the modern individual, imperialism and colonialism, and the commodification of culture. Such contexts are now importantly extended to include globalization and the range of shifts which are gathered up under the terms ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-colonial’, as the legacies and cultural forms of the earlier period are seen to be radically restructured and fragmenting at the end of the twentieth century.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-21

194  Critical Spaces

A distinctive feature of Cultural Studies is the search to understand the relationships of culture production, consumption, belief and meaning, to social processes and institutions. This has resulted in a refusal to see ‘society’ as simply the context, climate, or background against which to view a cultural practice or text; rather the production of texts is seen as in itself a social practice. There is a similar refusal to see cultural practices and texts as merely symptoms or documentary reflections of a prior set of social determinations. Instead, Cultural Studies insists upon the constitutive role of culture in sustaining and changing the power relations enacted around issues of gender, sexuality, social class, race and ethnicity, colonialism and its legacies, and the geopolitics of space and place within globalization. It examines these in terms of the ways of seeing, imagining, classifying, narrating, and other ways of investing meaning in the world of experience, that cultural forms and practices provide.

Media Studies The version of Media Studies which is closely connected with Cultural Studies largely arose within the same post-war intellectual project to comprehend the impact of industrialization and advancing capitalist social formations on new, mass forms of communication, representation, and consumption. Part of the impetus was to do this in ways that were more flexible and responsive and less value-laden than the responses to the mass media found in the traditional canonical disciplines such as literary studies or art history. In particular, these disciplines’ preoccupation with the idea of individual authorship as a source of meaning was criticized in itself and as manifestly inadequate for the study of advertising, popular cinema, and television. A parallel impetus was to pay much closer attention to a wider range of expressed or represented experience, however informal, popular, sub-cultural and apparently trivial, than was characteristic of mainstream social science. Feeding into these central impulses have been other traditions: sociological research and empirical study of audiences for mass media, especially television; critical studies of media power; the political economy of the media; studies of media politics and the public sphere; media and communications theory; and specific histories of radio, television, the press, new media and communication technologies.

The Study of Visual Culture More recently, there have been attempts to define a specific field of Visual Cultural Studies. While recognizing a formative relation to a wider field of Cultural Studies (which always contained an interest in the visual), its proponents do not see this as merely a specialized sub-division or extensions of Cultural and Media Studies, but as a reworking of the whole field of concern. With the late twentieth century’s explosion of imaging and visualizing technologies (digitalization, satellite imaging, new forms of medical imaging, virtual reality, etc.), they suggest that everyday life has become ‘visual culture’. This can be seen as an acceleration of a longer history

Seeing Beyond Belief  195

involving photography, film, television, and video. However, some argue that this new visuality of culture calls for its own field of study concerned with all kinds of visual information, its meanings, pleasures, and consumption, including the study of all visual technologies, from ‘oil painting to the internet’. (Mirzoeff, 1998: 3). From this perspective, it is argued that the study of visual culture cannot be confined to the study of images but should also take account of the centrality of vision in everyday experience and the production of meaning. As Irit Rogoff puts it: In the arena of visual culture the scrap of an image connects with a sequence of film and with the corner of a billboard or the window display of a shop we have passed by, to produce a new narrative formed out of both our experienced journey and our unconscious. Images do not stay within discrete disciplinary fields such as ‘documentary film’ or ‘Renaissance painting’, since neither the eye nor the psyche operates along or recognises such divisions. (Rogoff, 1998: 16) The primary purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate and critically discuss the validity and usefulness of a range of methodologies which have been brought in to play for analysing photographic images which have been a major element of visual culture in modern industrial societies. We shall show how insights and methods drawn from semiotics, psychoanalytic culture theory, art history, the social history of media technology, aesthetics and the sociology of culture are drawn upon to investigate how meaning, pleasure and power are articulated through specific images. Such images are produced and consumed within a wide range of social, economic, and cultural contexts, including those of advertising, the making of news, social documentary, medicine, the law and social control, education, the family, leisure, and entertainment. First, we briefly discuss Cultural Studies and methodology. The following three sections focus upon distinctive questions asked of the photograph within Visual Cultural Studies and demonstrate some of the key concepts employed with the field through analyses of a diverse range of photographs. Analysing examples of photographs from advertising and reportage along with images made for gallery exhibition, we discuss contexts of viewing, contexts of production, form and meaning, and looking and identity.

Cultural Studies: Methodologies Cultural and Media Studies is a compound field, elements of which are differently organized in different institutions. It is generally understood as an interdisciplinary field, rather than as a discrete discipline, which appropriates and re-purposes elements of theoretical frameworks and methodologies from other disciplines, wherever they seem productive in pursuing its own enquiries.1 Therefore it is hard to identify for Cultural and Media Studies its own singular and strict set of disciplinary protocols. However, and while differences of emphasis exist, most research

196  Critical Spaces

methodology courses within Cultural and Media Studies include elements of ethnographic, sociological, semiotic, psychoanalytic, and critical textual methods. One way of approaching a definition of Cultural Studies is to consider its objects of enquiry as the ways it understands the complex concept ‘culture’. These include, for instance, the ‘ordinariness’ or ‘everydayness’ of cultures, and interest in culture as the process through which a society or social group produces meanings. There is a stress upon the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ of culture, on productions as well as context. Cultural Studies is, then, not only methodologically eclectic, but open and experimental in the ways that it frames its objects of study. While it may borrow its methodological resources, it seldom assumes that it unproblematically has a set of objects ‘out there’ or before it, about which it can then ask questions formulated by and inherited from other disciplines. Pragmatically, its achievements have to be judged in terms of the coherence and insights of the accounts that it gives of its objects. Its methodological rigour lies in the responsible way that a researcher uses the intellectual resources that they borrow and apply. Even though an orthodox historian or sociologist may gibe at the taking of their methodological tools into interdisciplinary hands, the vitality and suggestiveness of much Cultural and Media Studies has been widely influential on other academic disciplines and criticism and has had an impact upon print and television journalism. How do these general points inform what we attempt here? While much of our attention is given to specific photographs, we analyse them without separating them from social processes. Except for the practical purposes of staging our analysis – we cannot do everything at once! – we resist reifying or hypostatizing the images. That is, we work hard not to see pictures as rigid and fixed things – beginning and ending at their frames. Another way to put this is that we approach the images as part of what has been described as ‘the circuit of culture’. (Du Gay, 1997). Each one can be thought of as passing through a number of ‘moments’ and its passage through each moment contributes to the meanings – plural, not singular – which it has and may have. In short, they are socially produced, distributed, and consumed; within this cycle there are processes of transformation taking place and of struggle and contest of over what they mean and how they are used. To sum up we offer a checklist of the main features of the analysis which follows. These will be restated as more focused questions within the analysis itself. 1 . We are interested in an image’s social life and its history. 2. We look at images within the cycle of production, circulation, and consumption through which their meanings are accumulated and transformed. 3. We pay attention to an image’s specific material properties (its ‘artifactualness’), and to the ‘medium’ and the technologies through which it is realized (here, as photographs). 4. While recognizing the material properties of images, we see these as intertwined with the active social process of ‘looking’ and the historically specific forms of ‘visuality’ in which this takes place.

Seeing Beyond Belief  197

5. We understand images as representations, the outcomes of the process of attaching ideas to and giving meaning to our experience of the world. With care and qualification, much can be gained by thinking of this process as a language-like activity – conventional systems which, in the manner of codes, convey meaning within a sign using community. 6. We temper point 5 with the recognition that our interest in images and other visual experiences (and, indeed, lived and material cultural forms) cannot be reduced to the question of ‘meaning’ and the intellectual processes involved in coding and decoding. As human beings, and as the members of a culture, we also have a sensuous, pleasure-seeking interest in looking at and feeling ‘the world’ including the media that we have put in it. 7. We realize that ‘looking’ is always embodied and undertaken by someone with an identity. In this sense, there is no neutral looking. An image’s or thing’s significance is finally its significance for some-body and some-one. However, as points 1 to 6 indicate, this cannot be any old significance, a matter of complete relativism.

Analysis Context of Viewing We need first to ask where the image is. What is its location (or locations) in the social and physical world? Our answer to this question will tell us much about how we meet or encounter the images: that is, how we attend to it. Is it, for instance, met in the public or private part of our lives? Is it something on which we can concentrate and be absorbed by in a single-minded way or is it one contingent element amongst others in our busy daily transactions, in our leisure time or as part of our work or education? Did we deliberately seek out the image, in a library or a gallery? The context influences how we look at the image through constructing certain expectations, for instance, the gallery adds an aura of seriousness of intellectual or aesthetic intent to the picture. Second, why is the viewer looking at the photograph? What information or pleasures do they seek? How are they intending to use the image? Is their interest idle or purposeful? If the look is purposeful, as in, for instance, studying the images with which we have chosen to illustrate this chapter, then it is important to know what editorial judgements have been made and how this has influenced the selection. Writing this chapter, and in particular choosing images (which will be reproduced several thousand times within copies of this book) and then discussing them in certain ways, is a small exercise of power. What are our reasons, our interests, or purposes, in selecting the images we have? What view of the traffic in images are we promoting? Uppermost in our minds has been the exemplification of the methodological points we wish to make. Not all images would serve as well to do this although, in principle, if the concepts and methods we use are of value then they should be applicable to a wide range of images. However, here we have favoured ‘strong’ examples of the concepts that we are dealing with, to help elucidate points.2

198  Critical Spaces

FIGURE 16.1 

Marlboro cigarette advert, c.1995. © Martin Lister.

The image (Figure 16.1) of the ‘redneck’ in a Marlboro cigarette advertisement is situated on a super-site hoarding. This is positioned to the side of a roundabout on a major ring road in a large provincial city. The photograph of the image was difficult to take because the hoarding is hardly accessible on foot. It is within a major road complex where no provision is made for pedestrians (they are actively discouraged) and is clearly intended to be seen by passing motorists or motorists in the frequently slow-moving traffic that is typical of this main approach to the city during peak commuting hours. The same image was also reproduced in glossy magazines and the magazine sections of major Sunday newspapers. Literally, then, a photographic original – also a digitally manipulated image (see Henning, 1995: 217) – has been translated into two kinds of print of vastly different scales. We can reasonably speculate that one may be seen through the frame of a car window while on the move, while the other could be draped across the lap of a reader or browser while reclining on a sofa or travelling on a train. Alternatively, it might be read at a desk when the reader takes a break from the work they otherwise do there. In this sense the images are located, both in the physical world and in our everyday social worlds, quite differently. Taking two of these scenarios further, we can begin to say something about how the one image is experienced in different contexts. In the case of the car driver or passenger (this itself may be an important distinction), the image is experienced in time or as the spectator travels in space. It will loom up to confront the spectator and then recede from their field of vision. Their encounter with the image will not be the result of an intention to look at it; it presents itself to them. The image – as a publicly sited hoarding – will be seen in the context of the (sub)urban environment: the intersection of motorways stretching away from the viewer, the backs of

Seeing Beyond Belief  199

working-class housing behind it, the sound of traffic passing in other directions, the smell of traffic on hot (or wet) tarmac, and so on. The image is not a passive element in this scene, it depicts a man (who looks in the same direction as the viewer) who is himself beside a major road looking on at an American-style truck. There are hills in the background as there are in the actual location in which the image is sited. What is depicted in the image echoes or resonates with the situation of the driver/passenger/reader of the image. On the sofa, another viewer looks at the image in their domestic space. They have sat down, positioned themself, chosen the magazine in which the image is printed, opened it, and alighted on the image. They may, in the first instance, have chosen and bought the magazine in which the advert appears. They hold the image and focus on it. In a different sense from the first example, they too experience the image in time, or more precisely, within a sequence of images and written words offered by the other contents of the magazine. They might consume the magazine in a linear fashion working their way through from beginning to end, or more selectively, working back and forth through its pages, in effect producing their own juxtapositions between its various features and advertisements. We can ask more questions of this situation. Is the magazine, and for some moments the advert, their sole object of attention? Is the television on? What is being broadcast? How does it, at some level of consciousness, interact with the image? Might it be a programme about some other aspects of life in the United States? A ‘road movie’? Perhaps music is playing – the image may have a soundtrack. Perhaps the ‘reader’ is not alone but looks at the magazine with a friend or partner; they discuss, judge, joke and elaborate via anecdotes and connections on the image. Our second chosen example (Figure 16.2, p. 200) is an older photojournalistic image, one which still, on first encounter, may raise a smile. ‘An Oblique glance’, by French photographer Robert Doisneau, which shows a couple looking into the window of a Parisian antique shop, has been reproduced in books and exhibitions about Doisneau, the photographer, as well as being referenced in several discussions of French humanist photography shown in major international exhibitions on documentary or on post-war French photography. The image was first published in Point de Vue (photo-magazine). In contrast to the Marlboro advert, the contemporary viewer is likely to encounter this image within the context of the work of the particular photographer, or as an example within a more general discussion of reportage photography of the period. The photograph may be reproduced in a book, or, indeed, the viewer may be pursuing historical research concerned with photojournalism, with Doisneau or with French humanist photography. Whilst the reader of Point de Vue in 1949 may have come across the image in circumstances equivalent to our putative sofa reader of the Marlboro advert (perhaps whilst listening to the radio), contemporary viewers of this image may approach it rather differently. On the one hand, Doisneau’s work has been extensively recycled as posters and postcards and is familiar to many who would not necessarily know the provenance of the image or the name of the photographer. On the other hand, precisely because the work is now acclaimed as exemplary of its genre and era, many viewers are likely to have in some way sought out the circumstances of

200  Critical Spaces

FIGURE 16.2 

 obert Doisneau, ‘An Oblique glance’, 1948/49. © Robert DOISNEAU/ R GAMMA RAPHO.

viewing, whether borrowing or buying a book, or visiting an exhibition. (The same is true of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe which we discuss later.) The photograph has a title, which indicates to the viewer its primary humorous focus, and it is specifically authored. The naming of the photographer lends status to the image as a work of art and, indeed, the context of viewing may be a gallery exhibition within which the image is hung as a fine print, perhaps as one in a series of similarly carefully reproduced photographs. We are generally familiar with the convention of the gallery, with the ritual of progressing from image to image, attending to each one for a short space of time, then, perhaps, starting to make comparisons between one image and another in terms of subject-matter and in terms of aesthetic form. Like the Marlboro adverts, the experience of the encounter is inter-discursive in the sense that situation, contemporary references and resonances inform our experience, whether we merely glance at the image or study it more intently. Questions of social history also obtain. For example, whilst viewers, both in the 1950s and now, may see the Doisneau photograph as offering information about Paris after the war (for instance, the clothing worn by the boys across the street and the style of dress of the couple), this information inevitably holds differing implications for those considering the picture some fifty years later.

Seeing Beyond Belief  201

Context of Production Our next question is: how did the image get there? This question shifts our attention from how we encounter the image to ones about its production by others and its distribution – to the intentions and motives of others, and the institutional and other social contexts, imperatives, and constraints in which they work. Here the contrast between the Doisneau photograph and the Marlboro advertisement is instructive. Most obviously, the first was produced as a narrative image, as photojournalism, whilst the other was constructed as an advertisement. Also, the manner of production differs. Doisneau’s photograph is about an event which has not been specifically directed by him – although the setting up of his camera inside the shop with the painting of the naked woman placed at an angle in the window orchestrated the possibility of responses from passers-by. His conceptual approach is in line with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous definition of photography as ‘the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of a significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give an event its proper expression’ (CartierBresson, 1952). For the photographer the skill is one of recognizing the ‘decisive moment’, both when taking the image and in the process of selection and editing. Here it is clear that photography was not seen as somehow inherently objective but, rather, reportage was used by photographers as an opportunity for interpretative commentary. The point was to find ‘telling’ photos, or ‘photo-novels’, sequences of images for publication in illustrated magazines such as Life (USA), Vu (France) and Picture Post (Britain), which were popular and widely distributed from the 1930s to the 1950s. Whilst his work was more along the lines of social observation than ‘hard’ news, that is the reporting of major contemporary events, a sense of ‘news values’ will have informed the decision to shoot this series of images from within the shop.3 Doisneau made this image at a time which predates television as the primary conveyor of visual information and was informed by pre-war documentary film and photo movements. By the 1930s in France, there was an established ‘humanist’ focus upon ordinary people and everyday life which took as its subject-matter people at work and at leisure, depicted in streets, cafés, and brothels, or at special events such as fêtes. Doisneau described Paris as a theatre of images: ‘It doesn’t matter where you look, there’s always something going on. All you need to do is wait and look for long enough until the curtain deigns to go up’ (in Hamilton, 1995: 182). In our example, Doisneau has set himself up in the shop in order to observe events; he has constructed a scenario within which it is likely that interesting events may occur. By contrast, advertising imagery is overtly directorial, constructed purposefully in line with a particular brief and taking specific account of the intended means of communication (hoarding, magazine advertisement, etc.). The photographer for the Marlboro advert is not named; there is no attribution of authorship. Unlike photojournalism, the dictates are entirely commercial. In advertising the photographer or art director are named only if they are famous enough for their name to condone the product.4 The Marlboro image is an advertisement for cigarettes and will have been designed and produced for that company by a specialist advertising agency as part of

202  Critical Spaces

the Philip Morris company’s wider marketing and advertising strategies. This advert belongs to a whole series for Marlboro cigarettes which, in part, are a response to the early 1990s ban on advertising cigarettes on British television and the anticipation that this ban will be extended to all forms of advertising. This accounts for the way that the advert (and the others in its series) contains no written or explicit reference to either cigarettes or the Marlboro brand. Ironically, the clear reference to smoking cigarettes which connects the image to the product is given in the government health warning which runs along the bottom of the image. The producers of these Marlboro ads have to solve a problem, that of how to reference a brand of cigarettes and how to promote a product that is widely understood to be seriously dangerous to health. In the 1970s and 1980s Marlboro advertising associated the cigarettes with the figure of the ‘cowboy’, itself a vehicle for making a connection between cigarettes, white masculinity, ‘loner’ subjectivity and the untamed nature of the mythological American West. At that time, it was possible to include the brand name and copy which recommended smoking (Marlboro cigarettes in particular) as natural, pure, and relaxing within the advert. More recent government restrictions on such practices have led designers and producers of the adverts to use other strategies. They know that the distinctive red colour of the Marlboro packet and logo can live on after the packet or name itself ceases to be shown. A significant red detail, ‘the sunburnt neck, a light on top of a police car, a traffic light’, appear in the more recent images as the only coloured elements in what look like black and white stills from arthouse movies. Furthermore, the producers use stills which reference movies which critically rework the myth of the West: Bagdad Cafe, Paris, Texas and Gas, Food, Lodging (Henning, 1995: 223–8). These postmodern reworkings of Western mythology also allow the advertisers to shift the connotations of smoking from the natural and relaxing toward the dangerous and the ‘romance of living on the edge’ (Henning, 1995). This advertising image is then a deliberate and skilful response to legal constraints and shifts in the culture of health on the part of producers whose task it is to maintain markets for their client’s product. The features of the image which we have discussed here are not arbitrary but the result of a complex interaction. This is between the profit-making demands of capitalist economics, the restrictions imposed by anti­smoking campaigners, health professionals and the law, as well as factors such as the modes of organization, division of labour and work processes which obtain at any specific advertising agency, and the knowing semiotic practices of advertising ‘creatives’. In our example, the image takes its form from, and depends for its success as an ‘advertisement’ on, such factors. Producers employ specific strategies, which will not be the only solutions that could have been adopted, but they are outcomes of intention and ‘producerly’ knowledge and skill. Whether we, as receivers or consumers of the image, directly take or accept the meanings they have intended to give the image is another question.

Looking: Form and Meaning We can note that at this point in our analysis we still have not begun to deal with what we may call the image ‘itself ’ or ‘in-itself ’. This raises some difficult and vexed

Seeing Beyond Belief  203

questions about the boundaries of an image or a ‘text’. What is the image in itself? What are the inherent properties of a text when considered apart from individual acts of looking at it and making sense of it?

Conventions Two uses of the concept of a convention, understood as a socially agreed way of doing something, one with literary and art historical roots, the other sociological, play a part in the visual analysis of photographs. We start our discussion of codes and conventions with an example from art history. This is useful as a way of recognizing that traditions of analysis employed by these specialists in studying the narrow range of images which makes up the history of art have always offered Cultural Studies something, especially the study of iconology and iconography (Panofsky, 1955; van Leeuwen, 2001). While it is probably true to say that, in Cultural and Media Studies, these methodological branches of art history and theory have always been overshadowed by the use of semiotic methods imported initially through Continental structuralism, we give them some time here. This is because they immediately offer ways of talking about pictures in terms of the key concept of ‘convention’. They also allow us to start from noticing things about images rather than about written language and then seeking to apply linguistic concepts to images.

Pictorial Conventions The art historian Michael Baxandall offers a brief, but exceptionally clear analysis of the pictorial conventions simultaneously employed in a fifteenth-century woodcut (Figure 16.3):

FIGURE 16.3 

Bartolo da Sassoferrato. De Fluminibus, Woodcut, Rome 1483.

204  Critical Spaces

[Plate 15] is the representation of a river and at least two distinct representational conventions are being used in it. The mermaids and the miniature landscape on the left are represented by lines indicating the contours of forms, and the point of view is from a slightly upward angle. The course of the river and the dynamics of its flow are registered diagrammatically and geometrically, and the point of view is from vertically above. A linear ripple convention on the water surface mediates between one style of representation and the other. The first convention is more immediately related to what we see, where the second is more abstract and conceptualised – and to us now rather unfamiliar – but they both involve a skill and a willingness to interpret marks on paper as representations simplifying an aspect of reality within accepted rules: we do not see a tree as a white plane surface circumscribed by black lines. (Baxandall, 1988: 32) Several points are worth drawing out of this paragraph. First, Baxandall talks about ‘marks on paper’ and the ways they are signs for flowing water, (imagined) bodies and land. He draws attention to a material surface and what it carries as the ground (literally and metaphorically) of a pictorial representation. He is aware of the materiality of the image that he analyses. This is important because a medium like a woodcut clearly offers different signifying resources than, say, an oil painting or photograph. Second, he sees the meaning of these marks on a surface (that is, flowing water) as dependent on interpretative skill and, even prior to that, a willingness or interest on the part of the viewer to interpret them. So, he sees that the image implies something about its viewer and her or his competence in looking. Third, he notes that several kinds of marks are doing different work within the one image: some are diagrammatic, and others are ‘more immediately related to what we see’ (Baxandall, 1988: 32). (Lines, for example, are used to indicate or describe the edges of human forms. Of course, no such lines are to be found at the edge of our limbs, but certain situations do arise when we perceive a contrast between a limb and a lighter or darker surface against which it is seen, the drawn line acts as a conventional equivalent for this contrast.) He sees these different kinds of marks as lying on a spectrum of possibilities which runs from the less to the more abstract. They all simplify reality, and they are all subject (for the sense they make) to accepted rules, rules which may or may not be familiar to us given our membership of a historically or culturally specific sign community.

Semiotics and Codes Baxandall’s description of these pictorial conventions comes close to the semiotic notion of an iconic sign, in which the signifier (the physical mark or material

Seeing Beyond Belief  205

thing/object/quality) bears some kind of resemblance to what it signifies (what it means or stands for). It also approaches, at the more abstract end of his spectrum, the semiotic premise that many kinds of sign are ‘arbitrary’; that is their meaning is not directly dependent upon some intrinsic qualities that they have. Rather, within a culture, a certain kind of mark has been matched (and agreed by all who can understand the convention, the language, or the code, that it is so matched) with a certain kind of object or quality of objects in the real world. Semiotics proposes that there are whole ranges of visual, material, pictorial and symbolic signs which are conventional in the way that Baxandall identifies, for example, in bodily movement and gesture, in the camera work, narrative devices and editing of film and television, in the weight, spacing and shapes of typographic forms. In this way the concept of a convention is extended to that of a ‘code’ – an extended system of signs which operates like a language (itself a code of uttered sounds or printed marks). There have been many attempts (within Cultural and Media Studies and elsewhere) to analyse images using elaborate and systematic semiotic theories of codes or of signification (the operation of signs) based upon the paradigm of language. Over repeated attempts, often under the sway of changing intellectual fashions (structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism), it has become clear that a too rigid application of systematic methodologies for visual analysis, which take written or spoken language as a model, is self-defeating. There is always a tendency in such attempts to miss the specificity of the medium, and the practices built around it in social use, where signification actually takes place. Hence, in a good example of the (sometimes very productive) tensions inherent in Cultural Studies which were remarked upon at the beginning of this chapter, the application of de-coding methodologies or the practice of textual analysis are often challenged by insisting on the need to stress the negotiated, dialogic, and sometimes resistant and subversive dimensions of human communication. In fact, it is this stress on the plural, messy, contested and even creative nature of our discourse with the visual and with images, the manner in which this is a site of a struggle over what something means, which often makes the Cultural Studies analyst wary of the very term ‘communication’, preferring instead ‘representation’ or ‘mediation’.

Photographic Conventions Convention and meaning enter into the business of making photographs at the most basic technical level. Indeed, it has been pointed out that meaning is even encoded in the design of the apparatus of photography. Very different examples of this are provided by, for example, Snyder and Allen (1982) and Slater (1991). The very existence of the rectangular frame of the camera viewfinder and its picture plane was designed into cameras at an early stage in the history of photography. The round lens of a camera creates a circular image which shades off into obscurity at its circumference. Some two hundred years before the first successful chemical fixing of the camera image, ‘the portable camera obscura of the early nineteenth century

206  Critical Spaces

was fitted with a square or rectangular ground glass which showed only the central part of the image made by the lens’ (Snyder and Allen, 1982: 68–9). This, as they point out, was the outcome of adjusting the camera image to meet the requirements of ‘traditional art’, the rectangular easel painting. This is a good example of the way in which a convention exists while its historical origins are forgotten. In considering the snapshot cameras of the mid­twentieth century, Don Slater (1991) sees that the small icons that help the snapshooter set the camera’s focal length for a particular kind of subject matter – a portrait, a family group, a landscape – already anticipate the conventions by which such genres are recognized and need to be produced. We will start our own hunt for photographic conventions a little further on in the process, in the basic decisions that a photographer takes as she or he deploys their equipment. First, however, we need to take care not to be misunderstood, as in what follows it could appear that we are imputing too much explicit intellectual effort to the photographer as they mobilize conventions. As for the fifteenth-century woodcut printer and his ‘audience’, conventions exist which are both used by photographers and understood by contemporary viewers of photographs. This is not to say that photographers consciously choose the conventions that they will use in making a picture. Some may of course, but we are not making the ludicrous suggestion that they hold seminars on semiotics in order to carry out a commission (although it may be worth remarking how close creative directors in advertising, whose job includes briefing photographers, come to doing this). In general, the use of conventions by photographers is a matter of assimilated ‘know-how’, a trained sense of ‘this is how to do it’ gained ‘on the job’ and by observing what does and does not ‘work’ in concrete situations. Similarly, in looking at a photograph and finding meaning in it, we do not need to refer to a dictionary of conventions – we don’t look them up. Unlike the woodcutter’s ‘now unfamiliar’ diagrammatic representation of a river flowing, photographic conventions are very familiar to most of us: they fall below the threshold of conscious attention. They are nevertheless there. It is the very degree to which sets of conventions have been assimilated, within a culture, as the way to do something, that guarantees their very naturalness rather than their evident conventionality. With regard to photographs in particular, the fact that they are also produced through mechanical and chemical processes tends to persuade us that they are not the outcome of skill in handling a ‘language’ but are automatic, and immediate, traces or reflections of what they depict. The portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe in Figure 16.4 could seem to be without convention. Both its extreme simplicity (not much scope for artifice, arrangement, or choice here) and its impact (a startled gaze which startles the viewer) is surely the result of something more like spontaneity or passion than a rule-governed activity or ‘a socially agreed way of doing something’. In fact, within its simplicity, there is a considerable complexity of conventional devices and by identifying them we can go a long way toward accounting for some of its drama. The conventional operations that we would draw attention to are the following: framing, gaze, lighting, context, camera position.

Seeing Beyond Belief  207

FIGURE 16.4 

Robert Mapplethorpe, Clifton, 1981. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

First, the frame (itself, as we saw earlier, a device which has dropped well below visibility as the convention that it is): consider how tight it is set around the man’s face. It excludes any signifying context except that of the deep black background. Anything that might locate, pin down, domesticate, classify, or otherwise offer us clues as to who this person is or what he does, is ruled out. Second, the gaze: the man looks directly at us, wide eyed. In fact, what he looks at directly is the camera. Mapplethorpe has not had him look away to right or left, up or down, not even slightly. It is in looking at the camera that he appears to be looking at us. This is a convention known to portrait painters (who used linear perspective and ways of highlighting the eye, rather than a camera to achieve this) and filmmakers who (except in special circumstances) strictly avoid the convention in order not to break the illusion that we are looking in on another world without ourselves being seen. Third, the camera position places us completely on a level with the man. We are, in terms of frame, gaze and camera position ‘face to face’. Strictly speaking it is us in our ‘viewing position’ (not our real location in the world) who are face to face with a man depicted in this way (which, of course, may not be how we would see his face, wherever it is, in the real world, at work, in a shop, a nightclub, whatever). Do we not also feel physically close to him? All the conventional factors that we have been considering so far contribute to this sense of physical proximity. His head fills our field of vision as it is represented by the photograph and ‘he’ arrestingly answers, locks on, as it were, to our gaze. Lastly, the dark background and the arranged lighting of the head may contribute to this sense of proximity. Here is a case of signification arising from the image’s materiality. We can see the dark background as either measureless depth or flat surface, the material surface of

208  Critical Spaces

the picture itself. Seen in reproduction in this book we will tend to ‘see through’ the page to the image of an image – a poorly reproduced photograph. Seen as a framed ‘fine print’ in a photographic gallery we would be aware of the texture, lustre, and grain of the black areas of the photograph as a material surface – as ‘stuff’ rather than depicted space. Two other factors that we have already met are at work here: the location of the image and the way we attend to it or the socially appropriate mode of looking. The very size of the photograph and the rituals of looking at photographs in galleries are likely to distance us from or bring us close to the actual object. The scale of the image also positions us in relationship to it. The way in which the man’s head is lit (there is no natural light here, it is imported and arranged by the photographer), means that we ‘read’ the head as being in front of the already close black surface. It emerges from the black background. As we worked our way through the conventions that are at play in this image we saw, as they operated together, a photographic code. A set of signs that, taken together, means something to us. However, how we might express that meaning in spoken or written language is another matter. There are two reasons for this. One is a general matter of what and how images ‘mean’ and the second is particular to the kind of genre of art photography that Robert Mapplethorpe makes. In general, it can be very difficult to spell out the meanings of pictures in verbal or written language, which after all is another code. Some kind of translation is bound to take place either way but in this case from image to word. As John Berger (1972) has observed, language can never get on a level with images. Secondly, as a photographer working as an independent artist, Mapplethorpe is not charged with sending simple, clear messages or communicating unambiguous information to us. In fact, as a white gay photographer who frequently photographed naked black men his work is shot through with ambiguity and his interest in or desire to do this has provoked much debate (see Mercer, 1994: 171ff.).

Social Conventions Before we look further at the operation of photographic conventions and codes, we should recognize that photographs also work by utilizing or borrowing (by re-presenting them) many of the visual codes that are employed in ‘lived’ rather than textual forms of communication. The mimetic capacity of a photograph, the way in which the indexical marks which its surface carries can resemble the look of objects and things in the real world, means that within a photograph certain things may be depicted or represented (through photographic conventions) which are themselves conventions in their own right. These are conventions that we employ in the wider social world, in our everyday lives and its sub-cultures. The photograph was described by Roland Barthes (1977: 17) as being a ‘message without a code’. By this he meant something close to Susan Sontag’s (1979) description of the photograph as a ‘trace’, a kind of direct print off the ‘real’ without any code (break-down into units) intervening. It is, for us, much harder to see what the equivalent of the woodcutter’s conventions

Seeing Beyond Belief  209

FIGURE 16.5 

 avid Hampshire/Martin Lister. Photograph of schoolboys, circa 1986. D © Martin Lister.

are in a photograph, although in the previous example we have, hopefully, begun to do so. However, the other side of the coin, as it were, of this mimetic capacity of photography to be a trace or an imprint of the real is that it can borrow and carry all of the sign systems and codes (of dress, style, architecture, objects, body language, etc.) which, together with speech and the written word, sound, and smell, make the lived world meaningful. In the photograph in Figure 16.5 we can see how this is so. We are now using the other, more sociological, concept of convention. Much of the charge of this picture comes from the dress conventions of the boys who are represented in it. In a real sense, the photographer is using photographic codes to frame and point to this other set of signs that are used in everyday life. Consider the boy on the left of the frame. He is subverting a dress code and by doing so he is signalling his distance from the meanings of ‘respectable’, conventional, male dress codes. A tie is an item of dress that is designed to hang between the collar of a shirt and the waist after it has been wrapped around its wearer’s neck and tied in a certain way at the front, so that its knot sits neatly between the two wings of a shirt collar. The boy in the picture has not failed to achieve these conventional requirements of tie-wearing – he has deliberately used his tie to flout them. He has, literally, made it do something else. He has consumed the whole length of the tie in the knot and contrived to position it some inches away from its conventional place. The meaning of doing this will be apparent to others who also wish to resist the conventional uniformity encouraged by the institution of the school. Symbolically, at least, he is

210  Critical Spaces

signifying his sense of exclusion from the ‘community’ of the school and his inclusion or membership of ‘the lads’. He is marking out a difference. Clearly, the success of his semiotic work depends upon knowing first that there is a conventional way to wear ties. The boy in the centre of the picture has done something similar by turning his tailored and lapelled jacket into a kind of all-enveloping tunic. If we catch echoes of generic movie images of the rebel caught in the rain or cold, we are probably not far from identifying one of the sources for this particular convention.

Power and Photographic Conventions We now turn our attention to some photographs (Figures 16.6, 16.7, 16.8 and 16.9) where, given the institutions for which they were made (newspapers and magazines), we can assume some intention to communicate information was of a high priority. These are images which belong to the genre of photojournalism, images made specifically to report on events. Like the Mapplethorpe portrait, but for different reasons, such photographs are also characteristically marked by their lack of apparent artifice or display of pictorial convention. Indeed, sometimes referred to as ‘straight photography’ to distinguish it from the elaborate arrangement, setting up, lighting and theatricality of other kinds of photography (advertising, fashion, art), the very invisibility of convention seems to speak instead of photography’s power to provide direct evidence of events. The credits tell us that the photographs were taken in Africa (Ethiopia and Sudan) during periods of famine in the 1980s. The original credits also indicate that the photographers who made these photographs were working for picture agencies (Magnum and Bisson/Collectif), probably on a freelance basis, and hoping to place their work with newspapers, magazines or, possibly, famine relief charities. These photographs were reproduced as part of a special 1985 issue of the photographic journal Ten: 8 which examined the politics of famine relief. It explored the part that photography played in constructing a Eurocentric view of Africa and its peoples as economically and technologically weak, dependent victims of natural disaster. The accompanying text argues the case that photojournalists foster this view and that, together with the demands upon aid agencies to raise money, a view of Africa and Africans is constructed which renders their normal self-sufficiency and culture invisible. At the same time the way famine is represented ignores the role of capitalism and the history of imperialism in bringing about a situation whereby African economies are crippled by long-term debt repayments, the use of fertile soil to grow cash crops for export and dependency on short-term emergency aid. In the text which accompanies the reproduction of these photographs in Ten: 8, some research is cited which indicates what ideas and images of the ‘Third World’ and its peoples a group of London school pupils gained from television and photo­ reportage. They list poverty, babies dying, monsoons, disease, drought, refugees, flies, death, dirty water, beggars, malnutrition, bald children, large families, insects, poor clothing, bad teeth, kids with pot bellies, mud huts and injections (Simpson, 1985: 23).

Seeing Beyond Belief  211

FIGURE 16.6 

 ew Year’s Day, Korem camp, Wallo province, Ethiopia, 1985. © Bisson/ N Collectif.

FIGURE 16.7 

 ike Goldwater. Drought migrant, Zalazele transit centre, Tigray, 1983. M © Mike Goldwater/Alamy Stock Photo.

212  Critical Spaces

These are all important factors which bear upon matters such as the tasks and commissions which the photographers are given, the purposes of the agencies that they work for, the ‘news values’ that they are expected to provide and the selection and editing of images by editorial staff for publication (see the section earlier in this chapter, ‘Context of production’). However, in this section we wish to concentrate upon how meaning is encoded in particular photographs. The point is to see what ideological weight conventions have, especially when they operate as parts of a complex photographic code. For the photographer who wishes to avoid producing yet another image which compounds the restricted perceptions of Africa noted earlier, there will be a struggle to encode different meanings in a photograph, something that begins with the choice to deploy conventions in a single act of image making. We can see this in the two images reproduced in Figures 16.6 and 16.7. Both images represent people in obvious distress. The main signs of this distress are facial expression, the gesture of hands, bodily position, and stance. We noted earlier that these were not, strictly speaking, photographic conventions but more broadly social and cultural ones which photographs ‘cite’. They are part of the human body’s expressivity. Our ability to read the signs through which bodily and mental states are expressed is a social not a photographic skill. The photographer expertly borrows these signs and relies upon our abilities, learnt through our lived experience, to read them. Often to a high degree these signs are indexical, the class of signs famously identified by C.S. Peirce where the material sign (the signifier) is caused by what it means (the signified). The usual examples in semiotic primers are the footprint = foot, smoke = fire and knock at door = presence. They are different because they are less arbitrary and symbolic than signs like ‘dog’ or ‘chien’ are for the animal it signifies. In these latter cases, these ink marks on paper are not caused by dogs having passed this way. In Figure 16.6 there is a certain strain in the musculature of the man’s face, in his open mouth and furrowed brow, which we can recognize as meaning something in the sphere of pain and hopelessness. Likewise, in ‘Drought migrant’ (Figure 16.7), the woman’s eyes are heavy-lidded and unfocused, while she ‘holds’ her head – they signify something in the sphere of exhaustion and nervous distraction. It is hard to be precise, but we would surely agree on what they do not signify and on the spectrum of conditions and feelings where the meanings lie. A photograph trades in mimesis, in establishing perceivable and meaningful similarities between one thing (a human face) and another (a set of tones on a paper surface). There are, of course, varying degrees of such direct, symptomatic indexicality in human and bodily expressions. Consider the ‘coded’ smile which is not a direct expression of pleasure but a knowing and ironic response to disappointment or sadness. However, when such signs are themselves represented in a photograph, they are far from natural. Consider that before and after the moment of the photographic exposure that produced these images the subject’s expression and position might have been different and less culturally or symbolically expressive of distress. First, it is likely that the photographer took a number of exposures and later chose (edited) a contact strip of her or his film to choose the image in which the signs of distress (of whatever order) were most evident. (Or selections may have been made by a picture editor,

Seeing Beyond Belief  213

anxious to reinforce particular inflections of the famine story.) Second, there is no direct equivalence between a human face seen in a photograph and in other lived situations, something that was pointed out in discussing the Mapplethorpe portrait. We will now consider the material qualities of some photographs and how they work to add meaning to these social codes and, as they do so, edge us toward recognizing how the photograph is a complex construct of signs. First, we consider the edges or boundaries of the pictures: the frame. The framing of the ‘straightest’ picture is something that must be decided upon both at the time of offering up the camera’s lens to the scene and later when making a print in an enlarger (or, in the case of digitized pictures, in a computer image manipulation programme), or possibly when digitally or physically cropping the print. In ‘New Year’s Day’ (Figure 16.6) the frame is set wide: over two-thirds of the picture area represents a surface which we read as a baked and cracked plain of earth, some far-distant figures, a line of low hills behind them, a strip of almost cloudless sky. The setting of the frame in this way with the figure of the kneeling man, slightly off-centre, is the first means by which he is located and isolated in this barren space. If we imagine tightening the frame and shifting it to our left, no doubt to include a second or more figures in the picture, this image of isolation disappears. Second, we consider the depth of field, a term which refers to how much of the scene is in sharp focus and, depending upon available light and speed of film, is a factor within the photographer’s control. By choosing a combination of shutter speed and aperture (or allowing an automatic camera to set them) depth of field can be shallow or deep, restricting or amplifying the information we are given. The depth of field in this image is considerable. We see the cracked earth on which the man sits, the texture of his worn garments and the delineation of the tiny distant figures and hills. This choice of depth of field (or at least the choice not to limit it) reinforces the sense of the man’s isolation, first established by the frame. Third, we consider the quality of the light that makes the man visible and the photograph possible. Clearly this is natural ambient light (the midday sun?) which is not directly within the photographer’s control. However, it is utilized by the photographer and the way strong light with a high source, directly above the subject, describes surfaces in terms of stark contrasts is an important factor here. The deep shadow marking the man’s eye sockets and the sharp delineation of his collar bone and upper ribs are given emphasis by the photographer’s choice to make the exposure at a place and a time when the light is of this kind. Compare this with ‘Drought migrant’ (Figure 16.7) where the light is more diffuse. The focus and the light are also reinforced by the fine grain and optical resolution of the photograph. The skin of the man’s head, veins standing proud on his temple, the surface of his neck and chest, the rough texture of his clothes and the cracked earth are all very apparent to us. Through these optical means our tactile sense is engaged. Fourth, we can note that the frame or moment chosen by the photographer has the man looking upwards and out of the frame to his right. He looks up at something or someone who is invisible to us. Several factors that we have already considered work together with this gaze (the facial expression, the delineation of the face and body, the isolation in space) to make this an image of tragic supplication. Such a

214  Critical Spaces

gaze also adds a narrative element to the picture: something is happening outside of the space and the moment of the photograph to which it nevertheless alludes. The camera’s point of view (the place from which we look) is high. He kneels; ‘we’ stand. Turning now to ‘Drought migrant’ (Figure 16.7) we can see how each of these factors plays a different role. The face and upper body of the woman occupies over half of the framed picture area. We are positioned on a level with her. She is shot in close-up and, as with the Mapplethorpe photograph, codes of space and personal proximity are put in play. Yet, markedly different from either the Mapplethorpe or the previous picture of the man on the parched plain, her eyes do not engage ours or actively direct our attention elsewhere. They look forward and out of the picture space towards the space we occupy as viewers, but in a ‘blank’, unfocused way that does not directly answer our own gaze and we can read as a symptom of exhaustion. The light in this photograph is less harsh and revealing of contrasts, softer and more diffuse, than that in ‘New Year’s Day’ (Figure 16.6). The depth of field is shallow, and we cannot read what is behind her or where she is, except to see a blurred image of a second woman whose gesture echoes her own. Overall, even though we have again a single main subject in a landscape format, we can conclude that this woman is not positioned and represented as an isolated victim seeking or imploring help, physical state unflinchingly delineated, as is the man in ‘New Year’s Day’. The softness of light and grain, the interiority of the women’s gaze together with the rhetorical quality of the way her hands are included in the frame and cradle her head, and a choreographed quality in the way this gesture is echoed in the second figure, approaches an aestheticization of the horror of the woman’s situation.

FIGURE 16.8 

 hris Steele-Perkins. USAid, Sudan, 1985. © Chris Steele-Perkins/ C Magnum Photos.

Seeing Beyond Belief  215

FIGURE 16.9 

 ike Wells, A food convoy passing through Korem Refugee Camp on its M way to Mekele Camp in Tigray, February 1985. © Mike Wells.

Finally, we turn to two other images (Figures 16.8 and 16.9) from the same edition of the magazine. These enable us to introduce some new points about photographic codes and the ‘positioning’ of the viewer. They are also useful because in comparing this new pair with the two images of ‘famine’ we have so far been discussing, we are alerted to the relative similarity of those two images rather than their differences, which has been the object of our analysis so far. ‘USAid’ (Figure 16.8) introduces the element of juxtaposition within the frame. The depth of field ensures that we read the letters USAID on the side of a Range Rover positioned on the picture plane close to a group of women huddled in the foreground. For the European-American viewer the ‘ethnic’ dress and swathed faces of the women are played off against an icon of the West’s advanced automobile technology. At first sight, like the man in ‘New Year’s Day’ (Figure 16.6), we see that the attention of the group of women is directed towards another event taking place beyond the frame, until we notice that the third woman from the left is looking across the direction of the others’ gazes and directly at the camera. Unlike the explicit and direct meeting of the camera’s/viewer’s gaze in the Mapplethorpe image (which makes no pretension to be a documentary record), we have here a rupturing of the documentary rhetoric. Our position as voyeurs (seeing but not seen) and the power of the camera to scrutinize (without its operation itself being scrutinized) is revealed. ‘We’ are seen, and our gaze is returned. So, in this image the photographer is, in a sense, caught in the act of constructing, through juxtaposition, a statement about what is before him.

216  Critical Spaces

In ‘A food convoy’ (Figure 16.9), for the first time in this brief analysis, the camera shares the viewpoint and perspective of the subjects in the photograph. We stand with and behind the group who attend to their water pots and as the child raises its hand at the passing Red Cross convoy. If we return to think about the image of the ‘redneck’ in the Marlboro advertisement with which we began this chapter, which similarly ‘invites’ us to look with the depicted subject(s), we can begin to see how the more technical proposition of a ‘viewing position’ opens into the fuller concept of a ‘subject position’. Who are we, in each case? Who looks like this, with others, and at what?

Looking: Recognition and Identity Who is the viewer and how are they placed to look? Being ‘placed’, part of having an identity, is to some extent given by the form of the image itself. In short, all or most images in the Western pictorial tradition (and this includes most photographic images where the camera and its lenses have become key mechanisms in furthering and elaborating this tradition) are designed or structured to ‘tell’ the viewer where they are. As Bill Nichols has argued: ‘Renaissance painters fabricated textual systems approximating the cues relating to normal perception better than any other strategy until the emergence of photography.’ (Nichols, 1981: 52). As we have already noted, camera technology was developed and adjusted to take on perspectival conventions already established within Western art. Nichols goes on to argue that just as the painting stands in for that which it represents, so perspective, organized in relation to a singular imaginary point of origin, stands in for the emphasis on the individual concomitant with the emergence in the West of entrepreneurial capitalism. Thus, the viewing position constructed via the camera cannot be seen as ideologically neutral. Rather, particular value systems, organized around individualism, inform our look. That this viewing position is voyeuristic has become something of a preoccupation within cultural studies. As we have already remarked, in the Mapplethorpe portrait the man viewed seems to look back at us. This is relatively unusual. More commonly, we look at images of people who appear unaware of the presence of the camera and – by extension – the possibility of becoming the object of someone else’s look. Thus, it has been argued, the viewer exercises a controlling gaze. This notion of the voyeuristic gaze has been used to describe the way in which tourists look at the non-Western world as well as the way men often look at women. In her well-known article on narrative cinema and visual pleasure, first published in 1975, Laura Mulvey drew upon Freud’s emphasis upon scopophilia as a primary human instinct and his ensuing discussion of voyeurism within her analysis of the processes and pleasures of popular cinema spectatorship. She argued that the (male) spectator voyeuristically gratifies his erotogenic impulses through his

Seeing Beyond Belief  217

controlling look, which is mediated through the look of the camera, and through the look of male characters within the world of the film, at the female figure on screen. The argument is complex but, in brief, she concluded that pleasure in popular narrative cinema emerges from the fetishization of the female figure as an object of desire. Although subsequently criticized for its narrow concern with the male heterosexual spectator, this essay was ground-breaking at the time as it was an early attempt to articulate psychoanalysis and feminism in order to analyse visual pleasure. Victor Burgin took up this model in relation to looking at photographs: Following recent work in film theory, and adopting its terminology, we may identify four basic types of look in the photograph: the look of the camera as it photographs the ‘pro-photographic’ event; the look of the viewer as he or she looks at the photograph; the ‘intra-diegetic’ looks exchanged between people (actors) depicted in the photograph (and/or looks from actors towards objects); and the look the actor may direct to the camera. (Burgin, 1982: 148) ‘An Oblique glance’ (Figure 16.2) offers an exemplary opportunity to demonstrate and discuss the mobilization of the look within photography. The camera occupies the essentially voyeuristic position of being hidden in the shop out of the sight of passers-by, thus constructing a voyeuristic position for the viewer of the photograph whose ‘catching out’ of the couple cannot be acknowledged since they have no idea of the presence of the candid camera. Since the camera is not acknowledged, what preoccupies us here, and, indeed, offers the primary source of interest and amusement, is the exchange of looks within the photograph. To be more precise, it is a traversing of looks, rather than an exchange, since the woman is contemplating, and appears to be speaking about, an image which we cannot see whilst the man glances across her to contemplate the fetishized nakedness of the woman depicted in the ornately framed painting. The humour lies in this traverse, in the neat observation of a subversive moment which is heightened through the presence of the boys in the background outside the shop across the road (perhaps engaged in some mischievous activity) – in other words, the ordinariness of the setting. As Mary Ann Doane has argued, this image appears to centre upon the woman looking, yet what makes it interesting in terms of the psychoanalytic is the scopophilic gaze of the man placed half out of the frame (Doane, 1991: 28ff.). His gaze effectively encases and negates hers, not only because the object of her look cannot be seen and shared by us but also because the geometry of the image is defined by the male axis of vision across from one edge of the image to the other. Her gaze centres on an image invisible to us and has no part to play within the triangle of looks which offers complicity between the man, the nude and the viewer and thus animates the image. Indeed, the woman, despite being central within the picture,

218  Critical Spaces

functions as the butt of the joke, which is what the picture is actually about. This joke confirms women’s place as object of the look since the key female presence is not that of the woman within the couple but that of the nude in the painting. This photograph engages the viewer in complicity with the man in ways which, as with the photograph of the schoolboys discussed earlier, articulate recognition of and, possibly, identification with a certain subversiveness. In this instance, however, the position of identification is distinctly uncomfortable for the female viewer since it is founded on the objectification of the naked woman, in phallocentric understandings of desire. The bringing of psychoanalysis to bear on the image has been influential. As noted earlier, Mulvey (1975) drew upon Freud’s discussion of scopophilia, the instinct to look, and voyeurism, the desire to exercise a controlling gaze, in order to discuss the positioning of the female figure in popular cinema as the passive bearer or object of the male gaze. For Freud woman was ‘other’ and femininity was a mysterious riddle. As he famously remarked about women, ‘you are yourselves the problem.’ (Freud, 1933: 146). Mulvey drew upon psychoanalysis to investigate ways in which, in narrative film, pleasure in looking was constructed around the active male look. Despite criticism for focusing on the male gaze and heterosexual looking/desire, her essay made a key contribution within Visual Cultural Studies as it introduced debates about the pleasures of looking at images which articulated questions of social power – in this instance, patriarchy – with questions of sexuality and the erotogenic imaginary. Within Visual Cultural Studies such debates broadened initially to take account of the female gaze, of homosexual looking and of what John Urry has termed ‘the tourist gaze.’ (Urry, 1990). As Patricia Holland has remarked in relation to ethnic otherness: The coming of photography gave rise to a new set of dilemmas around the production of the exotic. On the one hand it displayed images of hitherto unknown and remarkable places and people, but at the same time it had to be recognised that these were real places and people. The veneer of exoticism may be confirmed or challenged by the photograph itself. (Holland, 1997: 113) Thus, broader parameters have been adopted: analysis of the gaze now considers a complexity of social positions and power relations and takes into account the implications of looking from positions defined as ‘other’. More recently issues pertaining to the fluidity of identity have been brought into play. Here, psychoanalytically informed questions relating to identity and identification processes influence sociologically determined questions associated with cultural self-location. Following Laplanche and Pontalis, we can take identification as a ‘psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the

Seeing Beyond Belief  219

other provides.’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988: 205). They add that ‘it is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified’. This obviously draws upon Freud, but it can take us into discussions of the power of representation, and of identification processes within societies acknowledged as multi-cultural ethnically, and in terms such as class or region. As Bailey and Hall have argued: Post-structuralist thinking opposes the notion that a person is born with a fixed identity – that all black people, for example, have an essential, underlying black identity which is the same and unchanging. It suggests instead that identities are floating, that meaning is not fixed and universally true at all times for all people, and that the subject is constructed through the unconscious in desire, fantasy, and memory. This theory helps explain why for example an individual might shift from feeling black in one way when they are young, to black in another way when they are older – and not only black but male/female, and not only black but gay/heterosexual, and so on. (Bailey and Hall, 1992: 20) They add that ‘identities are positional in relation to the discourses around us. That is why the notion of representation is so important – identity can only be articulated as a set of representations’. (loc cit: 21). Here, first, identity is seen as unfixed and, second, it is conceptualized as complexly and ambiguously caught up within identification processes. Returning to the pictures of African people disempowered economically and subjected to famine (Figures 16.6 to 16.9), how are we positioned as viewers of these pictures? Here many of us are clearly not like the people pictured. Our position is as virtual tourist, Western outsider, as onlooker. However, ambiguities do enter in. We may identify at some level as women, or in terms of ethnicity, not with the plight of the people depicted so much as in a sort of universal humanitarian way. This identification is in accord with the rhetoric of these images which invite compassion and are broadly recognizable as the type of pictures used by aid agencies and charities for fund-raising. Fundamental within this is the reassurance of otherness and of our safer social and political location. By contrast, if we return to the Mapplethorpe portrait, our sense of self may be more ambiguously caught up within a set of slippages associated with sexuality and, from a white point of view, fascination with the ethnic other (which seems to have motivated several of Mapplethorpe’s portraits and has been one of the key sources of offence at, and attempts to censor, his work). Yet a similar complexity is associated with a recent advertisement for Pirelli tyres (Figure 16.10, p.220). Pirelli are known for producing calendars featuring naked women as pin-ups, which, in the 1970s, attracted disapprobation from feminists concerned with media representations of women. This image of Carl Lewis, the male athlete, poised as if to sprint but wearing red stilettos (which would prevent him from running anywhere) references

220  Critical Spaces

FIGURE 16.10 

 arl Lewis photograph for a Pirelli advertisement, 1994. © Pirelli C Foundation.

the fetishization of the pin-up, deliberately playing upon ambiguities in gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. As an image of a black ‘hero’ it challenges and disorients assumptions. We might fantasize ourselves as a successful athlete, and thus in some way identify with Carl Lewis, but the ambiguity of this image probably stops us short in our tracks. In discussing the spectacle of the other, Stuart Hall comments that this image works through acknowledging difference: ‘The conventional identification of Lewis with black male athletes and with a sort of “super-masculinity” is disturbed and undercut by the invocation of his “femininity” – and what marks this is the signifier of the red shoes.’ (Hall, 1997: 233). The advert arrests attention through playing with conventional signifiers and stereotypes, confident in our reading competencies, that is, in our ability to unpick and enjoy the range of intertextual references mobilized. So far, all the pictures we have discussed have figured people. Finally, in Figure 16.11, we consider a landscape empty of people but replete with cultural references. Here a photograph of a biscuit cutter, in the shape of a sheep, is placed on top of a pile of hewn stone in the foreground of a moorland landscape. It has been constructed primarily as a gallery image and, as with all images, relies upon the viewer bringing a set of previous knowledges or competencies into play. It is one of a series in which domestic romanticization of the rural is wryly noted through the photographing of a toy or kitchen utensil in the location which it references. This work is culturally specific, relying as it does on familiarity with British land, with

Seeing Beyond Belief  221

landscape aesthetics and with what we might term the ‘Laura Ashley – National Trust’ invocation of the pastoral. The stone walls imply that this is moorland, rather than central England farmland. As with all photographs it is productive to discuss this image in immanent terms, taking account of framing, composition, tonal contrast, and accordance with the photographic convention of representing land through translating views into black and white landscapes. In formal terms, it complies with the landscape aesthetic of horizontal divide as a one-third/two-thirds proportion; the land rolls away downwards before rising into the distance; the stone wall is foregrounded through sharp photographic focus which we decode as emphasizing its significance within the picture. The camera has been placed to underscore the placing of the ‘sheep’ in this position, overviewing the land, exercising a territorial gaze. Irony resides in recognizing the incongruity of placing a biscuit cutter to stand in for the relation of actual sheep to the moorlands which are their pastures and which, in turn, are grasslands kept from overgrowth through the grazing of sheep, goats and ponies. From the point of view of the viewer there is yet more to be said. The wall on which the sheep stands represents a boundary or obstacle beyond which we are not supposed to step. We are excluded from the empty, expansive hillsides, Arguably, we are reminded of our place as observer, rather than as roamer. For those of us who draw rural England into our sense of national identity, there is also reassurance of something which may seem essentially British. Here we might contemplate the

FIGURE 16.11 

Sean Bonnell. ‘Chalk Down’, from the series Groundings, 1996. © Sian Bonnell.

222  Critical Spaces

priority allocated to looking, to opticality, implicit in the photograph as a visual medium and, in this instance, in the photographing of land as landscape, The image may conjure up affective memories of other senses heightened in actual experience of the rural: sound, smell, touch. So, as we now see, ‘viewing position’ is one component of a more complex concept – a ‘subject position’. The simplest examples include those images which place us in a privileged position to see things clearly or synoptically (some argue ‘panoptically’), Others cast us as voyeurs, hidden from the view of those depicted (‘others’) on whose bodies or actions we gaze from our occluded position. Yet other images belittle us, overawing us with their scale, relative physical placing, and the perspectival rendering of the position of those who look down upon us. This particularly relates to certain settings: church, art gallery and, as we have seen in the case of Marlboro, billboards. Many images centre us in a complex world laid out for our eye in ways that would be impossible in reality. Issues of proximity, intimacy and distance are important here. However, beyond placing us, images also tell us who we are in other ways; they offer us an identity. This is a transient sense of identity consequent upon looking at the image, engaging with and enjoying the messages and meanings it then gives to us.

Conclusion As Annette Kuhn has succinctly commented: In general, photographs connote truth and authenticity when what is ‘seen’ by the camera eye appears to be an adequate stand-in for what is seen by the human eye. Photographs are coded, but usually so as to appear uncoded. The truth/authenticity potential of photography is tied in with the idea that seeing is believing. Photography draws on an ideology of the visible as evidence. (Kuhn, 1985: 27) Nevertheless, photographs are often treated as if they were a source of objective and disinterested facts, rather than as complexly coded cultural artefacts. Roland Barthes (1984) draws our attention to the fleeting nature of the moment captured in the photograph and the extent to which contemporary experience, along with limited knowledge of the specific context within which – and purpose for which – the photograph was taken, inform ways of seeing and introduce slippages of meaning into any view of the image as witness. Photography contributes to the construction of history; it is not a passive bystander. When photographs are presented as ‘evidence’ of past events and circumstances, a set of assumptions about their accuracy as documents is being made. Such assumptions are usually acknowledged through statements of provenance: dates, sources, and so on. But this is to ignore wider questions about photographs concerning their status and processes of interpretation. As we have already noted, usefully, Susan Sontag (1979) uses the term ‘trace’ to express the caution with which the analyst needs to think about the relation of the photograph

Seeing Beyond Belief  223

to the material world. As Allan Sekula remarks: ‘Ultimately, then, when photographs are uncritically presented as historical documents, they are transformed into aesthetic objects. Accordingly, the pretence to historical understanding remains although that understanding has been replaced by aesthetic experience’ (Sekula, 1991: 123). As this implies the original reasons for making an image, and the constraints operating within the context of its making, may disappear only to be replaced by new and substitute references and expectations. Furthermore, whatever an image depicts or shows us, the material means and medium employed to do so have a bearing upon which qualities of the depicted thing or event are foregrounded. For instance, our responses are influenced by use of glossy paper as against cheaper, matt, absorbent paper or by the differences brought about by use of high- or low-­ resolution VDUs when considering images downloaded from a website or stored on CD-ROM. Finally, it is not possible to separate out ‘what is said’ from ‘how it is said’. To recognize this is not necessarily to go as far as Marshall McLuhan’s edict that ‘the medium is the message’ but it is to recognize a degree of sense in his insight. Roland Barthes used the term ‘the rhetoric of the image’ to point to the way in which seductive or persuasive means are employed to make an argument or to convince us to see things a certain way. The photographic image is, then, a complex and curious object. As we have shown, the methodological eclecticism of Cultural Studies allows the analyst to attend to the many moments within the cycle of production, circulation, and consumption of the image through which meanings accumulate, slip and shift. This is achieved through holding in play diverse approaches to the image which in their interaction acknowledge this complexity. This is simultaneously its strength and a point of criticism.5 Indeed, in some ways Cultural Studies may seem to be a rather messy field, lacking precise boundaries arid unconstrained by any single set of disciplinary protocols. But its ability to articulate a range of systematic methods of analysis to complexly address questions of form, production, reception and meaning while taking account of political issues, institutions and ideological discourses makes it comprehensive, significant, and fascinating as a field of operation. The refusal to be prescriptive about method but rather to point to a variety of methods, and to encourage analysts to bring into play their own experience, further underpins the strength of Cultural Studies. Martin Lister and Liz Wells, 2001. Originally published in Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt eds. Handbook of Visual Analysis, 2001. London: Sage. Note: Martin Lister is Professor Emeritus in Visual Culture at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His publications include: as co-author, New Media,: A Critical Introduction, 2009, 2nd ed.; as editor, The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 2013, 2nd ed.; ‘The times of photography’ in Time, Media and Modernity, 2012, and ‘Overlooking, rarely looking, and not looking’ in Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography, 2013. He was a founding editor of the Routledge journal, photographies.

224  Critical Spaces

Notes 1 However, for the contrary argument, that Cultural Studies should be or is a discipline, see Bennett, T. (1998). 2 Given that historically men have been more active than women as photographers, and given the criteria mentioned earlier, together with the copyright availability of examples known to us, what we have constructed is a sequence mainly of photographs of men by men. A number are also of black African people, photographed by white photojournalists and now commented upon by white intellectuals. Does this matter? Cultural Studies (sometimes referred to as ‘victim studies’) is frequently charged with an obsession with political correctness (PC). We would say it does matter but the answer is not to add a PC ‘quota’ of images. The point is to be aware, reflexively, of how the work we are doing (the academic exemplification and exegesis of a kind of method) and the conditions in which we are doing it mean that some things have been rendered invisible and others have not been foregrounded. 3 News values in Media Studies refers to dominant agendas within news reporting associated with subject-matter, urgency, assumptions about the appropriate style of treatment, and so on. 4 An instance would be Oliveri Toscani, the Benetton art director, whose name in itself now serves to confer extra interest in the campaign or product, recently exemplified in his leadership of a campaign to draw attention to tourism and its implications for the survival of Venice. 5 For instance, Victor Burgin has accused Cultural Studies of borrowing from psychoanalysis in ways which over-simplify and therefore misappropriate concepts and terminology (Burgin, 1996).

References Bailey, David A. and Hall, Stuart (1992) ‘The vertigo of displacement: shifts in black documentary practices’, Critical Decade Ten.8, 2 (3): 14–23. Barthes, Roland (1977) ‘The photographic message’, in S. Heath (ed.) Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana. Barthes, Roland (1984) Camera Lucida. London: Fontana (originally published in French, 1980). Baxandall, Michael (1988) Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. (1st ed. 1972). Bennett, Tony (1998) Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Burgin, Victor (1982) ‘Looking at photographs’, in V. Burgin (ed.) Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan. Burgin, Victor (1996) In/different Spaces. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cartier-Bresson, Henri (1952) The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon and Schuster. Doane, Mary Ann (1991) ‘Film and the masquerade: theorizing the female spectator’, in Doane, Mary Ann (ed.) Femmes Fatales. London: Routledge. Du Gay, Paul (ed) (1997) The Production of Culture/Cultures of Production. London: Sage and Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1933) ‘Femininity’, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, vol. 2 of The Penguin Freud Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hall, Stuart (ed.) (1997) ‘The spectacle of the Other’, in Hall S. (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage and Oxford University Press.

Seeing Beyond Belief  225

Hamilton, P. (1995) Robert Doisneau, A Photographer’s Life. New York: Abbeville Press. Henning, Michelle (1995) ‘Digital encounters: mythical pasts and electronic presence’, in Lister, M. (ed.), The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. London: Routledge. Holland, Patricia (1997) ‘Sweet it is to scan: personal photography and popular photography’, in Wells L. (ed.), Photography: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Kuhn, Annette (1985) The Power of the Image. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand (1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Nicholson­Smith. London: Karnac and the Institute of Psychoanalysis (originally published 1973). Mercer, Kobena (1994) ‘Reading racial fetishism: the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, in Mercer, K. (ed.) Welcome to the Jungle. London: Routledge. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.) (1998) The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16 (3), Autumn: 6–18. Nichols, Bill (1981) Image and Ideology. Bloomington, IN: University of lndiana Press. Panofsky, Erwin (1955) Meaning in the Visual Arts. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rogoff, Irit (1998) ‘Studying visual culture’, in Mirzoeff, N. (ed), op cit. London: Routledge. Sekula, Allan (1991) ‘Reading an archive’, in Brian Wallis and Marcia Tucker (eds), Blasted Allegories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Simpson, A. (ed.) (1985) Famine and Photojournalism, Ten: 8, 19. Slater, Don (1991) ‘Consuming Kodak’, in Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (eds), Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography. London: Virago. Snyder, Joel and Allen, N.W. (1982) ‘Photography, vision and representation’, in T. Barrow, Armitage, S. and Tydeman, W. (eds), Reading into Photography. Alberquerque: University of New Mexico Press (first published 1975). Sontag, Susan (1979) On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Urry, John (1990) The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. van Leeuwen, Theo (2001) ‘Semiotics and Iconography’ in van Leeuwen, Theo & Jewitt, Carey (2001) Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage.

17 THE CRITICAL FORUM

Problematising the Theory-Practice Relation Imagine a dozen or so filmmakers – directors, writers, actors, producers, photographers, video artist, journalists, even teachers – sitting in a darkened room, screening, and discussing each other’s work, or engaged in debate provoked by a presentation on the experimental, or listening and taking notes at a lecturer-led session on Bakhtin or Foucault related to popular culture or theories of knowledge. Here we have a critical forum! Concern to explore the interrelation of theory and practice has, variously, been at the heart of independent filmmaking, as well as central to the formal educational curriculum in many higher education establishments. There are many relatively recent examples of workshops constructed as (ideally) ‘safe’ collective space within which exploration of ideas and practices could be fostered, and which fed back into the development of British film culture.1 Practice is informed by theory – whether or not this is acknowledged by the practitioner. Conversely, to be heuristically useful, film theory needs to be grounded in analysis and understanding of practices – creative, institutional, and interpretative. In other words, practice is theory-driven and theory at its best is empirically underpinned.2 For this reason we are interested, within media studies, in constructing situations within which the integral relation between theory and practice can be explicitly problematised and explored. I want to argue that this can best be achieved through the centrality of the critical workshop within the educational curriculum. By ‘critical workshop’ I mean the constitution of a forum centred on praxis in film, video and new media, a form of creative laboratory.3

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-22

The Critical Forum  227

MA Independent Film and Video This course (MA IFV) was established in the mid-1980s at what was then St Martin’s College of Art. It was a part-time course, pursued over two years, and was initially developed within a fine art context.4 It was conceptualised as a practice-­related course with emphasis upon an annual production-skills Summer School, upon workshops on work-in-progress, and upon a work placement in the second year of studies. The pedagogic model was one of parallel involvement in critical and theoretical studies, and in production-based experience. ‘Practice’ was defined in broad terms, recognising the interrelation of the moments of production, distribution, and exhibition, and exploring interconnected systems and concerns. Assessment rested upon practical work, and a placement report, as well as two extended essays. In 1990 The London Institute consolidated its film and video provision through the establishment of the School of Media at the London College of Printing, and the course was relocated there.5 Significantly, the production element of the course was then dropped – more for pragmatic reasons than for pedagogical ones.6 Film and video provision at the School of Media is premised on a philosophy of the interrelation of theory and practice, upon historical contextualisation and upon acknowledging cultural diversity; this philosophy informs the MAs in Screenwriting, and in Documentary Research (as well as the undergraduate programme). Thus, in principle, the School of Media offers practice-centred courses at postgraduate level which are geared towards career enhancement. We do not offer ‘high theory’. Rather we employ the workshop model to investigate contemporary practices and foster student creativity. Indeed, the part-time MAs have constructed a new form of relationship between the education institution and contemporary cultural industries. MA Independent Film and Video was thus uniquely geared for practitioners. It was concerned with the culturally independent sector within film and video and aimed to recruit people working, or wishing to work, in that field. It recruited film and video practitioners; those employed in distribution, exhibition, or policy development; journalists, researchers, and educators (hereafter referred to generically either as ‘filmmakers’ or ‘practitioners’).7 Indeed, through recruitment the course constructed its central resource, namely, the diversity of knowledge and experience brought into play by students within each cohort. Historically, the focus of the course was upon ‘alternative’ practices – those which rest outside, or alongside, the mainstream including experimental, critical, or community-based work. In its final years it was not a ‘practical’ course, although, despite the termination of Summer Schools, there remained some focus upon the fostering of developments in students’ own practice. The primary purpose of the course, throughout its fourteen or so years, was to empower students through the fostering of critical understanding of contemporary debates and practices, their historical emergence, and their location in relation to broader cultural debates and concerns, thus enabling them to appraise

228  Critical Spaces

and develop their practice and to situate it within broader perspectives. The course thus aimed to induce historical, theoretical, and critical understanding of film and video (and, increasingly, new media) taking account of aesthetic issues, ideological discourses, and the political economy of the sector. Its primary objective was, in some senses, empowerment through intellectual confidence building.8

Film Theory for Film Practice Filmmakers need film theory. They draw upon it implicitly in their creative work. Logically, debates within film theory are central to the educational curriculum for filmmaking. But what is meant by film theory? In recent years, in Britain and North America, emphasis has been laid upon film theory as a relatively autonomous arena or discipline within the Humanities. This has been political and pragmatic (in terms of establishing the field within the university sector, soliciting research funding, and so on) as much as academic. As is generally acknowledged, film theory, historically, has been hybrid, drawing heterogeneously from, for instance, literary (narrative) theory, dramaturgy, aesthetics, chemistry, physics (optics), as well as the social sciences (reception studies). Recent film theory has benefited from the insights of postmodern debates, from psychoanalysis, gender studies, queer theory, and so on. In sum, film theory is essentially (albeit not uniquely) heterogeneous. How, then, to prioritise the potential range of theoretical starting points and topics for critical discussion in ways which best act as touchstones for fuelling and propelling the academic interests and desires of filmmakers? And how to achieve this constructively, in ways which feed – rather than stifle – the creative concerns of the practitioner? I have grown accustomed to thinking this in terms of three strands of concerns: first, theory pertaining to the critical analysis of film including the mapping of the historical development of ways of thinking about film (broadly, film theory). Second, film as a phenomenon thought within the more widely conceptualised field of visual cultural studies (broadly, visual cultural studies). Third, the politics of cinema and of survival within cinema industries, by which, in this context, I refer to low budget and no budget filmmaking, non-mainstream exhibition spaces, and so on, as well as the more obvious mainstream modes of funding, organisation and control (broadly, political economy of cinema). What emerges is that there is no such thing as ‘the film studies’ curriculum, or, indeed, the visual cultural studies curriculum for filmmakers. Rather, courses must specify pedagogic objectives centrally appropriate to the specific student group (in this case, practitioners). This specification provokes particular hierarchies of concern in terms of theory and criticism. Where the primary agenda is empowerment, then the objective is to equip students with a broad set of theoretical tools and questions, appropriate to film analysis, but not necessarily exclusive to film theory. It is the comprehension of the parameters of debate, and the fostering of the ability to apply methodologies in relation to research issues, which is central to this (postgraduate) level and type of objective within media education.

The Critical Forum  229

Hence the centrality of the critical workshop as a forum for application of theoretical perspectives to film analysis and for discussion of contemporary contexts and practices. To take a few examples of recent years: •

An argument broke out following a screening of an extract from Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) during which discussion an Italian student was highly resistant to the assertive dismissal, by a British student, of a particular scene from the film on the grounds that it was ‘melodramatic’. This discussion led her to pursue research exploring sub-titling since, on her further investigation, it became clear that dimensions of the scene in question, specifically a song playing on the radio, which in Italian might be interpreted as undercutting the plotline, were not translated, and that this limited the complexity of layering of meaning for the non-Italian-speaking audience. (This ex-student now works in continuity as well as in translation/sub-titling.)

Thus, the issue of cross-cultural interpretation was brought in to focus during group discussion, picked up for further exploration by one student, for whom the issues fed into her current work in translation and, increasingly, employment within continuity. This meant that the discussion was brought back to the group at a later stage in the context of presentation of dissertation topics, arguments, and research findings. •

A student, an actor-director and producer, who has a particular interest in personal documentary, studied the films of Ross McElwee for her first extended essay. She subsequently directed her first film in which she retraced her childhood experience of the American summer camp. (Her film, True Blue Camper, won the ICA Dick award for best short film, 1996.)

Her research clearly related to her own developing practice, and the group benefitted from a ‘preview’ screening and discussion of the film. Open screening sessions within which students bring in work-in-progress, as well as recently completed projects, for discussion within what would have become established as a ‘safe’ space were central to the principle of creative laboratory. •

A student, with a background in printmaking and set design, who had made some visits to Japan and forged some links with filmmakers there, pursued research on Japanese experimental cinema (film, video, digital) for his final dissertation. (He subsequently co-curated a festival of Japanese experimental cinema at the ICA (Institute for Contemporary Arts), London, September 1999. This was followed by a scholarship to spend six months in Japan.)

These are particular examples – and there are many more – of instances wherein the sharing of information, particular interests, specific investigations – practical and academic – were woven into the course experience. As a part-time course, pursued over two years, the programme developed from being organised primarily in terms

230  Critical Spaces

of a taught curriculum, via the establishment of the workshop scenario and group research projects towards, in the final six months, student-led, dissertation research seminars. I took it as a matter of (my personal) professional honour that each ­student would in some way demonstrate a learning curve in terms of project pitching and the ability to coherently present themselves, their project, and their material (­relevant to pitching ideas for gallery or film funding, as well as in more academic situations). Indeed, all students were required to become equipped to present their own work, creative/academic, within seminar situations – and, indeed, they did! Here I could cite several examples, but one probably suffices – that of a (reserved, nay, taciturn) painter-turned-video-artist who, in the first term, upon being programmed to talk about himself and show examples of his personal practice, was able only to speak his name. In other words, although he could show slides of his work, he could not articulate much about his practice. Two years later I sat at the back of the room as he spent an hour defending, verbally, a particular theoretical position, traced via Deleuze and Guattari, illustrating his argument with examples ranging from Herzog to Viola. And yes, I would not be in the least bit nervous as (ex-) tutor were he, or others, to be contributing to workshops, seminars, conferences, or festivals as reflective practitioners. To reiterate, that was the purpose of this course which itself, in the year 2000, was in abeyance at The London Institute but which, as I emphasised earlier, has in common with other part-time postgraduate courses, an emphasis on empowerment through critical reflection upon practice which is fostered through the workshop process. Alongside this programme, which was carefully constructed in terms of pedagogical principles whilst appearing relatively open and relaxed, there were regular screenings and discussions of student work and, more broadly, informal networking opportunities. It was common for ongoing films, videos, and other projects, initiated by any one of the students, to involve several others, thus taking advantage of the diversity of expertise, technical skills, interests, and aspirations within the group. Such initiatives were technically (in terms of course objectives, or assessment procedures) outside of the course itself; but in fact, this interaction was absolutely central to its day-to-day operations in terms of individual self-development through collective practice. Not only were students the key resource in pedagogical terms, but also, each cohort variously operated in terms which transcended the basic remit of the course.

A Few Final Points At risk of sounding pious, it is worth noting that good pedagogy involves creating discursive spaces, not merely relaying information (empirical, or heuristic, in terms of mapping and investigating theoretical debates). Shared experience contributes to creating the safe space, one within which mutual trust fosters explorative discussion. Such a forum enjoys collective response to audio-visual spectacle, proceeds often through laughter, develops intensity through body language, and is founded upon the sociality of physical presence. Websites and chatrooms, whilst sometimes valuable intellectually, and certainly interesting in various curious ways, cannot replicate the workshop experience. If the new millennium is ushering in new debates

The Critical Forum  231

about pedagogy, and about the student experience, then let us stress the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the critical workshop that is and should be at the heart of film, video, and multimedia education. This creative laboratory is geared towards fostering reflection both on and within practice. As such we need to find ways of, variously, maintaining scenarios or spaces within which experimentation, reflection on practice and associated debates are fostered, indeed, defended as axiomatic to creative practice. Liz Wells, 2000. Originally published in The Journal of Media Practice, Vol 1:2, 2000. Bristol: Intellect. Note: This chapter is included because, although the example cited relates to a film programme and dates from over two decades ago, the pedagogic principles and the notion of a creative laboratory/workshop is widely relevant within arts education, including photography, especially at postgraduate taught and research levels. Re-reading this in 2022, with the shift to online discussion groups that was necessitated by covid-19 lockdowns, I was struck by the prescience of emphasis on the value of the in-person, collaborative workshop experience.

Notes 1 Film co-ops established in London, Bristol, Exeter and elsewhere from the 1970s on, and the Black workshops sponsored by the BFI (British Film Institute) in the 1980s, were prominent examples. 2 For a mythologised ‘classic’ debate reference E. P. Thompson’s spirited attack on Althusserian Marxist philosophy in The Poverty of Theory and other essays. London: Merlin Press, 1978. 3 This references the Constructivist emphasis upon a laboratory approach to exploration in the arts. It also draws upon the art school model of studio-based seminars. I am not claiming originality. Indeed, to do so would be to ignore the pedagogic approach central to the work of many colleagues at the School of Media and elsewhere. (Whilst slightly different in objective, the Open University Summer School is one of the best-known examples of emphasis upon the collective study experience.) 4 Initiated as a postgraduate diploma and developed at (now) Central St Martin’s by William Raban, filmmaker and lecturer; since 1997, a close colleague at LCP (London College of Printing). 5 Ian Green, who oversaw the move to the School of Media, left to take up a post at the University of Westminster in January 1993. I took over as course leader in September 1994. Validation for the course ran out in 1999. At the time of writing the course was in suspension, although, of course, its reputation, and the principles upon which it was founded and has been run, remain valid and pertinent. 6 Access to production facilities remained prioritised for undergraduates. 7 The nearest ‘competition’ in terms of recruitment were the BFI/Birkbeck and the University of Westminster. 8 Ex-students generally extol its virtues. A number are now in university posts and/or registered for research degrees. Furthermore, individual research projects leading to the two extended essays required, were sometimes truly original in appraising particular historic or contemporary developments. This has often been noted by external examiners. Indeed, externals have regularly commended student work and proposed that I, as course leader, should recommend selected dissertations for publication.

18 THEN AND NOW Some Notes on Photography and Theory

Framing Moments What is a photograph? Photographs operate through framing a moment in time, portraying objects, people, and places as they appeared within the view of the camera. They record ‘then’ and ‘there’ for us to contemplate ‘now’ and ‘here’. Photography’s ability to ‘freeze’ a moment for subsequent contemplation has, as has often been remarked, contributed to dislocation of time and space, illuminating history, and illustrating geography. As Susan Sontag famously remarked in On Photography (Sontag 1977), photographs give us an unearned sense of familiarity with the world. This contributes forcefully within our sense of personal and cultural identity. This locates photography within a large conceptual spectrum. It follows that a range of theoretical approaches may be relevant to analyzing the operations of photographs within various fields of practice ranging from fine art to personal photography, from documentary to advertising. These include semiotics, psychoanalysis, art history, social history, the history of media technologies, aesthetics, philosophy, and the sociology of culture. Furthermore, audiences encounter photographs in a variety of contexts from public galleries and archives to journalism or emailed snapshots. Critical analysis of photography involves linking questions of form, style, content and meaning with broader sociological, psychological, and semiotic understandings. We need to distinguish between effects and affects which are specifically photographic in the sense that they emanate from formal coding, and the extent to which meaning stems from understandings ‘borrowed’ from other cultural code-systems, such as dress-systems or conventional criteria of newsworthiness. Given the ubiquity of photography and its diversity of uses and contexts we also need to be aware of the fluidity of meaning and significances attributed to images; to see meaning as temporary, unstable. Only thus can we begin to investigate how, why, and in what circumstances, we use photographs. DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-23

Then and Now  233

The last twenty years or so have witnessed a range of shifts in theoretical concerns and debates. In some ways the shifts seem dramatic; only a few years ago the digital was being greeted as heralding ‘the death of photography’! Now differences of technical method are addressed as part of the language of the medium, and photographic media are central to gallery practices (cf. Tate Modem; MOMA, New York; the Pompidou Centre; Venice Biennale; the Turner Prize.). Post-modernism was something of a catch phrase in the 1980s; now, some twenty years later, it seems very much in the past as do the sorts of ‘high theory’ debates that preoccupied some critics at that time. But events do not unfold and run on in dialectically straightforward ways. Rather, older ideas echo within the new, concerns refold upon each other in the light of new historical and theoretical perceptions.

Document In the 1920s Walter Benjamin argued that photography, through stilling a scene, draws attention to that which we might otherwise have failed to observe. Photographs offer access to what he terms the ‘optical unconscious’ thus enhancing their resonance. For instance, a photograph of women learning how to do their make-up reveals a plethora of detail beyond that which we might remember from witnessing the scene itself. That image, by Inge Morath, included in an exhibition of Magnum Women Photographers, is archetypical in that the visual interpretation synthesizes the geometry of the composition with detailed information.1 Hence its fascination. Documentary itself came up for interrogation in the 1980s as the position of the photographer as observer, viewed as somehow detached and objective, came into question. Notions of photographic ‘truth’ became relativized. Politics of representation seemed crucial in the 1980s, a decade of political struggle in Britain and elsewhere; this included stereotyping (for instance, of women) and marginalization (for instance, of ethnic minorities). Questions of the operations of photography within the media attracted debates in magazines such as Afterimage, Camerawork, Screen Education, Ten.8. Underpinning this emphasis on analyzing images was a sense of possibilities for change. There was a burgeoning of community projects whereby people were encouraged to use photography and video to picture their own lives, thereby challenging dominant discourses. The family album became viewed not only as a site of mediation of personal histories but also as a focus for interrogating identity. Representational processes became understood as oscillating complexly between visible stereotyping and more invisible subjective processes of accommodation within social and domestic hierarchies.

Institutions Whether in public museums and galleries, commercial archives, or family albums, photo collections reflect the interests and curiosities of the collector. They also reflect more general attitudes and practices. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s (1972) emphasis upon situating documents within an archeological approach to understanding

234  Critical Spaces

‘knowledge’ in terms of ideological discourses, historically and now, several critics became concerned to analyze the implications of particular archives as ‘readings’ of history. (See, in particular, work by Allan Sekula, and John Tagg.) Thus, collections, seen as elements within the institutionalization of photography, through which histories are constructed and ideological priorities refracted, came up for scrutiny in the 1980s and continue to form a rich seam of research, for instance, for university doctoral theses – albeit, not necessarily underpinned by the Marxist perspectives of the 1980s which lent radical edge to critical analysis. The sociological notion of ‘institution’, with characteristic ideological positions, pre-­occupations, practices, and rituals, came to be defined relatively broadly to include not only the institutions of photography – archives, photographers’ associations, photography education, and so on – but also the institutions in relation to which photography occurs, wherein specific photographic conventions have emerged – for instance, the family, the advertising agency, the international art market. However, this approach had some tendency to emphasize photography as an ‘economy of signs’ a notion which rests on conceptualizing photographs as commodities like any others within various systems of material and ideological circulation. Neither Marxist analysis in terms of the ‘use-value’ of images nor semiotics in analyzing meaning-production processes can in themselves account for the resonances of photographs. Unpacking his book collection, Walter Benjamin commented that ‘every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories’. (Benjamin 1992b: 61).

Signification Language and signification were central to theoretical debates of the 1980s, and continue to be so, albeit again reflecting shifts and changes. For instance, there was heated discussion, which seems highly anomalous now, about use of colour for serious documentary imagery. The new British colour documentary photographers (Martin Parr, Paul Graham, and later, Anna Fox, Anthony Haughey) were accused of trivializing subject-matter through using colour which at that time was associated with commercial photography. That this association of monochrome with ‘serious’ photography seems completely outdated now offers an example of shifts in visual vocabulary. Meaning itself was also in question. Increasingly it became viewed primarily as a product of play within and between possibilities, rather than of the formal, relatively rigid (visual) language structures initially proposed within semiotic theory. It followed that readers (spectators) became conceptualized as active interpreters engaged in decoding imagery, drawing upon their own knowledge and experiences to make sense of particular photographs encountered within a specific sort of context. The focus remained to some extent formal, drawing upon linguistic-style method. For instance, several critics sought to understand photographic seeing more precisely through comparing the still and the moving image. Peter Wollen (1984) contrasted ‘Fire’ and ‘Ice’, emphasizing differences of narrative effect, questioning the relation

Then and Now  235

of the frozen image to stories which might be told. This approach still seems valid. The photographic and the cinematic may converge in content, visual style, and haunting affect even if the viewing experience and context are rather different. In some academic circles (notably – notoriously? – at the then Polytechnic of Central London) psychoanalysis was drawn into explaining photographic effects placing questions of subjectivity, fantasy, and desire centrally on the agenda. Psychoanalysis related to art practices was not new; Surrealism had extolled unconscious generative processes. But in the 1980s the focus was on psychoanalysis as academic tool, on symptomatic readings of images, and on the extent to which we are immersed in image-worlds and related effects. The post-modern rhetorician, Jean Baudrillard, asserted that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Baudrillard 1995), not because he thought that nothing had actually occurred, but because he wanted to draw attention to the fact that for most people this experience was one of photographic/televisual representation and mediation. He proposed a dislocation of any direct relation between the signifier and the real and argued that contemporary consumer culture involved reference and discursive relations, rather than representation. Photography claimed more playful spaces; sometimes referencing classic photomontage, but with contemporary paradoxical twists. Umberto Eco, author and semiotician, notoriously made a visit to New Orleans (the city) to check whether it lived up to its simulation in Disneyland. In Las Vegas, New York is conjured up through the iconography of the Statue of Liberty and a Coney Island ride. Although greeted with resistance and skepticism such theoretical provocations seemingly contributed to opening more playful spaces. Photography could be lighthearted; pastiche was validated, and parody became critical method. Echoes of 1930s photomontage? But this also laid conceptual ground for the digital. If we no longer believed in a necessary relation between image and its originating object or reference, then the possibility of creating images from pixels came as not too much of a surprise. New technology impacted on the economy of images not so much in terms of the pictures created but in terms of their distribution and (cyber)contexts of reception; jpegs, like Chinese whispers, appeared increasingly mutable. Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay on ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, which contrasted photography with more traditional art forms and argued for the democratizing effects of the mass reproducibility of images, attracted frequent reference in the 1990s. But the climate is increasingly one of political cynicism, the individual as consumer is paramount, and the body has been writ large within the art gallery!

Then and Now The task of theory is to explain. It follows that the objective of photography theory would be to analyze and contextualize photographs and photographic practices, historically and now. Yet academic faith in theory as a source of comprehensive and finite explanation has long since been relinquished within the Humanities, and photography, in its ubiquity, has persistently refused containment as an object of

236  Critical Spaces

analysis. Questions have accumulated over the past 80 years or so, some of which fall away, but many persist, re-articulated through cultural shifts, currently particularly articulated towards questions of memory, identity, and subjectivity in an era of cyber-communications. Even here, the range and disparity of institutions and contexts within which photographs operate mean that theorization of photography as always intersects with a wide range of issues. Indeed, any project within ‘theory’, however modest, seems increasingly problematic. The photograph slips away from grasp, endlessly refusing the embrace of theoretical concerns and always pointing to the limits of systematic analysis in ways which remind us not only of the diversity and dispersedness of photographic practices but also of the nebulousness of image-encounters. Liz Wells, 2002. Originally published in Source 33, Winter 2002. Note: Written in 2002 for the Irish photography magazine, Source, it is included here as it offers a brief account of developments in theory and criticism within debates about photography towards the end of the twentieth century which may interest photo historians and critics who were not around at that time.

Note 1 Inge Morath, ‘Beauty Class at the Helena Rubenstein Studio’, Manhatten, 1958. Magna Brava – The Magnum Women Photographers, PM Gallery, London, September– November 2002.

References Baudrillard, Jean (1995) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Benjamin, Walter (1992a) ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations. London: Fontana, 1992 ed. Written 1936. Original publication in German, 1955. Benjamin, Walter (1992b) ‘Unpacking my Library’ in Illuminations. London: Fontana, 1992 ed. Originally published in 1931 in Literarische Welt. Foucault, Michel (1972) The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Original publication in French, 1969. Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography. New York: Penguin Books. Wollen, Peter (1984) ‘Fire and Ice’ in Berger, John & Richon, Olivier, Other than Itself. Manchester: Cornerhouse.

19 MODES OF INVESTIGATION On Photography and Environment

Historically, and in popular culture, there remains a tendency to celebrate the ­environment – the sublime implications of mist rising up the mountains (Caspar David Friedrich),1 the poetics of rural and urban landscapes (William Wordsworth),2 or the amazing activities of colonies of penguins (March of the Penguins, National Geographic Films, 2005). It goes without saying that, impressive though the natural world is, we need to find ways of transcending visual eulogy in order to communicate something of the urgency of examining the challenges of environmental change. This essay focuses on photo methods, on what photography can do in relation to environmental issues, and examines some of the ways in which photographers have approached researching, documenting, and communicating significant concerns. In order to explore photographic strategies, I shall touch briefly on a number of themes: national park management; sea change and water pollution; industrial and post-industrial landscapes. I should add that these are not distinct arenas, they are inter-related; to give an obvious example, industrial pollution contributes to global warming which in turn influences polar glacier melt, which leads to sea change. I shall also comment on modes and contexts of publication. Consideration of methods of communication is relevant for all artists, but particularly so for artist-­ photographers exploring phenomena of immediate socio-political relevance; part of the purpose of such investigations is to engage audiences in related reflections and debates. As the American writer and photographer, Deborah Bright, has remarked, ‘Whatever its aesthetic merits, every representation of landscape is also a record of human values and actions imposed on the land over time’. (Bright, 1989: 126). Implicit within this statement is a notion of human responsibility for stewardship of the land. W.J.T. Mitchell reminds us of this through suggesting that ‘landscape’ is most usefully considered as an action or verb: ‘to landscape’. (Mitchell, 1994) DOI: 10.4324/9781003354680-24

238  Critical Spaces

Humans shape the land, for instance, through positioning roads and buildings, creating vistas, identifying agricultural areas, conserving wilderness areas, or facilitating industrial parks or tourist developments such as coastal beach strips or mountain ski resorts. Settlement is determined by transport possibilities; we can track histories of human mobility, including trading and commerce, through tracing histories of ports and shipping links, ancient pathways, and modern highways. Vegetation types may shift and natural contours may erode; they also adjust to accommodate agriculture, urbanization, railroads and highways, industrial and military bases, airfields, and so on. Physical legacies of previous land use offer evidence; for example, slagheaps indicate mining activity, soil absorbs pesticides, discarded plastic bags kill fish. Landscape is not timeless; nature evolves and changes both in itself and in response to human action. Industrial pollution contributes to air quality that in turn affects the health of animals, insects and plants – at the moment there is particular concern in the UK about the decline in the bee population probably linked to insecticides used in agriculture. Without bees we have no pollination, without pollination we have no food. It is ourselves who ultimately suffer from misuse of natural resources. Yet, despite extensive debates, many governments are failing to address questions to do with agricultural management, fossil fuels, industrial and transport emissions, global warming and climate change. So the challenge for those involved in photography relating to environmental trauma is to find ways of drawing attention to issues. Hence my interest in photo methodologies, in ways in which photographers as researchers may intervene within such debates. One caution, for the sake of shorthand I may refer to ‘nature’. This is not to say that I accept a binary distinction between culture and nature. Any such simple binary masks the complex inter-action of human culture, the botanical, the agricultural, animal husbandry, environmental sustainability, pollution, change, and so on. Whilst we depend on natural phenomena for survival and sustenance, human action has consequences for the complex environmental ecology of which we form a part. Human culture contributes to the evolutionary shifts and fragilities that characterize planetary stability and change. *** In researching land and landscape photographers draw on a range of resources and use various enquiry strategies. Typically, this might include maps, socio-­historical, legal and political documents, literary accounts, paintings, early photographs, eye-witness and oral histories. For example, the Finnish photographers, Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo, researched Tree People (Puiden Kansa) over a period of about fifteen years. (Kovalainen & Seppo, 2006). They started photographing trees and forests in 1992, also exploring spiritual and cultural connotations. They investigated mythology associated with the forest and people’s relationship with local woodlands. They used oral history methods and investigated photographic archives in forest regions (in Estonia and Finland) as well as pursuing extensive research into legend and myth. For Finns the Kalevala, mediaeval legends passed down as oral history, but which have also existed in written form since the 19th century, remains a touch point for national sentiment. Their initial interest was in the spiritual and the

Modes of Investigation  239

FIGURE 19.1 

 itva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo, ‘Yard Tree, Spruce’, 1997, from Puiden R Kansa (Tree People). © Kovalainer/Seppo.

shamanistic; the original title as translated into English was The End of the Rainbow. It was only as the project developed, and they became increasingly concerned with the consequences of commercial logging and change in the woodland landscape for Finnish identity, that their approach became more analytical and socio-political. For them, at this stage, it also developed educational objectives. Sacred groves of trees existed prior to the import of Christianity when apparently they were cut down and replaced by landmarks such as a church or a cross, but their existence remains marked in ancient place names. As the authors comment, markers can also be found on the land, for example, a stone circle or charcoal residues testifying to ritual fires. Trees that may have been planted when land was first cleared for farming have grown, outliving the initial settlers, carrying on through the generations. These trees in domestic environments are seen as spiritual protectors and places of contemplation. One of their interviewees remarked that after a baby had been born in the sauna it was taken for a blessing by the yard tree before being brought into the family home. Such trees are also viewed as anticipating or responding to human events – for instance, the belief that when an old farmer dies a branch will fall off. In one account the good-luck tree, which had previously flourished, fell down shortly before the death of the last member of a family. These accounts are interesting because they reveal a particular sense of intimacy with nature.

240  Critical Spaces

Trees also act as memorial markers, with commemorative inscriptions carved into the bark, or photographs hung on the tree trunk, often found on the route between the family home and the local cemetery, presumably representing some sort of compromise between Christian and pagan beliefs. Many of these trees have been logged, erasing personal histories as well as changing local landscapes and impacting on traditional affinities. Several of the location photographs made as a part of the project depict people with their preferred trees, places of solitude that are obviously special to them. They also made a set of panoramas portraying rural spaces where woods have been cut down, accompanied by interviews with the individuals isolated within what must previously have been personal arcadias. (Exhibition prints are two metres wide with the interviews on headsets.) As a pictorial form the panorama emphasizes the extent of change across the horizon. In picturing what remains of forest retreats, along with the desecration effected by logging, the artists reassert the significance of the forest within Finnish consciousness whilst simultaneously challenging complacencies about woodland, nature, and the Finnish national imaginary. The design of the book is complex, with several essays and short texts as well as photographs, either sepia-toned or in muted colour. It makes extensive use of quotes from interviews with residents, from archive materials including reproductions of documents and portraits, as well as contemporary photographs of people holding framed miniature family photos. One section is devoted to ‘the Bear, the Sky and the Pine’. Another section concerns trees as symbols and carriers of family history. The book has also been translated from Finnish to English, and also into Japanese. The Japanese translator’s statement is interesting because it suggests a universalism of our relationship with forests: This book contains everything about past, present, and future; people and nature; living and the dead; the visible and the invisible. There is a traditional culture in which people form deep relationship with trees in Japan, as in Finland. However, this culture is in decline in modern economic development. This book will show Japanese people that this culture is not something isolated but it is actually very universal. Knowing this fact, I believe, will encourage Japanese people.3 My purpose in referencing this example is to suggest something of the range of sources that can be drawn into play from mediaeval myth to contemporary interviews, from maps, literature, and other library materials to considering current economic axioms. Also, the persistence of the researchers in sustaining the project and their interest in it over a long period of time is remarkable. In terms of audience, Tree People resulted in gallery exhibitions, a film, education packs, the book, and talks by the artists; in other words, it was designed for differing audiences and contexts. Tree People centrally raised issues of land management (commercial logging) in relation to human histories, experience, and myth. Conversations on Nature (2011),

Modes of Investigation  241

work by Chrystel Lebas and by SofijaSilvia, likewise concerns land management, in this instance, in two national park areas near Rijeka, Croatia. Again, their respective approaches went well beyond considerations of photographic methods. Both artists talked with those responsible for forest management and animal habitation. One starting point was to ask what we could learn about the histories of these specific places, about human ideals, and about forestry and horticultural vision from examining the shaping of these landscapes, including buildings from former eras. The Brijuni Islands in the Adriatic are just off the west coast of Istria near Pula. Archaeological remains indicate human presence dating back to Roman times and beyond. In the Austro-Hungarian era the Austrian industrialist Paul Kupelweiser cleared the islands of malaria, planted trees, cleaned up ponds, and fostered the population of deer and peacocks as well as importing more exotic animals. Writers, artists and others, including Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, George Bernard Shaw and Karl Wittgenstein, visited the islands. Later, President Tito used the islands as a private retreat, military enclave, and place for entertaining foreign visitors including heads of state. After his death it became dilapidated, remaining a military base with limited access. SofijaSilvia grew up on the mainland across from the islands, but never went there as a child. Now the largest island has been regenerated as a national park with a golf course, clear pathways, a small souvenir shop and access by ferry for hotel guests and for organized groups of day visitors. Spending time in remoter areas of the islands, she observed the animals roaming freely around the park. This led her to reflect on the idea of the island as a landscaped garden and on our position as

FIGURE 19.2 

SofijaSilvia, Silent Islands, Brijuni – Imaginary Landscape, No. 01, Idyl, 2009. © SofijaSilvia.

242  Critical Spaces

observers of an idealized ‘nature’ re-organized in response to human interests and desires. It became an encounter that for her, along the lines of Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of fairy tales and suggestion that we go to forests to test ourselves, was as much about self-exploration as about enquiry through observation.4 In Bettelheim’s account the forest is a transitional space from which the protagonist emerges in a changed state. Silvia has become passionate about the islands as a space of reflection, but she has also become deeply involved in discussions about the management of the islands as a place where imported plants, and animals that were not indigenous, have nonetheless become integrated within the landscape. What is particularly relevant about this from our point of view, I think, is the reminder that – to paraphrase – humans make history, but within the legacies and constraints of circumstances not of our own making. The forensic detail with which Silvia documents animal and plant-life on the islands informs the work of the rangers responsible both for strategic development and for day-to-day decision-making. The other photographer in this two-person show, Chrystel Lebas, has explored several rural areas in Europe.5 Her interest in Risnjak National Park, in Northwest Croatia, stems from her search for wider understanding of the inter-relation of humans and nature. Risnjak was first declared a National Park in 1958 subsequent to various botanical explorations, and in 1997 was enlarged to its current size of over sixty square kilometres. It is about 15 kilometres inland from the Adriatic, mountainous and heavily forested, and includes the source of the River Kupa that forms the border between Croatia and Slovenia. Along with animals and hunters, Lebas ventures out at dawn and, more often, at dusk, using long exposures at twilight to make images at the point when light gives way to darkness, the familiar becomes strange, we can no longer see clearly, and, like animals, we are forced to rely on instinct and intuition, on sound, smell, textures rather than sight. Her work takes a range of forms. One series of photographs, Histoires Naturelles (Natural history), consists of close-up documentation of flora and fauna with forensic detail reminiscent of nineteenth century botanical studies. Through projected

FIGURE 19.3 

 hrystel Lebas, Presence – Untitled n.30 – Risnjak – Kupa, 2010. © Chrystel C Lebas.

Modes of Investigation  243

moving imagery she offers virtual ‘real-time’ encounters with natural phenomena as, for example, the sun slowly ebbs away from the Kupa river valley. Bears, stags, wolves, and lynx roam this area, rendering the Risnjak highlands potentially dangerous (yet attractive for hunters and for tourists). But in her series Presence animals are never actually seen; rather, like a hunter, she registers the environment and notes marks and tracks, acknowledging the animal culture that runs in parallel with human occupancy. The park was recently divided by a dual carriageway linking Rijeka with Zagreb but cutting the forested area in two. In her film, Tracking Nature – Dedin – Risnjak, traffic noises infuse the atmosphere of a so-called ‘green bridge’ over the new motorway, built so that large mammals can cross freely between the National Park areas. Apparently it took 3 years for the bears to learn to use the bridge that had been built for them. Both bodies of work were exhibited in the form of a ‘dialogue’ at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, in Summer 2011.6 During the exhibition the Museum hosted a symposium involving those responsible for animal management as well as the artists and art critics. One discussion contrasted the use by animal behaviourists of video and infrared technologies to collect data on animal movement, and information made evident through ways in which both photographers had worked. Essentially, the scientific data was reactive in the sense that the process relied on animals happening to pass in front of the lens or beam. By contrast, the artists, particularly Chrystel Lebas, actively sought out and documented evidence of animal presence. Through selection and editing the photographic projects remarked complex patterns of animal behaviour and the marks and legacies of their movement. In the gallery environment the range of moving and still images – some of which were deliberatively pictorially enticing and others more concerned with detailed documentation – along with adjunct informational materials rendered a complex picture of issues relating to island or wilderness habitats. *** What might loosely be called a politics of environment management deals both in that which in principle is human-made and can be changed and that which – even though it may be a consequence of human actions – seems beyond control. This also applies to water pollution and sea change. Australian photographer Narelle Autio spent the summer of 2009 documenting debris left on Australian beaches. In The Summer of Us, we see a set of objects – a coke can, a box of matches, a pair of jeans, a plastic fish – collected over a single summer from the beaches near her home in Adelaide. Each item is removed from the beach and photographed in her studio using a large format camera and a light box to create an intense white background. The outcome is a set of forensic still life images; the pigment prints, 40 cm x 50 cm, are precise and exquisite. They are indeed available for sale as individual images. As such each object seems singled out, often appearing beautiful as the print contributes to fetishizing it as an item from everyday culture. However, for gallery installation the prints are spaced out as a block, echoing the idea of a random range of objects strewn all over the beach. The installation introduces an element of critique that does not adhere to the images

244  Critical Spaces

considered singly. The taxonomy of human garbage is amalgamated with natural materials such as dead birds, fish skeletons, crab claws, and shells preserved in salt and sand, that have also washed up ashore. The inventory of debris adds up to a catalogue of the oddities of contemporary civilization as well as pointing to irresponsible use of the beach as a dustbin and failure to reflect on the dangers of debris for fish, birds, and small animals, yet we are also reminded of mutability and mortality as abandoned objects coalesce with natural phenomena. Likewise, Mandy Barker has been photographing debris from the sea. SOUP, her title, commonly refers to plastic debris suspended in the sea, and particularly a massive accumulation in the North Pacific Ocean commonly referred to as the ‘Garbage Patch’. The plastics are salvaged from beaches worldwide and photographed laid out on black velvet, which adds texture and lusciousness to the imagery. The strategy differs from that used by Autio in that objects are collected together within each single image, emphasizing the congregation of refuse. She states that the ‘images aim to engage with, and stimulate an emotional response in the viewer by combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction and social ­awareness’.7 This is a

FIGURE 19.4 

 andy Barker, from SOUP: Refused, 2013. Ingredients; plastic oceM anic debris affected by the chewing and attempted ingestion by animals. Includes a toothpaste tube. Additives; teeth from animals. © Mandy Barker.

Modes of Investigation  245

FIGURE 19.5 

Andreas Müller-Pohle, ‘Budapest, 2005’ from The Danube River Project, © Riverproject.net.

tactic used by many photographers concerned with environmental issues. The aim is to attract audience attention through pictorial form, inviting a ‘double take’ as the viewer reflects on the implications of the content depicted. In effect, the project offers a contemporary version of a still life, except that what is shown is more likely to be metal or plastic than botanical specimens. Where once we would have enjoyed a painting of flowers or fruit and wondered at the marvels of nature, now we reflect on the horrors of what we are doing to our natural environment. Of course, the camera cannot perceive the nature of residues polluting water itself. Representing the invisible, for example, the constitution of water poses a different challenge. The Danube River Project by Andreas Müller-Pohle8, first shown in 2006, offers what he describes as ‘a poetically documentary view’9 tracking the river, which is over 2800 kilometres long, flowing through Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, the Ukraine and Romania, thereby forming a key artery within Central Europe. The angle of vision is unusual; rather than adopting a standard landscape pictorial, the image is shot at water-level, with land and architectural artifacts looming above, often in somewhat alarming fashion, whilst the grey waters occupy the bottom of the image. He collected samples and analyzed the water quality, integrating ensuing data on chemical composition within the watery lower section. The information, which we may or may not be able to decode (depending on our understanding of chemistry), enhances anxieties that we might already be feeling as bridges, boats and riverbanks tower over us. Müller-Pohle describes the project as ‘a “pictorial atlas” and a “blood count” all

246  Critical Spaces

in one: an aesthetic and scientific compendium of Europe’s most important river, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea’10. In eschewing a more traditional pictorial viewpoint, and in offering adjunctive data, the project effectively invites audiences to reflect on consequences of industrial, agricultural, and urban effluent. The Danube River Project is also published as a book, which is effective as it allows readers to track the river, and, as with all books, return to it in order to reflect further. As a communication method books have been important for photographers historically. Indeed, with a proliferation of photobook festivals in recent years, along with self-publishing, and the number of publishers now specializing in photography publications, there appears to be a resurgence of interest in the book as a vehicle for photographic materials. With ebooks, and kindle versions of printed books, it remains to be seen both how such publishing will evolve and ways in which artists will experiment with new means of communication. But it is clear that many photographers view online sites as complementing rather than substituting for the production of books as a material object to be enjoyed. As such, the book remains an important element within the range of possible strategies for inviting audience engagement with environmental issues. *** John Ganis, born in Chicago and now living in Detroit, explores American landscapes and has become increasingly interested in investigating environmental trauma. His project, Consuming the American Landscape, was shot over a period of 19 years and was

FIGURE 19.6 

John Ganis, ‘Chrysler Technology Center Construction, Auburn Hills, Michigan, 1987’ from the series, Consuming the American Landscape, 2003. © John Ganis.

Modes of Investigation  247

eventually published in 2003. He notes that the first picture in the series was serendipitous. In 1984 he happened to drive past an Earthmover that was creating a cloud of red soil. He apparently drove on for ten miles or so but could not get the image out of his mind, so he turned back and made the picture. (Ganis, 2003: 141). This became the starting point for a nation-wide exploration of, what he terms, ‘the beauty and complexity inherent in any situation’. (loc cit) As in Barker’s imagery reflecting on sea pollution (discussed earlier), in this series Ganis deployed aesthetics as a strategy for commanding attention. At first glance this picture suggests the expansive scale of the flat landscape and details soil textures; tyre marks lead to the construction area that is centred yet distant. Picture composition aligns with the Western aesthetic ‘golden rule’ of thirds – with the sky and the land meeting within the middle horizontal third whilst the distant towers are in the middle vertical third. The composition lends a sense of harmony that belies the content. Again, the issue is whether this tactic operates to draw an audience in thereby inviting viewers to reflect upon the implications of the content of the image, or whether the formal precision contains the subject matter pictorially; certainly there is a risk that aesthetics distracts from thematic implications, especially as the colour tones are gentle in gradations. The scene appears serene, yet the towers that we can see without quite knowing their function suggest an intrusion, one that might or might not be cause for celebration, depending on point of view – concern with environment and sustainability or with industrial exploitation of the land. Of course, the import is culminative; the impact emerges not from the images singularly but from their articulation within an exhibition or in book form. *** Whether or not the strategy of rendering the ugly or the dystopian beautiful to entice audiences to consider human actions and their consequences has been a matter of debate for many decades. Walter Benjamin famously commented that in his 1928 picture book, The World is Beautiful, German photographer, Renger-Patzsch, rendered images enjoyable by handling his subject-matter in a fashionable and technically fully accomplished way and hence distracting, for example, from the social implications of industrial mechanization. (Benjamin, 1977: 95). Deborah Bright is among those who have returned to this debate in recent decades. She argued that Photographs of the strong forms of a Chicago or Pittsburgh blast furnace say nothing about the tragedy of massive unemployment in the Rust Belt or the profit motive of a corporation that rends the social fabric of a company town. (Bright, 1989: 140) The phrasing of the statement clearly references German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, and his comment that a photograph of the external walls of the Krupp factory (in Germany in the run up to the Second World War) tells nothing about the politics of the owners (members of the National Socialist – NAZI – party) or of the work relations that prevail within. In fact, Bright was writing in part in response to the 1985 New Topographics exhibition at George Eastman House, Rochester. She challenged the alleged neutrality of imagery then asserted by the exhibition curator.

248  Critical Spaces

Crucially, she linked artistic strategy, meaning, and context of viewing. Taking John Pfahl’s series Power Places as an example, she argued that his power plants appeared as objects of beauty naturalized within the landscape, photographed in ways that may serve to distract from or mask environmental trauma. The issue often is one of context of viewing. Where pictures form part of a series there is an accumulated impact, for example, the way in which the import of the 72 photographs in Müller-Pohle’s Danube River series starts to alarm, or the block of images noting animal tracks in the Croatian forest articulates a sense of animal presence that transcends the informational content of the single images. Single images, taken out of the serial context within which the photographer conceptualized them, may be more problematic in terms of meaning and import. As Bright commented, pictorially harmonious single photographs (such as those by Pfahl, or, as I have implied, some of the examples considered earlier) might equally adorn the office walls of those (such as industrial CEOs or government departments) who are responsible for environmental trauma, paradoxically becoming celebrations of industrial achievement rather than critiques of consequences. In terms of representation of troubled landscapes, photographers as artists and communicators necessarily spend time considering pictorial strategies. Discussing ‘Beauty in Photography’ the American photographer, Robert Adams, distinguished between beautiful photographs and significant ones suggesting, in effect, that significance emerges from content whereas beauty is an effect of conventions and composition. (Adams, 1996: 32). He adds that beauty does not preclude significance. The question is one of balance, of the inter-relation of form and content, and of anticipating ways in which the familiarity of the pictorial may have the effect of superseding, repressing, or distracting from the implications of that which is depicted. *** We may fear the sea, whether sublimely whipped up by gales, or as an indicator of climate change as water levels rise. But the sea remains a primary waterway, especially in an era of global commerce. The North Sea ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp are both in the process of expansion. This has implications for surrounding regions, already marked by signs of post-industrial decline as mechanization, container shipping, and the increased capacity of individual ships has reduced the numbers of jobs for dock workers, significantly impacting on local economies and communities. Two photographers have recently been charting the consequences of the enlargement of ports for the local environment but have taken very different approaches to this. Isabelle Pateer explored the impact of change in one small Belgian village that is under threat of demolition to make way for the expansion of the Antwerp docklands. Researching this social documentary involved repeated visits over a period of five years from 2007 onwards. The farmlands and village of Doel, with its old stone windmill, date from mediaeval times, but this pre-industrial legacy is not what concerned her. The house that belonged to the family of the painter, Rubens, is still there, but we don’t see it in her pictures. Rather we note the cranes, pylons, and power plant that dominate the skyline over the flat polder that edges the sea. Large metal cleats seated in the mud suggest boats previously moored here. Unsettled

Modes of Investigation  249

documents the situation of villagers, juxtaposing individual portraits and pictures of the local environment. Infamously, in 2008 riot police were sent in to help ‘convince’ the 200 villagers remaining in their homes of the benefits of responding to the Flemish Executive’s request that they vacate all properties. The tensions are complex: a nuclear power station borders the village and safety legislation limits the proximity of industrial activity which means that the proposed new dock may never be permitted. The photographer has decided to focus on the everyday banal of empty rooms, ordinary houses, a schoolroom, graffiti and wall art. Young men and women hang out in empty rooms or exterior spaces whose dereliction testifies to the limited prospects confronting them. The flat light and brown/grey tones that characterize the majority of the images enhances a sense of the bleakness of the region and the unresolved situation of those who remain, still living here, but unsettled. But ‘Kirsten’ is perhaps more picturesque than most, although the stream in which Kirsten stands, ankle-deep, nevertheless appears murky despite the pictorial glow of the setting sun. Likewise engaged with changes in harbour areas in the North Sea, Marie-José Jongerius was commissioned by Netherlands Fotomuseum to document the extension of Rotterdam docks, which involved reclamation of polder land. She took an overtly evocative approach, titling her publication Lunar Landscapes thereby referencing both moonlight and also how we might imagine the surface of the moon, an uninhabitable place. The style is melodramatic as she draws attention to what

FIGURE 19.7 

Isabelle Pateer, ‘Kirsten’ from Unsettled, 2012. © Isabelle Pateer.

250  Critical Spaces

we might define as a new sublime, photographing re-rendered landscapes at night. Fritz Gierstberg, Head of Exhibitions at the Fotomuseum, tells us that Jongerius’s ‘experimental approach originates from the perception that new man-made land reclaimed from the sea is land without a past; it is neither culture nor nature. A land without images either.’ (Jongerius, 2012: foreword). Apparently the project was shot in an area of 20 square kilometres, in one of the more densely populated countries of Europe. Yet it seems remote, deserted, and, as I am suggesting, more a romantic landscape of imagination than one founded in actuality. For Hans den Hartog Jager this area built on sand flats is an ‘in-between world’, generally overlooked. (Hans den Hartog Jager, in Jongerius, 2012). He describes driving out to the site three quarters of an hour from the city centre: … the landscape around us kept changing: first the blocks of flats, the shops and the houses disappeared, and then the planted greenery slipped from the surroundings. Halls and warehouses subsequently appeared on the horizon and increasingly more cranes, containers and factories – each so large that you felt incredibly insignificant in their midst as an individual. … (at the sand flats) … there was no sign of life anywhere, apart from a lone seagull skimming overhead, shrieking loudly, undoubtedly on its way to a place where it would be more at home. When the initial feeling of astonishment about the emptiness had receded, it was replaced by a pleasant feeling of liberation – what a huge amount of space, what a wealth of possibilities! (loc cit, n.p.)

FIGURE 19.8 

 arie-José Jongerius, from the series, Lunar Landscapes, 2012. © MarieM José Jongerious.

Modes of Investigation  251

Contextualization is crucial; the photographs seem sublime, awesome, inexplicable, so there is a certain need to bring us back down to earth, to think about the space in relation to decisions based primarily on the needs of commerce that have determined its future. In terms of photo tactics, the aesthetic impact of the work stems particularly from the photographer’s decision to photograph at dusk, thereby emphasizing a melodramatic bleakness. The expansion of commercial ports in Europe is centrally linked with post-­ industrial landscapes in the West, as industrial centres have shifted, particularly to Asia, and Europe has become increasingly reliant on importing goods manufactured elsewhere. The contemporary expansion of global markets is a key theme addressed in FUTURELAND NOW, an exhibition of new work by British artists, John Kippin and Chris Wainwright.11 In 1989 they came together for the exhibition FUTURELAND, wherein the imagery invited us to question legacies of industrialization in the North East of England, and the consequences for the region of an economic shift from primary productive industry to service sector work. Living in Britain in 2013 we were forcibly reminded of the context of that time, the ‘Thatcher era’, as the death of Margaret Thatcher re-opened discussions of her determination to break the power of the unions associated with traditional industries such as mining. The exhibition was subsequently hailed as an early example of what became termed ‘industrial sublime’ – although technically it is a ‘post-industrial’ sublime. Kippin’s strategy at the time was to integrate text within the image, setting up resonances through the tension between what we see and what is alluded to in the words or phrases. (See Figure 14.1, p.172) He continues to make work using image and text, although the text is no longer always incorporated within the picture itself, and he increasingly uses diptychs or triptychs to set up resonances that are then further counter-pointed through quotes and other texts, or, as in the example of ‘Monument’ through disjunctions between what we see (a coal tower) and what we know (the socio-economic history within which the coal mines were shut down). (See Figure 12.1, p.147). FUTURELAND NOW also included an external billboard that makes clear reference to transport to and from Asia with all that this implies in terms of shipping routes, effluent, and congestion in certain areas where huge merchant cargo ships congregate offshore. It follows from their focus on the rivers Tyne, Tees, and Wear that both artists are concerned with the sea, an arena of commercial communications that is often overlooked yet still massively important economically – as Allan Sekula and Noel Burch put it in their 2010 film, The Forgotten Space. Wainwright’s staging of messages expressed in semaphore, the age-old means of communication from ship to ship, offers a further reference to international shipping routes. (See Figure 9.3, p.121) His approach is performative; he frequently stages events, pre-conceiving pictures that will ensure. The use of torches to form semaphore messages offers one type of example. Another device that he uses for emphasis is ‘painting’ with light, enhancing a sense of unreality, often creating uncanny scenarios. Red emerges as a signature colour in much of his work; in Europe (not the USA) this carries socialist associations. Much of his work is made at

252  Critical Spaces

FIGURE 19.9 

John Kippin, ‘QE2 entering Harbour’, billboard, from FUTURELAND NOW, 2012. © John Kippin.

dusk or at night, allowing artificial light to lend emphasis to what are often relatively deserted urban or seascape settings. Both artists are concerned with what art can do, and, as you see, experiment in photographic strategies. The publication includes a conversation in which John Kippin succinctly expresses his views on this, The process of art acts as more like water eroding a stone rather than something that is hugely incisive or active. But, if we’re involved in it, it culturally positions us in a place where there is some possibility to think about values. And if art doesn’t become an embodiment of values then it really doesn’t have much purposes.12 *** As artist-researchers and storytellers photographers bring a particular authority, and therefore responsibility, into play. I would argue that the authority of photography concerned with environmental issues is primarily founded in methodology, in evidence of a systematic approach to research. Typically this includes extensive contextual reading and referencing as well as the exploration through making and reflection on images that characterizes this field of photographic practice. The other point that emerges from many of the examples I’ve mentioned is that consideration of aesthetics is often not so much a question of pictorial form, convention, and beauty, although this is always relevant in some respects, but one of strategy as related to research purpose, context, and ethics. Through representing land or water as a particular sort of landscape or environment, photography contributes to reaffirming or challenging perceptions of environmental issues – hence the importance of critically evaluating the themes, contexts, epistemologies, critical methods, and aesthetic affects that inform and characterize contemporary practices relating to environmental change.

Modes of Investigation  253

Liz Wells, 2014 Originally published in Hedberg et al, Broken –Environmental Photography. Valand Academy, and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, 2014.

Notes 1 Caspar David Friedrich, ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’, c. 1818. Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Oil on Canvas, 94.8 x 74.8 cm. 2 William Wordsworth, English poet. Examples include ‘Tintern Abbey’, 1798, ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’, 1802. 3 Shohei Shibata, translator, https://www.ritvakovalainen.com/tree-people-japan. Japanese version published in 2009 by ASIA documentary Productions, Tokyo. 4 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. (Knopf, New York, 1976). Cited by the artist is discussing her work with the author (Liz Wells) in her role as exhibition curator. 5 She has previously explored and documented open woodlands as well as more formally managed rural environments in France and Britain. Between Dog and Wolf (2006), a series of photographs made at twilight, initiated a longer-term investigation into the mysteriousness of woodlands as space of escape that draws on childhood memories and implicates unseen histories. Her series Blue Hour was included in Twilight, V & A Museum, London, 2006. 6 Each artist had a solo gallery, then work by both artists was juxtaposed in the third (large) gallery and a fourth gallery was used as an information point with materials about the Brijuny Islands and Risnjak National Park. 7 http://mandy-barker.com/current/soup/ 8 Müller-Pohle is well known in Europe as editor of the long-standing magazine, European Photography. 9 Project statement, emailed by artist to Liz Wells, Spring 2012. The exhibition comprises 72 photographs that are also the basis for an audio-video presentation. 10 http://www.riverproject.net/downloads/Danube%20River%20Project_v09e.pdf. 11 FUTURELAND NOW opened at the Laing Gallery, Newcastle, UK, September 2012 – January 2013. 12 ‘John Kippin and Chris Wainwright in conversation with Liz Wells’, in Futureland Now, 2012, p113.

References Adams, Robert (1996) Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture, 1996. Benjamin, Walter (1977) ‘The Author as Producer’ in Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bosock. London: New Left Books, 1977. First published 1966 from an unpublished manuscript. Bright, Deborah (1989) ‘Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography’ in Richard Bolton ed. (1989) The Contest of Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT; originally published in Exposure 23:3, Fall 1985. Ganis, John (2003) Consuming the American Landscape. Stockport, UK: Dewi Lewis Publishing. Jongerius, Marie-José (2012) Lunar Landscapes. Rotterdam: Netherlands Fotomuseum. Kippin, John (1995) Nostalgia for the Future. London: the Photographer’s Gallery. Kippin, John & Wainwright, Chris (1989) Futureland. Newcastle: Laing Art Gallery. Kippin, John & Wainwright, Chris (2012) Futureland Now. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press, 2012. Edited by Liz Wells. Kovalainen, Ritva & Seppo, Sanni (2006) Tree People. Hülinielu tuotanto & Miellotar, originally published as Puiden Kansa. Helsinki: Pohjoinen Gallery, 1997. Also see http:// www.puidenkansa.net/ALOITUS.html

254  Critical Spaces

Mitchell, W.J.T. ed., (1994) Landscape and Power. London & Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Müller-Pohle, Andreas (2008) The Danube River Project. Berlin: Peperoni Books. Sekula, Allan & Burch, Noel (2010) The Forgotten Space. A film essay. Doc-Eye Film in co-production with Waldart Film. https://www.theforgottenspace.net/ Wells, Liz (2011) Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. London: I. B. Tauris.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Liz Wells. © Jessica Lennon. Liz Wells, writer and curator, edited The Photography Reader and The Photography Culture Reader (2019; 2003 1st ed.) and Photography: A Critical Introduction (2021, 6th ed.; trans, Greek, 2008; Chinese, 2012; Korean, 2016) and is a co-editor for photographies, Routledge journals. Publications on landscape include Land Matters, Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (2011; reprint 2022). She has contributed many essays within artist books, exhibition catalogues, journals, and other edited collections, some of which form part of this anthology. She is series editor for Photography, Place, Environment, Routledge.

256  About the Author

Exhibitions as curator include: Sea, Sand and Soil: Plastics in our Environment (Pingyao International Photography Festival, Sept 2021); Seedscapes: Future-Proofing Nature (Impressions Gallery, Bradford, Yorks, Sept–Dec 2020; UK tour 2021); Layers of Visibility (Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, 2018/9, co-curator, Yiannis Toumazis); Light Touch (Baltimore Washington International Airport, 2014); FUTURELAND NOW – John Kippin, Chris Wainwright (Laing Gallery, Newcastle, 2012/13); Sense of Place, European Landscape Photography (BOZAR, Brussels, 2012); and Landscapes of Exploration, British Art from Antarctica (UK: Plymouth, 2012; Cambridge, 2013; Bournemouth, 2015). She is Emeritus Professor in Photographic Culture, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business, University of Plymouth, UK. Awards include Honorary Doctorate, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2017; Honored Educator 2021, Society for Photography Education; the Royal Photographic Society 2022 J Dudley Johnston Award for research in photographic culture. She is British, London-born, and since 2000 has lived in Devon, UK.

INDEX

Italic page numbers indicate photographs. LW refers to Liz Wells. 100% Cashmere (Männikkö) 149 activism 27–28, 29 Adams, Robert 12, 13, 27, 66, 140, 248 aesthetics, insights through 28 Agraria (Banka) 139 albatrosses, symbolism of 57 alienation 185–186; see also distanciation, Brechtian Allen, N.W. 205–206 ‘Alrededores de Waterloo, 18 de junio de 1815’ (Bleda and Rosa) 161 ‘AMERICAN COAL’ (Kippin) 119 American Places (Palacio) 188 Amundsen, Roald 49 Anderson, Benedict 135 Antarctica: albatrosses, symbolism of 57; art as mediating scientific exploration 52–62; colour 56, 60–61; diverse communities 58; early and continued exploration of 49–50; Falkland’s War 103n4; histories 51–52; impact of humans on 101; interest in, LW’s 11–12; journeys and arrivals 54–56; light, colour and sound 60–61; longerterm residencies for artists 62; map 48; as masculine territory 95–96; materials, effect of environment on 56; mythologies around 51; as no man’s land 96; oil and mineral exploration of 49; reliability of equipment 53; research

bases 96; role and responsibility of artists 53; scientific research based on 50; social dimension 58; sound in 96–97; sublime, the 59–60, 61–62, 96–97; technological developments 53–54, 58, 60; transport support, dependence on 56; wildlife 61; women explorers 95, 103n2; working relationships, opportunities from 57 appropriation, refusing 76, 77–80, 79 architecture, light and 86 Arctic regions: activities in 76; interest in, LW’s 11, 16n7; see also Antarctica Ark Royal video (Kippin) 118–119 art, and light in Western cultures 86 artist residencies 65–67 arts: purpose of 28; and science 21, 50–51, 61 audiences’ responses to exhibitions 35–36 authority of the curator 18, 19–20 Autio, Narelle 243–244 Baetens, Jan 25 Bailey, David A 128, 219 Baldacchino, Nigel 142–143 Baltic region see Facing East: contemporary landscape photography from Baltic areas exhibition Baltzer, Bruno 141 banal, experience of in the wilderness 83 Banka, Pavel 139 Barker, Mandy 14, 244, 244–245

258  Index

Barthes, Roland 24, 154, 208, 222, 223 battlefield images: Bleda and Rosa 160, 160–162, 162; challenges for photographers 169–170; The Clearing: The Forest (Gersht) 167–169, 168; The Course of History (Michiels) 166–167, 167; historical proximity/distance 165; iconic photographs 159; Innocent Landscapes (Farrell) 164; preparation for photographs 161, 166; re-evaluation of themes 162–165; Shot at Dawn (Dewe Mathews) 162–164, 163; UNresolved, 2015 (Haughey) 169 Baudelaire, Charles 111 Baudrillard, Jean 235 Baxandall, Michael 203–204 beauty 12–14, 109 Below Tower Bridge (Brandt) 112 Benjamin, Walter 13, 50, 51, 233, 234, 235, 247 Berger, John 24, 64, 158, 160 Bettelheim, Bruno 92–93, 242 Bezencenet, Stevie 73 Black Bay (Brotherus) 152 The Black Bay Sequence (Brotherus) 142 Blank Mappings (Christofides) 129–130 ‘BLAST FURNACE’ (Kippin) 119 Bleda, Maria 160, 160–162, 165 Blues Brothers (Männikkö) 151 Bonnell, Sean 220–222, 221 Brandt, Bill 112 Brašmane, Māra 38–39, 39 breadth of research, LW’s 22–23 Brecht, Bertolt 8, 22, 23, 24, 25, 119, 130, 185, 186, 247 Bright, Deborah 237, 247–248 Brodie, Anne 55, 58, 60 Brotherus, Elina 142, 152 buildings, light and 86 Burgin, Victor 217 Burke, Edmund 9, 59, 73, 97, 98, 102, 109–110, 137 Burtynsky, Edward 10–11, 117 Cabrita Reis, Pedro 141 Calatañazor, en torno al año 1000 (Bleda and Rosa) 160 Campany, David 159–160 Campos de batalla, España (Bleda and Rosa) 160 Capa, Robert 159 capitalism 111 Carr, E.H. 19 Cartesian dualism 99, 109

‘Chalk Down’ (Bonnell) 220–222, 221 chance, role in art practices 126, 130n5 Christofides, Marianna 23, 128–130; reflection on memory 142; writing from a distance 20, 124, 128–130 Church of Memory (Hoak-Doering) 125 Citrin, Jack 135 Clanet, Celine 137 The Clearing: The Forest (Gersht) 167–169, 168 Clifton (Mapplethorpe) 206–208, 207, 219 Coast (Kippin) 118 codes and conventions see conventions Cold War Pastoral (Kippin) 178 Collier, Mike 116 colonialism 14–15, 138 colour, Light Touch exhibition and 90–91 colour photography, advent of 40 Compton Verney (Kippin) 118, 178–179, 180 conflict, landscapes of past 141; Bleda and Rosa 160, 160–162, 162; challenges for photographers 160, 169–170; The Clearing: The Forest (Gersht) 167–169, 168; The Course of History (Michiels) 166–167, 167; executions, sites of 162–164, 163, 165; historical proximity/ distance 165; iconic photographs 159; Innocent Landscapes (Farrell) 164; preparation for photographs 161, 166; re-evaluation of themes 162–165; Shot at Dawn (Dewe Mathews) 162–164, 163; UNresolved, 2015 (Haughey) 169 Consuming the American Landscape (Ganis) 246, 246–247 contemporary art, photography as 117 conventions: art history 203, 203–204; photographic 205–208, 207; pictorial 203, 203–204; power, photographic conventions and 210–216, 211, 214, 215; semiotics and codes 204–205; social 208–210, 209 Conversations on Nature (Lebas and SofijaSilvia) 240–243, 241, 242 Cotton, Charlotte 117 The Course of History (Michiels) 166–167, 167 Creates, Marlene 22, 29 creative role of curators 33; historical research 36–38; research for Facing East exhibition 34–35; selection of works 36 critical distance 22 critical essays, positioning of 7 critical forum: defined 226; film theory, need for 228–230

Index  259

critical intervention, curatorial strategy as 36, 46; colour and digital, advent of 40; form, expression through 38–39; installation considerations 40–41, 45–46; installation of exhibitions 38; landscape photography from Baltic areas 41–45, 42, 43, 45; research process, curating as 34–35; rhetorical devices 36; selection of works 36; see also Facing East: contemporary landscape photography from Baltic areas exhibition critical thinking 14–15; LW’s aim to induce 28–29 Cultural (and Media) Studies: analysis 197–202, 198, 200; complexly coded cultural artefacts, photographs as 222–223; conventions 203, 203–216, 207, 211, 214, 215; focus of 193–194; form and meaning, looking and 202–216, 203, 207, 209, 211, 214, 215; Media Studies 194; methodologies 195– 197; pictorial conventions 203–204; power, photographic conventions and 210–216; production context 201–202, 223; recognition and identity, looking and 216–222, 220, 221; semiotics and codes 204–205; social conventions 208–210, 209; strength of 223; viewing context 197–200, 198, 200; Visual Cultural Studies 194–195 culture and nature 12, 238 curatorial proposition 18, 19–20 curatorial strategy as critical intervention 36, 46; colour and digital, advent of 40; form, expression through 38–39; installation considerations 40–41, 45–46; installation of exhibitions 38; landscape photography from Baltic areas 41–45, 42, 43, 45; research process, curating as 34–35; rhetorical devices 36; selection of works 36; see also Facing East: contemporary landscape photography from Baltic areas exhibition curiosity, LW’s 24 Curiosus Naturae Spectator (Puranen) 78, 153 Curtis, Layla 55, 58 Custance, Gerardo 141 Cypriot culture and experience, exploration of 124–130 Daniels, Ann 95, 103n1 The Danube River Project (Müller-Pohle) 245, 245–246 Da Silva, Alves 142

Davidson, Peter 138, 151, 152 deadpan aesthetic 117 de Keyser, Carl 143 Derrida, Jacques 155 de Ruijter, Gerco 142 Descartes, Rene 99, 109 ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’ (Martin) 112 Dewe Mathews, Chloe 162–164, 163, 164, 165 dies solis (Sundays in Nicosia) (Christofides) 128–129 digital photography: advent of 40; digital/ technological sublime 101–102; theory and photography 235; see also technological developments disaster sublime 10–11 Diski, Jenny 83 Disputed Territory (Haughey) 159, 159 Disrupted Borders exhibition 77 disruption, landscapes of past 141 distance, writing from: Christofides, Marianna 128–130; Hoak-Doering, Elizabeth 20, 124–130 distanciation, Brechtian 22, 23–24, 25, 130 distressed aesthetics 39 Distressed Landscapes (Treigys) 39 disturbing images 7–8; sublime, the 9–10 Dixon, John 135 Doane, Mary Ann 217 Dobrowolski, Chris 57, 102 Doisneau, Robert 199–201, 217–218 double-distanced position as writer 23–24 Drury, Chris 57, 60, 101 Edwards, Elizabeth 77 Eliasson, Olafur 141 empire, European 138 The End of the Rainbow (Kovalainen and Seppo) 44 Engels, Friedrich 111 environmental elements, drawing generated by 126–127 environmental interrogation, photography as xii environmental issues: authority of photography in methodology 252; beauty as not precluding significance 248; Consuming the American Landscape (Ganis) 246, 246–247; Conversations on Nature (Lebas and SofijaSilvia) 240–243, 241, 242; The Danube River Project (Müller-Pohle) 245, 245, 245–246; Futureland/Futureland Now (Kippin and

260  Index

Wainwright) 251–252, 252; Lunar Landscapes (Jongerius) 249–250, 250; making the ugly beautiful 247–248; national parks, land management in 241, 241–243, 242; port enlargement 248–252, 249, 250, 252; research by photographers 238–243; resources used by photographers 238–240; SOUP (Barker) 244, 244–245; stewardship, human responsibility for 237; The Summer of Us (Autio) 243–244; Tree People (Puiden Kansa) (Kovalainen and Seppo) 238–240, 239; Unsettled (Pateer) 248–249, 249; visual eulogy, need to transcend 237; water pollution and sea change 243–246, 244, 245 ‘Error, Sunderland’ (Wainwright) 121 Eskildsen, Joakim 42 ethnic otherness 218 Études, Bel-Val, 6 Mars 2009 (Lebas) 3 Études Bel-Val (Lebas) 3, 87, 141 Europe, place and 133–135 Europe (Bleda and Rosa) 161 executions, sites of 162–164, 163 exploration, landscapes of see Landscapes of Exploration exhibition ‘Explosion No. 1’ (Magnussen) 36–37, 37 Facing East: contemporary landscape photography from Baltic areas exhibition: audiences for 40; critical evaluation as purpose 34–35; Distressed Landscapes (Treigys) 39; The End of the Rainbow (Kovalainen and Seppo) 44; ‘Explosion No. 1’ (Magnussen) 36–37, 37; installation considerations 40–41, 45–46; Lunatica (Merila) 38; Modernistic Journey (Guttu) 38; Norwegian Scenarios (Torgnesskar) 38; origins 34; Prospects (Torgnesskar) 38; research for 34–35; selection of works 36; title as enigmatic 36; Waters (Brasmane) 38–39, 39 fairy tales 92–93 Faithful, Simon 55, 56, 58, 61 Falkland’s War 103n4 Farrell, David 164–165 fatigue, image 8 feet as symbol 82 female gaze 218 The Female Pike (Männikkö) 151 Fenton, Roger 159 Fiennes, Ranulph 49, 97 Finnish hunting culture 153 Flora & Fauna (Männikkö) 150–151 Fontcuberta, Joan 143

form and meaning, looking and 202–216, 203, 207, 209, 211, 214, 215 Foucault, Michel 99, 125, 161, 165–166, 233–234 framing of pictures 154–156 Freud, Sigmund 9, 216 Futureland exhibition 113–114, 122, 175, 176, 182, 183, 251; see also Kippin, John; Wainwright, Chris FUTURELAND NOW - John Kippin, Chris Wainwright (exhibition) 251, 252 Futureland Now (Kippin and Wainwright) (book) 108, 116, 122, 173, 180–181, 182, 183, 251 Gabie, Neville 55, 56, 58, 61 galleries, Covid-19 lockdowns and 7 Ganis, John 246, 246–247 gender: exploration and 95; Finnish hunting culture 153; journeying in extreme conditions and 81–82; ‘northness’ and 152 Gersht, Ori 134, 167–169, 168 Gierstberg, Fritz 250 Glover, Gina 141 Grant, Keith 58–59, 100 Grants, Andrejs 40 ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’ (Martin) 112, 112 Greenwich Common Women’s Peace Camp 178 Gronsky, Alexander 142 Gursky, Andreas 117, 143 Guttu, Ane Hjort 38 Hall, Stuart 128, 219, 220 Hallam Day, Frank 91–92 Halso, Ilkka 143 Hampshire, David 209 Harmony Sisters (Männikkö) 147, 154 Hartog Jager, den, Hans 250 Haughey, Anthony 140, 159, 169 He (Kippin) 182–183 Hempleman-Adams, David 51 Heritage (Marchant) 113 hidden histories of landscapes: Bleda and Rosa 160, 160–162, 162; challenges for photographers 160, 169–170; The Clearing: The Forest (Gersht) 167–169, 168; colonialism 14–15; The Course of History (Michiels) 166–167; executions, sites of 162–164, 163, 165; historical proximity/distance 165; iconic photographs 159; Innocent Landscapes (Farrell) 164; preparation for

Index  261

photographs 161, 166; re-evaluation of themes 162–165; Shot at Dawn (Dewe Mathews) 162–164, 163; ‘Shotgun Cartridges, Armagh/Louth Border’ (Haughey) 159; UNresolved, 2015 (Haughey) 169 Histoires Naturelles (Lebas) 242–243 histories of landscapes 14–15; see also hidden histories of landscapes History Re-visited (Palacio) 188 Hoak-Doering, Elizabeth: LW’s essay on 23; writing from a distance 20, 124–130 Hobsbawn, Eric 137 Holland, Patricia 218 ‘Homage to Talbot: The Latticed Window, Lacock Abbey, 2010’ (Neusüss) 91 homosexual looking 218 Hopkins, Nick 135 Hopper, Edward 25 Horn, Rebecca 127 Huber, Yenny 142 Hughes, Philip 57, 59, 60 human-centric thinking 14, 25 iconic signs 204–205 icy vistas: masculinity and 74–75; see also Antarctica; Arctic regions identity: Europe, place and 133–135; and recognition, looking and 216–222, 220, 221 Imaginary Homecoming (Puranen) 76, 77–80 importance of visual communication xi incomprehensibility and the sublime 99 ‘Industrial Landscape’ (Lowry) 112 industrial sublime 111–113; continued fascination with 115; Kippin and 175–176; see also post-industrial sublime Initiation (Hoak-Doering) 126 Innocent Landscapes (Farrell) 164, 165 Installation, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Bleda and Rosa) 162 installation considerations for Facing East exhibition 40–41, 45–46 institutions, photography and 233–234 Interior/Exterior (Pirilä) 90 interpretation of images, two levels of 140 In Transit (Morstang) 89 James, David 75 Jameson, Fredric 102 Jensen, Per Bak 140 Johansson, Gerry 139 Jongerius, Marie-José 249–250, 250 Journeys: Antarctica 54–56; wilderness 73–75 Jussim, Estelle 188

Kant, Immanuel 9, 99, 109, 137 Kasearu, Flo 141 Kelly, John 49, 56, 61, 62n1 Kemmerer, Alison N. 188 Kilingberg, Margaretta 42, 42 Kippin, John 28, 107, 108, 111, 114–115, 116–117, 118–119, 121–122, 251–252, 252; Cold War Pastoral 178; collaborations with others 182–183; community arts movement 174; Compton Verney (Kippin) 178–179, 180; contribution to the field 173; economic shifts in the North-East 175; Futureland 175, 176; Greenwich Common Women’s Peace Camp 178; He 182–183; industrial sublime 175–176; isolationism of modern art 174; Local: government, people, photography 181–182; military engagement, traces of 177–179; ‘Nature Reserve’ 176–177; North-East England, move to 173–174; Nostalgia for the Future 172, 175, 179–180; place, questions about 177; political context of 1980s 174; precision in work 179–180; ‘SIMVLACRVM’ 177; subtleties of processes of signification 176–177 ‘Kirsten’ (Pateer) 249, 249 Klett, Mark 13 Koštrun, Peter 139 Kovalainen, Ritva 44, 153, 238–240, 239 Kristeva, Julia 99 Krivy, Maros 139 Kudász, Gábor Arion 139 ‘Kuhmo’ (Männikkö) 152 Kuhn, Annette 222 Kung, Irene 138 Landscape and Memory (Schama) 134 landscape as action/verb 134 landscape photography: Baltic areas 41–45, 42, 43, 45; definition of landscape 34; place and 135–144; women, and changes in 6–7 landscapes: breath of research, LWs 22–23; see also hidden histories of landscapes Landscapes of Exploration exhibition 96; albatrosses, symbolism of 57; Antarctica, early and continued exploration of 49–50; art as mediating scientific exploration 52–62; arts and science, comparison of 50–51; colour 56, 60–61; diverse communities 58; histories of Antarctica 51–52; journeys and arrivals 54–56; light, colour and sound 60–61; longer-term residencies for artists 62;

262  Index

map of Antarctica 48; materials, effect of environment on 56; mythologies around Antarctica 51; reliability of equipment 53; responses to places by artists 54; role and responsibility of artists 53; social dimension 58; sublime, the 59–60, 61–62; technological developments 53–54, 58, 60; transport support, dependence on 56; wildlife 61; working relationships, opportunities from 57 Landscapes without Memory (Fontcuberta) 143 Langford, Martha, LW’s conversation with: activism 27–28, 29; art, purpose of 28; arts and science, as false binary 21; authority of the curator 18, 19; critical thinking, LW’s aim to induce 28–29; curatorial proposition 18, 19–20; curatorial signature 18, 19; reflection and reflexivity 20–22; sentiment/ sentimentality, distinction between 24–25; writing 24, 25–26, 27 Laplanche, Jean 218–219 Lapland 72, 76 late photography 159–162 learning through doing xii, 26 Leaving the Harbor of Haloes (Hoak-Doering) 23, 125 Lebas, Chrystel 3, 14, 87–88, 141, 242, 242–243 Lewis, Carl, photograph of 219–220, 220 light: absorption phenomenon 85–86; aesthetic and thematic implications of 140–141; Antarctica 60–61; architecture 86; and art in Western culture 86; dawn and dusk 87; existential presumptions regarding 93; importance of to life 85; Light Touch exhibition 87–93; lux, lumen and illumination 86; metaphor and myth 86–87; northness and 151–152; perception of 85–86; photography and 87; in polar regions, LW’s interest in 11; power of xi; in theatres 27 Light Touch exhibition: Baltimore Washington International Airport as venue 87; colour, use of 90–91; existential presumptions regarding light 93; Hallam Day, Frank 91–92; intention of 87; Interior/Exterior (Pirilä) 90; Lebas, Chrystel 87–88; Like a Breath in Light (Pirilä) 90; Lookout (Silverman) 90–91; Morstang, Heidi 87–89; natural disasters 88–89; natural environment, relations

with 88–89; photography and light 87; Pirilä, Marja 90; Prosperous Mountain (Morstang) 88–89; The Road North (Morstang) 89; RV Night (Hallam Day) 91–93; Silverman, Lynn 90–91; social and cultural themes 91–93; Speaking House (Pirilä) 90; Tracking Nature Dedin, Risnjak (Lebas) 87; In Transit (Morstang) 89 Like a Breath in Light (Pirilä) 44, 90 Lister, Martin 8, 198, 198–199, 201–202, 209 Local: government, people, photography (Kippin) 181–182 local climate and culture, artists as subject to 78 Lookout (Silverman) 90–91 ‘Lövsjöhöjden’ (Klingberg) 42, 42 low-key observations 24 Lowry, L.S. 112 Lunar Landscapes (Jongerius) 249–250, 250 Lunatica (Merila) 38 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 99–100, 110 MacFarlane, Robert 14 Magnussen, Peter 36–37, 37 MA Independent Film and Video 227–230 Männikkö, Esko 147, 154; 100% Cashmere 149; animal portraits 154; Blues Brothers 151; colour/black and white photography 149; contemporary art institutions, relationship with 148; early interest in photography 148; everyday, interest in the 151; familiarity and affinity with subjects 148–149; The Female Pike 151; Flora & Fauna 150–151; framing of pictures 154–156; grouping of pictures 154; Harmony Sisters 147, 154; ‘Kuhmo’ 152; as man of the north 147; Mexas 149; northness 151–152; Organised Freedom 149–150, 150, 151; as outsider artist 148; Pemohy/Remont (with Turunen) 153; reflective, images as 149; Time Flies 154; tone, change of 149–150; ‘Untitled’ from Harmony Sisters 147; ‘Untitled’ from Organised Freedom 150; When Time Stops Still 148 map of Antarctica 48 Mapplethorpe, Robert 206–208, 207, 219 Marchant, Alison 113 Markou, Nikos 139 Marlboro cigarette advert (Lister) 198, 198–199, 201–202 Martin, John 112, 112

Index  263

Martinsson, Tyrone 13 masculinity: Finnish hunting culture 153; icy vistas and 74–75; polar regions and exploration in 95–96 McGregor, Jon 56 McKeand, Hannah 95 McNeil, Jean 56 meaning and form, looking and 202–216, 203, 207, 209, 211, 214, 215 Media Studies, Cultural Studies and 194 memory, reflection on 142–143 Merila, Herkki-Erich 38 messagefield (Hoak-Doering) 126–127 methods of working, artist residencies and 65 Mexas (Männikkö) 149 Michiels, Bart 141, 166–167, 167 The Ministry for the Future (Robinson) 28 Mitchell, W.J.T. 134, 237 mobile phones 8–9 Modernistic Journey (Guttu) 38 Moments before the Flood (de Keyser) 143 ‘Monument’ (Kippin) 107 Morstang, Heidi 87–88 motivation of photographers 26 Müller-Pohle, Andreas 143–144 Mulvey, Laura 216–217, 218 Museum of Nature (Halso) 143 nation, photography and: boundaries, advent of photography and 132, 145n3; parameters 132 nature: change in attitude towards 110–111; and culture 12, 238; human settlement/ nature 187; ‘Nature Reserve’ (Kippin) 176–177; Seedscapes, Future-Proofing Nature exhibition 29; sublime, the 100, 109–111; Tracking Nature - Dedin, Risnjak (Lebas) 87; visual eulogy, need to transcend 237; see also environmental issues; wilderness ‘Nature Reserve’ (Kippin) 176–177 ‘The Navigation Series’ (Wainwright) 117 Neimanis, Astrida 14 Neusüss, Flora 91 Nichols, Bill 216 Nickerson, Jackie 139 Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre residency programme 66–67 Nikolaeva, Vesselina 139 Noble, Ann 101 no man’s land, Antarctica as 96 northness 151–152 Norway as summer destination 153

Norwegian Scenarios (Torgnesskar) 38 Nostalgia for the Future (Kippin) 116, 172, 175, 179–180 ‘An Oblique Glance’ (Doisneau) 198, 199–201, 217–218 oceans: searise in Atlantic coastal areas, planned exhibition 29; water pollution and sea change 243–246 Øredok (Webb) 41–42 Organised Freedom (Männikkö) 149–150, 150, 151 Osborne, Peter 77 otherness, looking from positions of 218 out of place, being, creativity and 64–67 Pagett, Laura J 128 painting and photography, comparison of 50 Päiväläinen, Riitta 45, 45 Palacio, Oscar: American Places 188; History Re-visited 188; human settlement/nature 187; silent witness, photography as 185–189; Unfamiliar Territory 186, 188; ‘White Fence’ 185 Papastergiadis, Nikos 79 parody 102 ‘Paschendaele, 1917, Goudberg Copse, 2005’ (Michiels) 166, 167 Pateer, Isabelle 248–249, 249 Pathways in the Dust (Christofides) 128 Pemohy/Remont (Männikkö and Turunen) 153 Pfahl, John 248 Philippou, Nicos 139–140 pictorial conventions 203–204 Pirilä, Marja 6, 44; Light Touch exhibition 90 place: conflict, landscapes of past 141; digital transformations 143; documentary mode 139–140; feelings about 141–142; human intervention, consequences of 138–139; innovation in photography 142; landscape photography 135–144; memory, reflection on 142–143; moving images 142; responsibility to 143–144; sense of in Finland 153; Sense of Place: European Landscape Photography exhibition 132– 135, 144–145; see also post-industrial sublime planetary ecology, humans as part of 14 Plymouth-NiMAC residency programme 66–67

264  Index

Podpadec, John 113 poetic form 27 points of departure, meaning of term 108 polar regions: interest in, LW’s 11–12, 16n7; as masculine territory 95–96; see also Antarctica; Arctic regions; wilderness political interrogation, photography as xii Pollard, Ingrid 65 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 218–219 Ponting, Herbert 51–52, 52 port enlargement 248–252, 249, 250, 252 Porter, Michael 65 ‘Portrait’ (Päiväläinen) 45, 45 post-humanism 25 post-industrial sublime: artists’ interest in 113; caution re. technological achievements 115; concept of sublime 108–111; critical questioning about legacies 114; currencies of 111–116, 112; gallery/exhibition context 118–122; global employment shifts 115; locations and histories as themes 118–122; nature, change in attitude towards 110–111; redevelopment of industrial areas 108, 113; re-evaluation of the industrial 114; surprise, lack of today 115–116; thinking through art 116–122, 121; writings about 114; see also sublime, the post-modernism 99 power, photographic conventions and 210–216, 211, 214, 215 Power Places (Pfahl) 248 Presence (Lebas) 243 Prisăcariu, Tudor 139 ‘Private William Smith 06:30/14.11.1917 Primary School, Reningelst, WestVlaanderen’ (Dewe Mathews) 163 prospect paintings 136 Prospects (Torgnesskar) 38 Prosperous Mountain (Morstang) 88–89 psychoanalysis 216, 218, 235 Puranen, Jorma 11, 44, 71, 72, 76, 76, 77–80, 83–84, 152, 153 Raila, Artūras 142 randomness, role in art practices 126, 130n5 recognition and identity, looking and 216–222, 220, 221 Red Sea (Wainright) 118 reflection: artist residences and 66; and reflexivity 20–22 reflexivity 20–22, 130

re-photography 13–14 Requiem (Eskildsen) 41, 42 research: environmental issues 238–243; Facing East: contemporary landscape photography from Baltic areas exhibition 34–35; historical 36–38 residencies, artist 65–67 The Road North (Morstang) 89 Robinson, Kim Stanley 28 Rodhouse, Paul 53 Roginski, Szymon 139 Rogoff, Irit 195 role of curators: as creative 33; historical research 36–38; research for Facing East exhibition 34–35; selection of works 36 Romanticism 110–111, 137–138 Rosa, José Maria 160, 160–162, 165 Ross, James Clark 49 ‘Royalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death’ (Capa) 159 Rozenfelds, Gatis 40 Ruskin, John 10 RV Night (Hallam Day) 91–93 ‘Salamis 480BC, Cyanosaura I, 2006’ (Michiels) 167 Sámi people 76 Schama, Simon 134 schoolboys, photograph of (Hampshire and Lister) 209, 209–210 science and arts 21, 50–51, 61 scopophilia 216, 218 Scott, Robert Falcon 49 Sea, Sand and Soil: Plastics in our Environment exhibition 29 seas: searise in Atlantic coastal areas, planned exhibition 29; water pollution and sea change 243–246 second-level response as writer 23–24 Seedscapes, Future-Proofing Nature exhibition 29 Sekula, Allan 25, 114, 223 semiotics and codes 204–205 Sense of Place: European Landscape Photography exhibition 17n9, 93n4, 132–135, 144–145; Baldacchino, Nigel 142–143; Baltzer, Bruno 141; Banka, Pavel 139; Brotherus, Elina 142; Cabrita Reis, Pedro 141; Christofides, Marianna 142; Clanet, Celine 137; Custance, Gerardo 141; Da Silva, Alves 142; de Keyser, Carl 143; de Ruijter, Gerco 142; Eliasson, Olafur 141; Fontcuberta, Joan 143; Glover,

Index  265

Gina 141; Gronsky, Alexander 142; Gursky, Andreas 143; Halso, Ilkka 143; Haughey, Anthony 140; Huber, Yenny 142; Jensen, Per Bak 140; Johansson, Gerry 139; Kasearu, Flo 141; Koštrun, Peter 139; Kung, Irene 138; Krivy, Maros 139; Kudász, Gábor Arion 139; Lebas, Chrystel 141; Markou, Nikos 139; Michiels, Bart 141; MüllerPohle, Andreas 143–144; Nickerson, Jackie 139; Nikolaeva, Vesselina 139; Philippou, Nicos 139–140; Prisăcariu, Tudor 139; Raila, Artūras 142; Roginski, Szymon 139; Southam, Jem 140; Tempos, Theodoros 141; Vitali, Massimo 142; Weinberger, Thomas 138–139; see also place sentiment/sentimentality, distinction between 24–25 separateness 20–22 Seppo, Sanni 44, 153, 238–240, 239 Shackleton, Ernest 49 Shaw, Philip 99 shocking images 7–8 Shot at Dawn (Dewe Mathews) 162–164, 163 ‘Shotgun Cartridges, Armagh/Louth Border’ (Haughey) 159 Sides, John 135 significance of visual communication xi Silent Islands, Brijuni - Imaginary Landscape (SofijaSilvia) 241 silent witness, photography as 185–189 Silomäaki, Jari 44–45 Silverman, Lynn 90–91 ‘SIMVLACRVM’ (Kippin) 177 Slater, Don 205, 206 Snyder, Joel 205–206 social conventions 208–210, 209 social media 8–9 SofijaSilvia 240–242, 241 Solnit, Rebecca 14, 64, 127 Some Cities (Wainright) 118 Sontag, Susan 7, 189, 208, 222, 232 sound in Antarctica 60–61, 96–97 SOUP (Barker) 244, 244–245 Southam, Jem 14, 24, 25, 140 Speaking House (Pirilä) 90 spirituality and the sublime 10 spoken word 27 Spoolhenge (Noble) 101 Spufford, Francis 74 ‘Stalingrad 1942, Volga I, 2008’ (Michiels) 166

Stephenson, David 96 story-telling, accumulative 7 Strange Territory (Williams) 80 subject position 222 sublime, the: Antarctica 96–97; in art 10–11; astonishment 137; The Clearing: The Forest (Gersht) 169; contemporary art and 100–103; digital/ technological 101–102; disaster sublime 10–11; as disturbing 9–10; as effect of representation 110; exploration, landscapes of 59–60, 61–62; heroic associations 98; incomprehensibility 99, 137; natural phenomena 100, 109–111; origins and history 97–100, 108–111; pleasure and pain 97, 109; polar regions, LW’s interest in 11–12; post-modernism 99; spirituality and 10; sublimation and 98, 110; threat/danger, imagery of 97–98, 110; unknown spaces 102; wilderness 73; see also post-industrial sublime The Summer of Us (Autio) 243–244 Sundays in Nicosia (Christofides) 23 Suonpää, Juha 22, 43, 152–153 symbolic signs 204–205 Talbot, Henry Fox 135–136 taste 12–13 Taylor, John 175, 176 technological developments: caution regarding 115; exploration, landscapes of 58, 60; mobile phones 8–9; theory and photography 235 technological sublime 101–102 Temporary Taxonomy exhibition: Blank Mappings (Christofides) 129–130; Christofides, Marianna 124, 128–130; Church of Memory (Hoak-Doering) 125; dies solis (Sundays in Nicosia) (Christofides) 128–129; Hoak-Doering, Elizabeth 124–130; Initiation (HoakDoering) 126; Leaving the Harbor of Haloes (Hoak-Doering) 125; messagefield (Hoak-Doering) 126–127; Pathways in the Dust (Christofides) 128; things, witnesses! (Hoak-Doering) 127 Tempos, Theodoros 141 ‘Terra Exagitatorum’ (Puranen) 71, 78, 79–80, 153 ‘Terra Incognita’ (Puranen) 71 ‘Terra Nova Icebound’ (Ponting) 51–52, 52 theatre(s): exhibitions as form of 7; light in 27

266  Index

theory and photography: digital photography 235; documentation 233; framing moments, photography as 232; institutions 233–234; intersection with other issues 236; meaning 234–235; playful, photography as 235; range of theoretical approaches 232; representation and 233; shifts in 233; signification 234–235 theory-practice relation: film theory, need for 228–230; MA Independent Film and Video 227–230; problematising 226 things, witnesses! (Hoak-Doering) 127 thinking critically 14–15 thinking through practice xii Thoreau, Henry David 188 Time Flies exhibition see Männikkö, Esko Time Flies (Männikkö) 154 Torgnesskar, Per Olav 38 Tracking Nature - Dedin, Risnjak (Lebas) 87, 243 Tree People (Puiden Kansa) (Kovalainen and Seppo) 238–240, 239 Treigys, Remigijus 39 The Truth in Painting (Derrida) 155 Turner, J.M.W. 9 Unfamiliar Territory (Palacio) 186, 188 ‘Unique Modes of Investigation Photography and Landscape Research’ (Wells) 24 UNresolved, 2015 (Haughey) 169 Unsettled (Pateer) 248–249, 249 ‘Untitled’ from Harmony Sisters (Männikkö) 147 ‘Untitled’ from Organised Freedom (Männikkö) 150 Urry, John 218 ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ (Fenton) 159 van de Ven, Ariadne 21 Van Gelder, Hilde 25 Vear, Craig 60, 61 viewing position 216, 222 Visual Cultural Studies 194–195 Vitali, Massimo 142 von Schiller, Johann 137 voyeurism 216–217, 218

Wainwright, Chris 108, 111, 114–115, 116, 117, 118, 119–121, 121, 251–252, 252 walking and thinking 64, 127 ‘Wall paper History’ (Marchant) 113 Walton, David 25 Wandering (Williams) 80, 81–82 Wanderlust (Solnit) 127 water pollution and sea change 243–246, 244, 245 Waters (Brasmane) 38–39, 39 Weather Diary (Silomäaki) 44–45 Webb, John S. 41–42 weight of words 27 Weinberger, Thomas 138–139 Wells, Liz (LW): childhood interests and education 25–26; choice of articles for anthology 15; common threads in work xii; see also Langford, Martha, LW’s conversation with What is History? (Carr) 19 Wheeler, David 57, 60, 61 Wheeler, Sara 103n3 When Time Stops Still (Männikkö) 148 ‘White Fence’ (Palacio) 185 Whiteread, Rachel 126 wilderness: appropriation, refusing 76, 77–80, 79; Arctic, focus on 72; banal, experience of in 82–83; contradictory associations 71–72; definition and attitudes towards 72; fantasy 74; feet as symbol 82; icy vistas, masculinity and 74–75; imaginary/real, difference between 80–84; incursions northwards, effects of 78; journeys 73–75; Lapland 76; loss of originality in imagery 83; photography and 73; representation 72–73; stereotypes, rethinking 84; sublime, the 73; see also nature Wilderness (Suonpää) 43, 43 Williams, Elizabeth 11, 72, 80–81, 84 Williams, Raymond 28 Wilson, Edward 49 Wollen, Peter 234–235 women: changes in landscape photography and 6–7; explorers in Antarctica 95, 103n2; journeying in extreme conditions and 81–82 writing: from a distance 124–130; practical process of 27; weight of words 27