Photography and The Contemporary Cultural Condition Commemorating The Present by Peter D. Osborne

Photography and the
Contemporary Cultural
Condition
Commemorating the Present
Peter D. Osborne
First published 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Osborne, Peter D. (Peter Desmond), 1947– editor.
Title: Photography and the contemporary cultural condition : commemorating
the present / edited by Peter D. Osborne.
Description: New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. | Series:
Routledge advances in art and visual studies | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018004272 (print) | LCCN 2018006784 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781315818573 (E-book) | ISBN 9780415736251 (hardback :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315818573 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Philosophy. | Photography—Social aspects. |
Photography, Artistic.
Classification: LCC TR183 (ebook) | LCC TR183 .P4835 2018 (print) |
DDC 770.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004272
ISBN: 978-0-415-73625-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-81857-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Figures ix
Contributors xi
1 Commemorating the Present: Introductory Thoughts 1
2 The Accelerating Eye: Photographic Mobilities 27
3 Relocated Visions: Some Themes in the Photography of

Landscape in England 1990–2007 66
4 The Unapproachable Light: Photography and the

Sacred, Part 1 79
5 “Life’s Redemption”: Photography and the Sacred, Part 2 95
6 anredoM acitpO or Aztec Cameras: Cultural Hybridity and

Latin American Photography 121
7 The Accidental Theorist: Three Views on the Work of

Edgar Martins 142
8 The Damage: Photography and the Aesthetics of Fragility 158
Index 186
Figures
1.1 Vos Pellicules Déposées ici. Dieppe, 2015. 2

1.2 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, Paris 1838. 15
1.3 “Private James Crozier, 07.05 / 27.2.1916”, Le Domaine des
Cordeliers, Mailly-Maillet, Picardie. From the series Shot at
Dawn, 2014. 16
1.4 Walter Schels. “Maria Hai-Anh Cao; Portrait 5th December 2003”.
From Life Before Death/Noch Mal Leben vor dem Tod, 2004. 19
1.5 “Maria Hai-Anh Cao; Died 15th February”. From Life Before
Death/Noch Mal Leben vor dem Tod, 2004. 19
1.6 Solargraphy project, Helsinki/Peter D. Osborne. “Solarphotograph,
from a window in North East London”, 2007. 20
2.1 Chuck Forsman. “Vanishing Point, Morenci, Arizona”. From Western
Rider, 2003. 35
2.2 Chuck Forsman. “Intruders near Roundup, Montana”. From Western
Rider, 2003. 36
2.3 Rudy Vanderlans. From Supermarket, 2001. 39
2.4 Naglaa Walker. “Untitled” (Salvador, Brazil). From series Views from
Transport, 1999. 40
2.5 Naglaa Walker. “Untitled” (London). From series Views from
Transport, 1999. 41
2.6 Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers. I Am a Bullet, 2000. 44
2.9 Edgar Martins. From Airports, 2008. 51
2.10 John Holden. From Interference, 1994. 54
2.13 Nina Berman. From Hedge, 2010. 58
2.14 Trevor Paglen. Untitled (Sentinel Drone), 2014. 59
3.1 David Spero. “The Longhouse communal space and new kitchen,
Steward Community Woodland, Devon, November 2004”. From
Settlements, 2004–2005. 72
4.1 Tiago Santana. “O Chão de Graciliano Chã Preta, Alagoas—
Brasil”, 2003. 80
5.1 John O’Reilly. With Felipe Prospero, 1986. 99
5.2 John O’Reilly. S/SGT Killed Over Germany 1944 Age 24, 1991. 99
x Figures
5.3 John Dugdale. Psalm 42 Morton Street NYC, 1996. Cyanotype. 101
5.4 Rut Blees Luxemburg. Liebeslied, 1997. 107
5.5 Rut Blees Luxemburg. Nach Innen/In Deeper, 1999. 109
5.6 Maeve Berry. Incandescence, 2008. 112
5.7 Michael Shanks. From Ghosts in the Mirror, 2013. 113
5.8 Joanna Kane. “Unknown Woman, Cautious Type”. From
The Somnambulists Photographic Portraits from before
Photography, 2008. 115
6.1 Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Parábola Optica, 1931. 124
6.2 Bauer Sá. “White Shoe”. From series Nós Por Exemplo, 1993. 127
6.3 Bauer Sá. “Dando”. From series Nós Por Exemplo, 1993. 128
6.4 Luis González Palma. La Lotería, 1990. 131
6.5 Gerardo Suter. Coatlicue, 1990. 133
6.6 Allan de Souza. Los Extranjeros, 2017. 139
7.1 Edgar Martins. The Diminishing Present, 2006. 143
7.4 Edgar Martins. This Is Not a House, 2011. 146
7.5 Edgar Martins. This Is Not a House, 2011. 150
7.6 Edgar Martins. “Production Line BMW Group Plant Munich
(Germany)”. From 00.00.00, 2016. 153
7.7 Edgar Martins. “Paint Shop BMW Group Plant Munich (Germany)”.
From 00:00.00, 2016. 154
8.1 Venice: photograph damaged by water. 1961. 159
8.2 Jenny Nordquist. “Untitled”. From Leaving No Shadow in the
Mirror, 2014. 167
8.3 Stephen Gill. From Buried, 2006. 168
8.4 Fernell Franco. From Demoliciones, 1995. 170
8.5 Fernell Franco. c1985 “Autorretrato”, 1985. 171
8.6 Fernell Franco. Autorretrato De Los Ochenta, 1990. 172
8.7 Alejandro Chaskielberg. Otsuchi Future Memories, 2015. 175
8.8 Allan de Souza. “Arbor”. From series The Lost Pictures, 1962–2005.
Digital print. 176
8.9 Sam Ivin/Fabrica. “Nigeria 2015. Time waiting for asylum 10 years”.
From Lingering Ghosts, 2016. 177
8.10 Laurel Nakadate. “Lucky Tiger 142”. From Lucky Tiger, 2009. 179
Contributors
Doug Aitken, USA, is a highly influential artist working in almost all mediums includ-
ing photography as well as sculpture, installation and video. Much of his work
reflects on the changes in the nature and experience of contemporary (mediated)
space including the built environment and mobilised spatiality; a recipient of many
awards and object of numerous studies. His work has been widely published.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico d.2002, was one of the founders of modern Mexican
photography active from the 1930s to the 1990s. Influenced by Surrealism and
pre-Columbian cosmologies his imagery of the everyday world often invokes older
meanings still alive in the modernity of the present in a language we might call
allegorical documentary.
Nina Berman, USA, focuses her documentary work in photography and film on politi-
cal and social issues including the militarisations of American life and domestic
violence. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Whitney and
the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and many other venues across the United States,
Canada, Great Britain and Europe. She teaches at Duke and Columbia Universities.
Maeve Berry, Ireland, lives and works in Great Britain. Her work has been exhib-
ited across Europe and in Asia. Essentially documentary, in approach it covers the
human body, mortality, memory and landscapes and places transformed by use and
consumption and subjective nature of objects. Her work has been published in a
range of books and catalogues.
Rut Blees Luxemburg, Germany, lives and works in Great Britain. A photographer,
artist and tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, much of her work is devoted
to the depiction of urban spaces and forms. Some of her most renowned images
are unsettling and atmospheric depictions of urban night streets, spaces and objects
normally devoid of human figures. She has exhibited widely including as the Ren-
contres d’Arles Discovery Award laureate in 2011. She has published several books.
Alejandro Chaskielberg, Argentina, is based in Buenos Aires. He works in photogra-
phy and film and also teaches photography in Tokyo, Barcelona and Mexico City.
His vivid and manipulated colour photography is based on a heightening or inten-
sification but not abandoning of reality. He has worked in Japan, Africa, Surinam
as well as Argentina and has received numerous prestigious honours, including
awards from SONY and Magnum.
Allan De Souza, Kenya/Great Britain, lives and works in the United States. He is
Associate Professor in Art Practice at UC Berkley. He works in still photography,
xii Contributors
video, installation and text. Much of his work is concerned with the issue of migra-
tion, misrecognition, memory and visibility, with the fading of vision/memory as
people relocate and with the effective invisibility of minorities and migrants in the
established gaze. His work has been the subject of numerous studies and has been
exhibited in the USA, Europe, China and India.
John Dugdale, USA, is a one-time fashion photographer and is becoming a fine art
photographer with a strong focus on nineteenth-century photographic processes
including the cyanotype and albumen prints following his increasing blindness
brought on by HIV/Aids. His highly refined often model-based work has appeared
in numerous exhibitions across the United States and Europe and featured in many
collections including those of the Whitney Museum and the Royal Photographic
Society, England.
Chuck Forsman, USA, is a Colorado-based photographer, painter and fine art tutor at
the University of Colorado, Boulder. Much of his work is devoted to the landscape
of the Southwest and Northwest United States and to the experience of motorised
movement in and across the landscape. His work has been published in a number
of volumes and a selection of his painting and photography have been exhibited at,
among other venues, the Denver Art Museum.
Fernell Franco, Colombia d.2006, was based in Cali, Colombia. Franco devoted much
of his work to the depiction of his city as it was undergoing relentless state and
corporate-driven transformations from the 1980s onwards, much of it involving
the loss of rooted, local spaces and cultures. It includes the use of serial and frag-
mentation of the image reflecting these forces and effects. His work has been exhib-
ited and published internationally. In 2016–2017 there was a major retrospective
exhibition at the Museo La Tertulia in Cali.
Stephen Gill, Great Britain, is a widely exhibited photographer whose work utilises
the places it depicts at times by incorporating the objects, substances, and organ-
isms located there into the photographic process itself, thereby extending the pho-
tographic medium beyond itself. The photobook is central to Gill’s practice. Held
in numerous public and private collections his work has been exhibited in Europe,
the United States, Canada, Japan and Korea.
Luis Gonzalez Palma, Guatemala. His work can be seen as the search for a visual
language that embodies the hybrid nature of Central America’s culture. It mixes
a direct portraiture of actual Guatemalans with a foregrounded theatricality and
symbolism representing the histories and beliefs in which they are immersed. His
work has been exhibited globally and has been widely published. Many of his
images have appeared as covers for Latin American novels.
John Holden, Great Britain, is a photographer and artist. Much of his work is in a
variety of book, magazine and online formats and integrated with innovative typo-
graphic design and page layout. It engages with the experience of new contempo-
rary urban cultures and environments and mediations.
Sam Ivin, Great Britain, is already the winner of several awards including two from
Magnum Photos and awards from the British Journal of Photography and Renais-
sance Photography, among others. His first publication, Lingering Ghosts (2016)
Contributors xiii
was the product of an undergraduate project at the University of South Wales. Its
images of the damaged portraits of asylum seekers has been shown in England,
France and Italy. Since then Ivin has been involved in the creation of a community
photography archive in Stoke-on-Trent in England called Settling which returns to
the theme of migration into the locality since the Second World War.
Joanna Kane, Great Britain, is a photographer and art college tutor based in Edin-
burgh. Her work combines an interest in the history of photography with the appli-
cation of new visual technologies. Her work has been engaged with the invocation
of presence as an effect of nineteenth-century life and death masks and the compa-
rable effects of the photograph. It has been shown in the Scottish National Portrait
Gallery and during the Month of Photography in Bratislava, Slovakia, as well as in
publications.
Dean Kuipers, USA, is an author and journalist. He was an editor on the Los Angeles
Times and writes on art, politics and environmental movements (see Doug Aitken).
Edgar Martins, was born in Portugal and partly raised in Macao, China. He lives and
works in Great Britain. His work approaches the landscapes of high modernity in
a style that mixes remote visual grandeur with an eye for metaphysics. It has been
exhibited widely and published in a numbers of books. Martins is the recipient
of numerous awards including the Inaugural New York Photography Award, the
SONY World Photography Award, and has been nominated for the Prix Pictel.
Chloe Dewe Matthews, Great Britain, is a widely exhibited and published photogra-
pher; recipient of a number of awards, including the British Journal of Photography
International Photography Award and The Royal Photographic Society Vic Odden
Award and nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Prix Pic-
tet. Shot at Dawn is her first monograph. She is a Robert Gardender Fellow in
Photography at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard
University.
Laurel Nakadate, USA, works in film as a well as photography. Her photographic
work explores relations—whether the imaginary and manipulative relations of the
voyeur or those of the distantly related (shown by the artist photographing peo-
ple she is related to via DNA testing). She has been described as the artist of the
“chance encounter”. Her work reflects on the photographic image as a form that
brings things or people close and at the same time confirms their remoteness. She
has been the subject of many reviews and analyses and has been exhibited across
the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan.
John O’Reilly, USA, is a photographer, an artist and an art therapist. He is best known
for his photo-montages juxtaposing fragments from classical art with erotica and
historical references often expressing male gay themes and concerns. He has had
numerous exhibitions across the United States, Canada and France and is published
in a number of books.
Trevor Paglen, USA, is a photographer whose background lies in fine art and geog-
raphy, his work is frequently preoccupied by the often covert use of remote land-
scape and places by state and military power. It aims to bring visibility to what is
normally hidden. Recent work has recorded the presence of surveillance drones
xiv Contributors
in the skies above the United States. He collaborates with scientists, human rights
activists and writers. Internationally exhibited and published, Paglen is a recipient
of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the MacArthur Genius
Grant.
Bauer Sá, Brazil, is based mostly in and around Salvador, Bahia, in Northeast Brazil.
His work engages with the presence and beliefs of the country’s African-Brazilian
communities. It is characterised by a studio-based concentration on the body and
the performance of identity and history. He has exhibited many times in Brazil, the
United States, Europe and Japan and is widely published.
Tiago Santana, Brazil, is an independent documentary photographer and editor of
Tempo d’Imagem. Much of his photographic work is devoted to the depiction of
Brazil’s Northeastern regions, above all the presence of the sacred in the local cul-
tures. He has received many awards inside and outside of Brazil and has been pub-
lished and exhibited in Brazil and France.
Walter Schels, Germany, has come to specialise in facial portraits, observing, above all,
“the human existence in extreme conditions” (www.walterschels.com/en/about/).
Schels’s work has featured in numerous exhibitions and publications. He is a mem-
ber of Hamburg’s Frei Akademie der Künste, and the Association of Freelance
Photo Designers.
Michael Shanks, Great Britain, lives and works in the United States. He is an archae-
ologist and Professor of Classics at Stanford University California. His work ranges
from traditional and innovative archaeological research and theory to the archaeol-
ogy of contemporary design and digital, visual and aural cultures and is widely pub-
lished. Recent work has engaged with the “disinterring” of lost figures/presences in
damaged nineteenth-century Daguerrotypes by means of photographic scanning.
Solargraphy (Tara Trygg) is a mass participation project organised by Tara Trygg at
the University of Art and Design in Helsinki around 2006 which featured the gath-
ering of the imagery made by many pinhole cameras across the globe which traced
the passages of the sun across the sky over a 3-month period.
David Spero, Great Britain, has exhibited in Europe and the United States. His work
brings about a convergence of conceptualism and the photographic representation
of often normally unregarded spaces, places, lived in landscapes and artefacts. It is
widely published in books and journals. His work is held in the collections of the
British Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2009 he was awarded a
Photoworks Fellowship at the British School in Rome.
Gerardo Suter, Argentina, lives and works in Mexico City. Beginning in dance and
theatre photography, his work tends to be studio-based working in photography,
video, and sound design often using performing models with direct or indirect cita-
tions and embodiments of pre-Colombian entities and forms engaging with ques-
tions of time, the body and cultural memory and, more recently, with border culture.
His work is renowned for its high quality imagery and use of diverse techniques. It
is the subject of numerous accounts and studies and has been exhibited across the
globe. Suter represented Mexico in the 23rd Biennial in Sao Paolo in 1996.
Contributors xv
Rudy Van Der Lans, Holland, lives and works in the United States. He is a graphic
designer, trained in Holland and studied photography at Berkley, California. With
Zuzna Licko he founded and edited the highly influential visual communication
magazine Emigre and was an early utiliser of digital layouts and typefaces. This
background is evident in his work with photography.
Naglaa Walker, Great Britain, has a background in both science and photography.
Her work has been exhibited in around 30 venues in Europe and the United States.
She won the Jerwood Prize in 2003. Combining photography and her background
in physics her widely praised show, On Physics, was accompanied by a book of the
same title in 2006.
1 Commemorating the Present
Introductory Thoughts
Cuanto miren los ojos creado sea

Let all the eye sees be created.
Vincente Huidobro, Arte Poética
Photography does not belong to history as one

of its already-surpassed moments. In fact it is
photography (and increasingly so) that
becomes ones of those ‘productive forces’ that
drive both the production of history and its
reproduction, here ‘imaged’.
Francois Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography
. . . forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Elizabeth Bishop, At the Fishouses
. . . Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Louise Glück, “Nostos”, excerpt from Meadowlands
by Louise Glück ©1996. Reprinted by Courtesy of
HarperCollins Publishers and Carcanet Press Ltd.
. . . does what we have available to us now

deserve the name of photography?
Jacques Derrida
le réel, éternal vainqueur aux points [reality always wins on points].

Gilles Ortlieb, from Stephen Romer (Ed.) Into
the Deep Street ©2009. Reprinted by courtesy
of Carcanet Press Ltd.
The core proposition of this study understands that photography, considered either
as a unified or dispersed set of related practices, remains one of the most effective and
instrumental representational forms constituting contemporary culture. It maintains
that photography continues to shape both the exteriority and the interiority of social
Figure 1.1 Vos Pellicules Déposées ici. Dieppe, 2015.

Source: Author’s collection © Peter D Osborne 2015.
existence taking its place as part of the evolving modernity characterised by Jean-Luc
Nancy as “the epoch of representation” and present in the formation of the contempo-
rary human subject described by Hubertus V Amelunxen as “homo photographicus”
(Nancy 1993: 1; Amelunxen 1996b: 117; see also Richter 2010: xxviii). It argues that
photography’s claim to having a distinctive referential effectivity can still be defended.
But it is a proposition aware that, since even before the digital revolution, it rests on
Commemorating the Present 3
shifting foundations and is haunted by the possibility it might resemble Wile E Coyote
having run off a cliff keeps on going over empty space for while until, hit by the reali-
sation there is no ground beneath his paws and plummets to earth far below. Of art in
general Terry Smith posed the question can it still “constitute the stuff of existence?”
(Smith 2001: 8). Applying the question to photography, my answer is a “yes”—but a
yes with complications.
Photography is obvious. It is obvious in the original senses of the word meaning
“being in the way” or something “frequently encountered”. It is obvious because it
is ubiquitous and constant. From smart phone cameras stage—managing and net-
working our performances, through the medium’s numberless pragmatic, forensic,
ideological, promotional, hobbyist and aesthetic applications, to surveillance cam-
eras observing from wall or sky monitoring our presences, owning our public spaces,
photography remains an unavoidable facilitator and mediator of knowledge, identity,
pleasure, social relations and of the arrangements of power. The medium has shown
an evolutionary ability to adapt and absorb other forms. As Sontag observed, it is
phagic, it devours other forms of visual culture. It is the Dr Who of visual media. It
appears then that photography, at least photographic effects, remain inherent within
our lives and worlds, constituting a kind of immanence.
Photography still articulates the contemporary because certain of its own charac-
teristics mirror those of contemporary modernity itself. In other words, photography
remains constitutive of the cultural spaces we inhabit being in a way, a creature of
them. An example is modern culture’s obsession with the present on one hand and its
constant flight from it on the other. It is a contradiction which finds an equivalence in
the ceaseless modulation of presence and absence at the heart of photographic repre-
sentation—whose imagery is both indexical and spectral. Similarly, the double nature
of the photograph as both a capturing or fixing of a fleeting reality and as an all too
fragile or erasable material artifact echoes how modernity is at once defined by its
own productions and systems and yet haunted by their destruction, pulled down by
the same forces that brought them into being. As often it was Baudelaire who under-
stood the deeply contradictory and conflicted nature of a then emerging modernity.
He writes: “De la vaporization et de la centralization du Moi. Tout est là” (Baudelaire
1961: 1271)/“Of the vapourization and centralization of the Ego. Everything depends
on that” (Baudelaire 1969: 49).
Societies institute themselves, writes Cornelius Castoriadis, by “instituting a world
of significations” (Castoriadis 1987: 360). Charles Taylor, in a similar vein, utilises the
term “social imaginary”, which he defines as:
the ways in which (people) imagine their social existence, how they fit together
with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations
that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie
these expectations.
(Taylor 2004: 23)
Taylor underlines his use of the term ‘imaginary’ as his focus is “on the way ordinary
people “imagine” their social surroundings”. More often than being expressed theo-
retically, he notes, they are “carried in images, stories and legends” (Taylor 2004: 23).
Photography is one of many processes through which the social imaginary is repre-
sented, confirmed and distributed. It is a crucial medium in the “culture of generalised
communication” or “mediatized culture” (Vattimo 1992; Hepp 2013). Its emphatic
if only apparent realism, that is, its ostensibly non-linguistic essence, becomes a form
of enforcement or naturalisation of the values of the social imaginary, as though put-
ting them beyond discussion. No debate over photography’s social functions or its
claims to evidential authenticity can exclude a discussion of how it is implicated in the
politics of presence where visibility is linked to power, establishing what Gary Shapiro
has called, a visual régime. With acknowledged echoes of Foucault Shapiro identifies
a major characteristic of a visual régime as lying in
what it allows to be seen, by whom, and under what circumstances. But it is also
a question of a more general structuring of the visible: not just display or prohi-
bition, but what goes without saying, not what is seen but the arrangement that
renders certain ways of seeing obvious while it excludes others.
(Shapiro 2003: 2–3)
As we shall see in a later chapter, the restriction of visibility has been utilised as a
weapon of political repression.
A visual régime organises what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sen-
sible”. The concept widens the meaning of the term “aesthetics” to describe how
“ forms of visibility” are arranged in a more generalised social space than those of
exclusively art practices. They are, he writes, a system
of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is delimi-

tation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise,
that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of
experience.
(Rancière 2004: 13)
What he calls “primary aesthetics”, are not the exclusive domain of art. They are
forms actively present in shaping how experience and understanding are articulated
and presented across the whole of social life. Art practices are aesthetic interventions
into social and cultural practices already formed by “primary aesthetics”. They are,
writes Rancière,
“ways of doing and making” that intervene in the general distribution of ways of
doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being
and forms of visibility.
A work titled Where We Come From (If I Could Do Something for You in Palestine
What Would It Be?) 2001–2003 by the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir contests a certain
visual régime, or rather it side-steps through what is as much an act of kindness as
it the production of an aesthetic statement. In possession of a United States passport
and therefore able to visit Israel Jacir asked Palestinians prevented from doing so by
the Israeli authorities, what she might do for them while in Israel/Palestine. One asked
her to visit his Mother’s grave. The image shows the gravestone with Jacir’s shadow
passing over it, a mark of her presence, her gift of the presence disallowed the son, her
presence standing in for his.
My aim in subsequent chapters is to illustrate how photographic practices have
been engaged in the formation but also in the investigation or contestation of the
visual orders theorised by Shapiro and Rancière among others. Their engagements
are not always radically antithetical, not necessarily desiring the thorough disruption
of dominant visual régimes. Some do. For the most part, while they are critical in all
senses of the imposed languages of representation, their aim is to complicate or, rather
to, recomplicate how we see and how it conditions what we see and the meanings
we can draw from it. Much of contemporary photography now represents a resolute
uncertainty about the veracity of its statements. Yet, as the conveyor of provisional
truths it represents a powerful opponent of certainties which so often charge the arm-
ories of oppressive power structures and their rigid imaginaries.
Photography, then, can be a means of imposing a visual régime. It is more than that,
being itself what Castoriadis calls a materialisation of “imaginary significations” cen-
tral to the contemporary order (Castoriadis 1987: 361). The medium embodies certain
of the necessary myths of modernity such as the link between science and technology,
the link between its realist claims and positivism. It exemplifies the synthesis of culture
and technology and the production of symbolic goods. Through mass ownership of
cameras it is associated with the idea of mass cultural democracy. It is mass produced,
immediate and globalised. It progresses: able to re-invent itself as modern, and at each
change to transform what is meant by the term photographic. Finally, on behalf of the
modern, photography has heroically usurped the powerful spell of traditional society’s
mythical or sacred time. Traditionally, sacred time, described by Mircea Eliade as a
“succession of eternities”, might be made present through ritual (Eliade 1987: 88).
In the ritual of the photographic image the passing moment becomes an unchanging
eternity—an “eternal present” the sacralisation of the everyday (Eliade 1987: 88).
Photography states the obvious. Yet in doing so it can destroy its obviousness: out-
stare it; reveal the strangeness of things and the complexities of seeing; look into the
overlooked; unsettle the self-evident; introduce the precise uncertainty of the poetic,
thereby proclaiming what Geoff Dyer calls the “the poetry of comprehensive contin-
gency” (Dyer 2005: 4). Much of photography is a simple celebration of what exists,
an activity that places it at the heart of an evolving modern condition described by
the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz traces a passage from a religious to a post-
religious culture in terms of the shift from a view of the world as filled with symbols
and allegories to one made of things as themselves devoid of resident gods. He writes,
Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now In things of this

world, which exist and for that reason delight us.
(Milosz, 1993)
However, as we shall see, the visual expressions of secular modernity have not
remained unchallenged; the metaphysics of the image have not departed.
Photography in this moment is also elusive: easy to find, but hard to recognise—and
definable in multiple ways. While it remains, in John Tomlinson’s words, “one of the
great emblematic artefacts of modernity”, digitalisation, speeds of image transmis-
sion, global mass usage and changes in economic and social formations accompanied
by the rise of more sceptical takes on representation, have together transformed the
ways in which photography is understood (Tomlinson 2007: 72). For much of the last
30 years, as the digital epoch advanced, the very idea of a single distinctive entity called
photography has become seriously questioned. Numerous jeremiads have prophesied
its effective demise. These assertions and anxieties are now, like the medium itself, also
obvious. Nevertheless they need some re-describing.
In his essay “Ectoplasm”, a piece written mostly in the 1990s, Geoffrey Batchen
itemises a number of important descriptions of photography’s uncertain condition
following the advent of digital technologies. The status of the photographic document
itself was challenged (Tim Druckery). Its claim to truthfulness was being undermined
(Fred Ritchin). Its very medium specificity may have disappeared (Anne-Marie Willis);
and if it was not already a corpse, then photography was certainly “radically and per-
manently displaced” (William J. Mitchell in Batchen 2005: 129). These descriptions
are echoed elsewhere. Terry Smith wonders if given the excess of images in the world
photography has become enervated (Smith 2001: 1–7). John Roberts links the loss of
reliance on photography’s indexical power since digitalisation with a detachment of
the medium from its role in political criticism and resistance which had been based
in the revelation of social reality utilised to contest dominant ideologies, naturalised
myths and official versions (Roberts in Kelsey and Stimson 2008: 164; see also Paul
Willemen and Dai Vaughan in Doane in Kelsey and Stimson 2008: 5). George Baker
notes how, as the borderlines between photography and other media and art forms
have become unstable or reinvented, the practice is at risk of becoming lost in its own
“expanded field”. “Even among those artists,” Baker writes, “who continue in some
form the practice of photography, today the medium seems a lamentable expedient, an
insufficient bridge to other more compelling forms” (Baker 2008 in Beckman and Ma
2008: 177). James Elkins wonders if photography now survives only through being
hooked up to a conceptual life support system being, he writes, “intravenously fed by
pure streams of academic art theory” (Elkins 2011: 110). Touché.
And yet what seems to have happened is not the effective disappearance of photog-
raphy through the dispersal of its aspects and elements. In many respects it displays a
more vigorous cultural existence than ever before, a condition brought about by two
quite different reactions sharing the conviction or hope that photography remains a
distinctive and identifiable practice. On the one hand an insouciant or anti-theoretical
“business as usual” attitude exists. Much of the time photographs in general con-
tinue to be produced and utilised for their assumed indexical and referential qualities
as in the past. Uncertainties deemed paralyzing are exceeded either by simply being
ignored or else by being pushed past. Pausing for thought may not always be an
option. Berthold Brecht was prepared to surrender intellectual complexity for social
effectivity, adopting what he called, plumpes denken, “crude (or clumsy) thought”—
but Brecht lived in desperate times (Eiland and Jennings 2014: 431).
On the other hand, emerging from out of the more reflexive or theorised responses,
an agnostic, at times wary understanding of the medium has evolved, one able to
incorporate in both theory and practice the presence of the doubt and scepticism
represented by the kind of the statements cited by Batchen. George Baker maintains
that “something like the photographic effect still remains—survives, perhaps, in a new
altered form” (Baker 2008 in Kelsey and Stimson 2008: 177).
Photography now tends to be regarded as a multiply located practice made up of a
federation of somewhat disaggregated but coterminous practices, including those of
other contiguous media forms such as film and video. These elements are never entirely
integrated but nonetheless remain organised centripetally, without permanently privi-
leging one element over others, producing what has become commonly termed “the
photographic”. While recognisable as, what Henri Van Lier calls “the photographic
event”, in terms of technical aspects and an abiding implication with the processing
of photons, a relationship to reference and the question of presence, reproduction,
copying, transmutation and seriality, each iteration of the photographic event will
be context driven. Drawing upon Roman Jakobson’s model of language functions, a
photograph likely to be organised around a different dominant in different situations:
sometimes the Aesthetic/Poetic, sometimes the Referential, at other times the Con-
notative and so forth (Van Lier 2007: 11; Jakobson 1990). Also dominant, will be an
attendant Metalingual or Reflexive function instated as the continuous presiding prin-
ciple of the photographic as now understood. “The digital photograph”, writes Lev
Manovich, “annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing
the photographic” (Manovich 1996: 57; also cited in Pirenne and Streitberger 2013:
xvi). The philosopher Peter Osborne proposes the category of the “photographic” as
the basis on which a new kind of ontological identity for photography might be estab-
lished, one that supersedes a no longer tenable realist foundation. It is formed from
a loose assemblage of qualities and functions producing what he calls “a distributive
unity”, a “pragmatic unity” dispersed across “an historically . . . determinate, pro-
gressive range of technologico—cultural forms” from early chemical photography up
into and beyond cinematic, televisual, video and digital visualities—all of which have
become acquired characteristics and available facilities—dispersed, that is, across
photography’s own ‘expanding field’ (Osborne 2013: 123–125).
George Baker notes a prevalence of contemporary work in which the photographic
image features but in “reconstructed” form, hybridised by the absorption of what
he calls the “counter presences” of the other media forms it is drawing from or is
being drawn into. New forms have evolved, he argues, such as, among others, the
“still film”, the “frozen film” and “the cinematic photograph”. Much of this work is
located on the borders between and within still and moving, non-narrative and narra-
tive, between document and discourse—each representing new objects and territories
of practice, which yet remain in great part photographic (Baker 2008, in Kelsey and
Stimson 2008: 179–187).
Raphaël Pirenne and Alexander Streitberger maintain we need to rethink photog-
raphy as an intermedial and environmental form. They apply Bolter and Grusin’s
concept of remediation which sees the history of media and related cultural forms as
a series of transformations in which new technologies absorb and transform already
established forms. So speech becomes writing, becomes print, becomes screen text,
and so on. Digital technologies remediate and reinvent photography and render it
open to the effects of hypertextuality, of convergence with other media that the digital
dramatically permits. Consequently, they argue that photography’s presence as a rep-
resentational form now lies extended beyond itself, coming into being, “according to
the context of . . . use and appearance”, that is, determined by its environment which
includes these links with other mostly digitalised forms. It now exists in a permanent
condition of creative unsettlement, modulating between the retention of its medium
specificity and its being opened up to the disparate transformations brought by “inter-
mediality” (Pirenne and Streitberger 2013: xiii–xvii).
Roland Barthes believed that the most subversive photograph is the “pensive”
photograph, the one that “thinks”, that remains open, unlimited (Barthes 1982: 38).
A significant number of theorists have argued that it always was like this, an essentially
“philosophical” or reflective medium. Introducing his monograph on philosophy and
photography, Henri Van Lier clarifies his intention not only to apply philosophy to the
medium but also to consider how photography itself might induce analytical think-
ing “emanating from the photograph itself, the kind of philosophy the photograph
suggests and diffuses by virtue of its characteristics” (Van Lier 2007: 9). A number
of characteristics have encouraged photography to become, as it were, its own phi-
losopher. The photograph’s incompleteness, it lack of explanation, demands of the
viewer an especially self-conscious response. The irresolvable dispute between the idea
of photography as the revelation of the world and photography as the invention of
a world, or of a world as photographed, generates creative uncertainties with every
image. Possibly most important, is photography’s hybrid nature. Three or more dec-
ades ago Victor Burgin and Rosalind Krauss identified the significance of photogra-
phy’s pre-digital heterogeneous, multi-coded and therefore self-reflexive core (Burgin
1982; Krauss 1979,1999a). Similar claims have been made by Peter Wollen (1979)
and Jean-Luc Nancy (1993). Michael Fried insists that photography cannot help but
reflect on itself as it is what he terms, an “ontological medium” being “internally
differentiated”, constituted by both the intentionality of the photographer and the
impersonal operations of the camera system. The photograph is what it is not (Fried
2008: 347). More recently a radical hybridisation of the practice and the dispensing
with the need for a source-object consequent on digital technologies has rendered all
photography pensive. Rosalind Krauss describes it as a “theoretical because heteroge-
neous object”, a value derived from being internally differentiated, a mixed assembly
of codes, practices and functions, an unresolved convergence of elements demand-
ing to be thought through (Krauss 1999a: 290–294; Pirenne and Streitberger 2013:
xvi). Thierry de Duve characterises the medium as axiomatically paradoxical, and
paradoxes always induce enquiry. It is, he writes, “image-producing. It generates . . .
a semiotic object, abstracted from reality” and is at the same time “reality-produced
(one might even say, reality-producing. . .) generating the photograph as a physical
sign, linked to the world through optical causality” (de Duve 1978:114). Since his
essay, written prior to the full impact of the digital revolution, the status of “optical
causality” has been rendered disputable.
Francois Laruelle also describes the medium as hybrid, a co-presence of “science
and perception ensured by a technology”, whose “immanent—being” is “radically
distinguished from its material support” (Laruelle 2012: 11, 37, 20). The photograph
produces, he says, something “more than perception” (35) and more than a simple
mirroring of the world. And yet it “neither reasons nor reflects” (Laruelle 2012: 35,
31). However it produces, if not thinking, then a distinctive condition of thinking, or a
space for thinking, one produced by the fictional spaces between all of a photograph’s
un-resolvable determining and determined elements and forces, the spaces or displace-
ments that constitute Laruelle’s “non photography”. We arrive at that interior distance
again; in this case the one between the visual, symbolic, conceptual, technological and
the forces of intention and desire, whose inter-relationship must be established by the
viewer/spectator who brokers how meaning is produced between these elements.
Laruelle describes the photograph as a “transcendental automat” whose effects
are immanent, and at the same time implicated in the world beyond it. The repre-
sentation/thought so produced he calls an “idea-in-image”. It is an effect distributed
among its parts; less than a concept as it is unresolved; and more than a concept as
is it folded into its object, and its object folded into it. A photograph is, he states, a
“thought” that “relates itself to the World in an automatic and irreflexive, but real
way”. Photography is a “utopian activity”, because of the way, he says, it “grasps” its
objects, a way that originates “in itself alone” (Laruelle 2012: 37, 31,15).
While photography may have become more thoughtful, its fictional, constructed
character has at the same time become undeniable. Having been forced by digital pro-
cesses to face its own finitude, when not in denial, photography’s—if such a subject
exists—creative response has been to re-negotiate its contract with the real in a man-
ner that accepts the mediating and fictionalising effects of its representations while, in
many cases, re-committing itself to being an empirical art of describing and revealing,
and one of seeing conceptually, one of self-conscious interpretation in which both the
photographic discourse and the realities it seeks to engage with are “re-complicated”—
to take a term from Paul Auster. Photography is, for certain, undergoing an aesthetic
revolution of the kind that Jacques Rancière speaks of. He writes, “The aesthetic revo-
lution drastically disrupts things: testimony and fiction come under the same regime of
meaning” (Rancière 2004: 37). But this is not a decamping from the struggle to describe
the real. Rancière adds, “The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” describ-
ing the attempt to connect what he calls the, presentation of facts and forms which make
them intelligible thereby blurring “the border between the logic of facts and the logic
of fiction” (Rancière 2004: 38). Photography’s depictions have to be more than ever
emanations of thought and instigators of thinking.
If there is one thing that photography always requires us to think about, it is the
concept of presence and therefore the concept of the present. In his essay of 1834,
“The Now: Descriptive of a Cold Day”, Leigh Hunt applies some gentle ribbing to the
narcissism of his own time. He writes, “No other Now can be so present, so instan-
taneous, so extremely Now as our own Now” (Hunt 2003: 149). While Hunt may
have been challenging some kind of blinkered self-centredness, in every moment we
do encounter before us the simple facticity of the present, that is the hard existence
of a world, the world, before us in the here and now. Yet we know too that its pres-
ence is mediated through subjectivities and representations and even in its obdurate
materiality the world is a shifting, drifting and vanishing thing, something held by our
attention between past and future. Doug Aitken’s 2014 sculpture Now (Blue Mirror)
presents some of these themes embodied in a representational-conceptual art object
which produces some themes and insight of use in this discussion (Erickson 2015).
The work is simply the word NOW made of wood and mirroring glass. As a sign-
object it will always be saying “now”. As a material thing present in a gallery, it will
always be now, present in space before the viewer. It will never become then. And yet,
the mirroring surfaces bring about further complexity. They reflect the viewers, con-
tain the presences of their looking, introducing self-awareness into the object and the
event. The material object may be an obstinate fact, but the reflections are unstable
and of a different category. They seem to belong to the realm of consciousness more
than that of matter. They flicker, morph and tremble, then depart as the viewer moves
around or moves on. Present within the wood and the glass and the space of exposi-
tion, are light and time and movement. As material object, Aitken’s Now embodies the
constancy, the undeniability of the present. As aesthetic event, its effects display the
fragility and transience of the present—and its constructed nature demonstrating how
presence and the present are the products of a set of elements and arrangements—and
of acts made within such pre-existing frames. Considering Aitken’s work as an image,
themes emerge close to those of Sartre in his meditations on the imagination and the
image. As stated earlier, one of his best known propositions held that the image is not
an object but an act, an intention; that it is more than consciousness of the world but
a way of “being present in the world” (Flynn 1992: 214; Sartre 1972: 89).
The present, then, is not stable. It is a complex and “incurably imperfect” state, or
rather an event, one objectively formed and framed but also produced by its human
constituency while remaining indifferent to human intentions—and it doesn’t remain
stable for long (Benjamin 1970a: 205). In fact it barely exists. The Czech poet and
scientist, Miroslav Holub, describes how he finds it easier to imagine eternity than
the present moment which is, he writes, “a dimension without a dimension” (Holub
1990: 1). Tests on the processing and recall of stimuli indicate, he notes, the “subjec-
tive present” probably has a life of only three seconds. “Stimuli lasting more than
three seconds cannot be maintained by our consciousness as a whole; we are somehow
compelled to correct them” (Holub 1990: 2). Complementary analyses of literary
and musical forms appear to confirm the science. Holub reports that, in most Ger-
man poetry until the end of the nineteenth century, a single poetic line—the “carrier
wave”—takes 3 seconds to read aloud. Similar results, he adds, have been reached
in the analyses of poetry as far apart as England and Japan. Further support can be
found, he suggests, in studies of European musical language. For example, Mozart’s
musical motifs also average 2 to 3 seconds in length (Holub 1990: 3). He suggests that
such conventions not only reflect physiological continuities but functioned as patterns
for establishing communities inhabiting a shared sense of the present. Such insights
bring Holub to conclude that
we simply happen in segments and intervals, we are composed of frames flickering

like frames of a film strip in a projector, emerging and collapsing into snake-like
loops on the floor, called just-elapsed past.
(Holub 1990: 6)
Plato’s Timaeus describes time as “a moving image of eternity”, a picturing of time as

movement active within the stillness of an antecedent and ordered universe (Cooper
1997: 1241; Plato: Timaeus 37c/d). Holub sees experienced time present as precarious
and intermittent, always about to fall into disorder. He imagines it as though formed
out of breaking and reforming concatenations of short-lived visual instants that, given
the cinematic analogy, momentarily take on the appearance of movement and there-
fore of presence, followed each time by a collapse into mute materiality and, deprived
of its representations, and by the loss of presence.
It is more than noteworthy that Holub utilises film technology for his analogy. His-
torically the socially determining force of the technologies of production and measure-
ment such as spinning, weaving, pottery, the mechanical clock and the heat engine has
been derived from a combination of material and figurative power: the power to both
reorder the material world and re-shape how it is imagined. All have been recruited at
some time as metaphors for time and human destiny and therefore of how we under-
stand the present and its place in the temporal order. Are we, though, author or prod-
uct of the metaphors? Friedrich Kittler opposes McCluhan’s vision of media forms as
the “extensions of man”, instead, he insists that media technologies are rearranging
human beings according to their own logic and effects. Rather than bringing the world
closer to humans, they are bringing humans closer to machines (Kittler 2014: 295).
He concludes that “technology (Technik) itself determines the History of Being” (Kit-
tler 2014: 297). Thus, in the “technology—enframed” modernity we now inhabit—to
use Heidegger’s terminology—the metaphors are more likely to be drawn from the
technologies of representation and information (Heidegger 1977). Presently, almost
the only discourse used to describe the human presence, even the Being of humanity, is
based in the imagery and language of media machines, photography, the cinema, video
formats and devices or information processing and networking technologies. Likening
the experience of the present moment to the operations of the cinematic apparatus
exemplifies Kittler’s conviction that humans adapt to their machines—that machines
do not reciprocate.
Adopting Kittler’s perspective and taking into consideration Hayden White’s propo-
sition that history exists in its representations (admittedly a gross simplification of
White’s thinking), we can begin to develop a way of studying how photography pro-
duces the appearance of the present, how it organises our apprehension of presence.
Additionally we can begin to consider how photography, either symptomatically or
through conscious creative decisions, can question how the present is represented and
can complicate, even disrupt, what is understood as presence. In their different ways
each of the following chapters is governed by the question of presence.
Other than its reproducibility, photography’s distinctive status among the media
and arts was based from the start on its delivery of presence, of bringing a viewer into
an unprecedented proximity with the world independent of representation. Equally
distinctive is the equal and opposite effect of the photograph deferring the presence
of the object it is a trace of. Citing Barthes’ recognition of the medium’s conjoin-
ing of the “here now” and the “there then”, Steve Edwards notes what he calls the
“strangely paradoxical” nature of the time, of the presence, objectified in the photo-
graph (Edwards 2006: 118). In this, photography is embodying some of the uncertain-
ties stemming from ontological complexity of presence. For example, Gilles Deleuze
writes,
[T]he present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is not,
but it acts. . . . The past, on the other hand, has ceased to act or be useful. But it
has not ceased to be. . . . of the present, we must say that at every instant that it
“was”, and of the past, that it “is”, that it is eternally for all time. This is the dif-
ference in kind between the past and the present.
(Deleuze 1991: 55; see also Smith 2001: 105)
Conceptions of presence are commonly linked to proximity. Kittler invokes Aristotle

in this regard, observing how “he equated being with presence, immediacy, and being-
there” (Kittler 2014: 291). Montaigne associated proximity with authentic commu-
nication. Plainly, a photograph or rather its contents, say an event or a face, is not
present to a viewer. However, it shares something of such notions of proximity in that
it can confront us with the irreducible particularity of the event or face, and thereby
transmit to the viewer an engagement informed with something akin to this proxim-
ity. Sartre argues that presence is transitive; it is “Presence to (my italics)—an internal
relation between the being which is present and the beings to which it is present” (Sar-
tre 1969: 121). The act of recognising and taking on the present moment is the driving
principle and founding basis for types of conceptual and aesthetic practice which are
the subject of a study by Koral Ward, organised around two terms, “Augenblick” and
the “Decisive Moment”. The latter is a free translation of the phrase “a la sauvette”, a
Cartier-Bresson book title which became a motif associated with the formal properties
of his mise-en-scène and a principle governing his approach to taking photographs.
“Augenblick” is a German word for moment; but translated literally it means “a
quick glance”, even “the blink of an eye”. It signifies the transience, randomness, even
the suddenness, of the present moment, but also its intensity. These are qualities iden-
tified by Sartre. He writes,“the Present is not”. It is ungraspable as an instant, “for the
instant would be the moment when the present is. But the present is not; it makes itself
present in the form of flight”, when it is in flight towards the future (Sartre 1969: 123).
Mark C. Taylor argues that we now inhabit what he calls the “moment of complex-
ity”, the word moment, he writes,
derives from the Latin momentum, which means movement as well as momen-
tum . . . Its boundaries cannot be firmly established, for they are always shifting
in ways that make the moment fluid.
(Taylor 2003: 23)
Ward observes a sympathetic resonance between the conceptual preoccupations of

Heidegger and the visual engagements of Cartier-Bresson whose careers ran in remote
parallel. The work of both, she argues, displays a commitment to the characteristics
of augenblick taken as a principle and as a basis for a practice that might provide a
description both of perception and of our being in the world. Philosophically, the
principal entreats us to engage with the present in such a way as to accept both the
world’s indifferent otherness and our chosen and therefore responsible engagement in
it. More precisely it requires us to engage in a present that is now and yet past and
also a becoming-future. From Heidegger, Ward argues that the present does not exist
in any ordinary moment. It becomes an authentic present “when the future and the
having—been are united” (Ward 2008: 131–132). A moment thereby seized before it
vanishes confronts us with the transience and thus the intensity of human existence—
the qualities of augenblick. In doing so we might assume authentic being as the world
and ourselves together come to presence, and develop appropriate concepts and forms
of representation. Ward invokes Kierkegaard’s notion of the pause, when in moments
of enlightening and transforming intensity “wonder stands in pausa and waits for the
coming into existence” (Ward 2008: 20). We might also think of Wordsworth’s “spots
of time” in book twelve of The Prelude, in which experience and meaning, past and
present, memory and perception all cluster together in some revelatory completeness
located in and beyond the present and embodied in imageries and descriptions that
equally trigger and express such revelations. In this way the world and our being in the
world come into true presence. Heidegger’s “deportment towards things” is reflected,
she argues, in Cartier-Bresson’s aim of “putting himself in question” (Ward 2008:
128). Both derive their insights from locating thought and representation at the edges
of being, incorporating the finitude, the non-presence, the fact of mortality and the
unsignifying contingency that lies outside of thought, and beyond the photograph’s
frame. Much of Cartier-Bresson’s imagery consists in momentarily articulate configu-
rations that seem to hover or hesitate on the boundary of their own disintegration.
They portray the momentum, the instant and the movement away from it. Cartier-
Bresson located himself and his practice in spaces of time in such a way that revealed
the nature not only of photography but also of our experience of presence itself.
Barthes once proclaimed photography to be a memorialising apparatus rather than
a medium of representation (Barthes 2002: 194). If this is so, the photographic present
is a commemorated present, one that, in the moment of its invention is confirmed as
impossible, already receded and unreachable and for those reasons, desired. Photog-
raphy is also a spatial medium and invents the present in spatial terms. The present
too is itself in part spatial. Its dictionary definitions include references to place and
space, to attending or turning up somewhere, to arriving somewhere. (The French
verb arriver also means ‘to happen’.) Photography appears to make things turn up, to
make them arrive, to make them happen in a presented space haunted by “time was”.
Bergson argues that the basis of perception is memory from which it follows that expe-
rience can never quite coincide with its own present. The present is always something
recalled, that is commemorated (Bergson 1990). According to Slavoj Zizek photog-
raphy’s twin poles are pornography and nostalgia (Bond 2011: 30). Each invoke the
yearning for an object that remains unavailable and in so doing each invents its own
peculiar kind of pleasure, and its own kind of remoteness. All photography announces
the approach of the present, but only the photograph can ever arrive. Like the grand-
child observed by Freud playing his “fort-da” game of loss and retrieval and thereby
producing pleasure out of the pain of absence, we compensate for the impossibility of
the present by means of the pleasures of photography (Freud 2015: 8–12). Octavio
Paz writes: “La luz hace del muro indiferente/un spectral teatro de reflejos” (“The
light turns the indifferent wall /into a ghostly theatre of reflections”). Entre irse y
quedarse (Between going and staying) (Paz 2012: 471).
Ontologically speaking presence is unrepresentable and yet forms the ground, or a
kind of contentless basso continuo on top of or against which all ideas and representa-
tions play. Jean-Luc Nancy writes,
[B]efore all representational grasp, before science, and theology, and philosophy,
there is that: the that, precisely, there is. But “there is” is not itself a presence, to
which our signs, our demonstrations, and our monstrations might refer. One can-
not “refer” to it or “return” to it; it is always, already there, but neither in the
mode of “being” (as a substance) nor in that of “there” (as a presence).
(Nancy 1993: 4; see also 357–361)
Such descriptions might be regarded as almost disabling as far as the struggle for
effective representation committed to reference is concerned. Paraphrasing Heidegger,
Terry Smith links “presence” to “impossibility” owing to an unresolvable conflict, he
writes, between “authentic Being” and
the grain of seeing/knowing—the eye—of an age which can only see itself as a
picture, as if it were an image substituting itself for its own loss of being.
(Smith 2001: 8)
However, Smith stresses that he is making the link in a spirit “of possibility” (Smith
2001: 8). He argues for an aesthetic practice that is prepared to take this “impossibil-
ity” as the grounds of future creativity, able to push insistently “against its time as
much as it emerges necessarily within it—against both art time and social time” (Smith
2008: 8). Presence and indeed the present are formed from what is known and experi-
enced, past or present. It is also constituted by what it has yet to become, its futurity,
which is unknowable but exists as possibility. It is also formed of an unconscious of
forms and determinations from the past, from the histories and cultures of elsewhere,
invisible and mostly unknowable to the present. Jean-Luc Nancy argues, that repre-
sentation is both revelation and closure. It, he writes, “determines itself by its own
limit. It is the delimitation for a subject, and by this subject, of what ‘in itself’ would
be neither represented nor representable” (Nancy 1993: 1). As I understand Smith’s
proposal, creative work needs to be directed towards the possibility he invokes by
acknowledging its limiting effects and choosing to be incomplete, not fully coherent.
It requires an openness to that which lies beyond its limits, which itself is incapable
of imagining. It would entail displacing the historically positioned authorial subject
with its idealised “pure self contained unity” or accepting it as a necessary fiction
(Nancy 1993: 9–10). By opening up to what it is not, towards an otherness it has not
yet encountered and may never express, a work becomes other than itself, more than
itself and thus released from its own limits (Smith 2001: 8).
There are lines of thought emerging from Walter Benjamin’s writings in which a
particular art of memory allied with an historically informed reading of photographs
can not only retrieve the past but also apprehend the politics of the present. In his
essay on Proust Benjamin writes,
For an experienced event is finite—at any rate confined to one sphere of experi-
ence; a remembered event is infinite, because it is the only key to everything that
happened before it and after it.
(Benjamin 1970a: 204)
In his most materialist mode Benjamin identified how photography exemplified one
of modernity’s essential processes, that is, “technological reproducibility” and how it
introduced ways of seeing that originated in a machine (Benjamin 1970b). But, there is
another tendency in Benjamin’s thought which some have labeled “mystical”, others,
“surrealist”. Here the photograph is understood as a revelatory presence, the origin
of signals transmitted across the space of time to a present if it is willing to hear. Kaja
Silverman provides an exemplary account of this aspect of Benjamin’s engagement
with the medium. Referring to his 1931 essay, “A Little History of Photography”, she
describes how he sees (or is it imagines?) the photographic image
propelled by a mysterious kind of intentionality toward a particular look—one

that has the capacity to recognize it, and thereby to redeem it. It travels through
time and space to reach this look, and when it arrives, something extraordinary
happens. The present discovers itself within the past, and the past is realized
within the present.
(Silverman 2015: 7)
Unless the images are excessively, that is, repressively staged and controlled, pres-
ences, contingencies and unnoticed, unrehearsed gestures and arrangements appear in
photographs as the unbidden speech of actuality. By revisiting certain images from the
past the politically situated individual might detect in such elements the origins of the
present. Benjamin writes,
[T]he viewer feels irresistibly compelled to seek out the tiniest spark of concur-
rence, a here and now, in such an image, with which actuality has seared, so to
speak, the characters of the image. We are compelled to find the inconspicuous
place in which the essence of that moment that passed long ago, the future nestles
still today, so eloquently that we, looking back, are able to discover it.
(Benjamin 2015b: 66–67)
All images are thresholds between different conditions and temporalities, different
presents and presences. In the historical light of certain old photographs, Benjamin
speculated that aspects of the modernity of the present might be read and a synchro-
nicity between the present and the past activated. In doing so the viewer might produce
what Benjamin called “the now of recognizability” (Eiland and Jennings 2014: 225).
I’d like now to apply something of the spirit of this discussion of presence to some
examples of photographic work where the theme of presence is, in my view, central.
Photographic presence was initiated by the image of Daguerre’s lonely man on the
Boulevard du Temple in 1838 (Figure 1.2). In a street on which everybody else disap-
peared, he was the unwitting participant in the invention of a new kind of human
presence, a new kind of visibility in which we are seen becoming our own object,
in which we are confronted with the re-enactment of our own transience. Like god
humankind could now look at itself from outside of time, from a non-human place,
through the machine eye.
In 2013 the British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews completed a series of pho-
tographs titled, Shot at Dawn (Figure 1.2.) They document First World War execu-
tion grounds where, convicted of cowardice, desertion, dereliction of duty and similar
Figure 1.2 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, Paris 1838.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.
offences, Belgian, British and French soldiers were shot by their own men during the
First World War. No people are present. The sites were meticulously researched by
Mathews and each image was made as close as possible to the precise scene of actual
executions matching the time and season of each killing (Figure 1.3). With one or two
exceptions, the striking characteristic of the images is their emptiness, in the sense of
being devoid of almost any remnants or clues that might be linked to the events that
took place a century ago. It is a quality of emptiness they share with Joel Sternfeld’s
1997 On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam, a documentation of sites around the
United States where murders and other violent acts took place, and Paul Seawright’s
1995 Inside Information, a collection featuring places where the bodies of the victims
of sectarian murders were dumped in Northern Ireland. We could add the work of
Dirk Reinartz and Mikael Levin depicting the now blank, apparently innocent, sites
of certain extermination camps obliterated by the Nazis (see Baer 2002: 61–86). Some
have believed sites such as these are polluted space, even haunted. The truth is that the
traumas visited on many of them became largely forgotten or were not widely known.
Mathews’ aim is the restoration of memory to places and landscapes. In doing so
photography, that spectral medium, re-imagines them as haunted and returns to them
their restless ghosts.
The subject of Shot at Dawn is what is not in the photographs, what cannot be in
them, that is, the events of a century past, events almost without memorials. Yet it
is for that reason that the work is rich in signification. Its images seem neutral, even
remote. There is a stillness in them that encourages a meditative response. They ask
Figure 1.3 “Private James Crozier, 07.05/27.2.1916”, Le Domaine des Cordeliers, Mailly-
Maillet, Picardie. From series Shot at Dawn.
Source: © Chloe Dewe Mathews 2014 (original in colour).
to be looked at or rather into for a long period. While at times it is touched lightly
by the picturesque, it is work that doesn’t bring attention to itself. However, it is this
apparent simplicity that releases a complexity that forms itself around three themes:
presence, photographic practice and witnessing.
Presence features in the series as a lack, as the absence of the events that are its
primary subject. It is an absence that urges a consideration of both the politics of his-
torical memory and of the centrality of the idea of presence in photographic represen-
tation. John Durham Peters writes: “the deprivation of presence in one way or another,
has been the starting point of reflection about communication” (Peters 2000: 36).
It was noted earlier that definitions of the word “presence” include references to
being present somewhere, to presenting oneself in some place, to arrive somewhere.
Whatever happens, happens somewhere and as we also saw the French verb arriver
can also mean “to happen”. So, presence is in part a spatial phenomenon and photog-
raphy is based on the simulation of and reflection on space or spaces and the evocation
of presence. Though lacking the presence of the historical subject matter, Mathew’s
empty spaces are essential to a work powerfully invoking what time and deliberate
institutional amnesia prevent it from actually showing. For this reason Shot At Dawn
is as much conceptual as it is a type of documentation. The work induces a critical
awareness of photography’s relationship to presence and absence, memory and for-
getting and of the limits of visual representation. Further, having provided them with
the details of specific executions, it hands to viewers the responsibility for their own
interpretation of the images and their own relationship to the complexities of histori-
cal memory. That is to say, the work also signifies the active presence of the viewer,
the spectral visitor, who must rediscover these deaths and return them to where they
were staged.
The theme of presence also touches on how societies are established on the giving of
meaning to spaces and topographies by naming them, giving them mythical histories,
and investing them with presence. As Mircea Eliade argues, without human mean-
ings bestowed onto it, space is indeterminate and random—everywhere is nowhere
and nameless and Being is literally groundless. He writes, “[S]ettling a territory is
equivalent to founding a world” (Eliade 1987: 47). This process involves the creation
of sacred spaces, centres and sacralised reference points around which the meanings
and uses of other ‘profane’ or peripheral, spaces are organised, that is, how the world
is made orderly—and textual. A sacred space is a topographical intensity filled with
meaning. It is always an entry into time, a portal. Cosmic and ancestral times flow
through them. Transformative events may have taken place in them. The First World
War has been epically memorialised. Its monuments and graveyards are sacred spaces,
ritual grounds marking sacrifice, martyrdom, grief, the desire to honour the dead and,
some might say, to expiate a collective guilt. They are places where past and present
are united, gateways into history and meaning. Until recently the executions have had
no such memorials. Associated with dishonour and often traumatising for the men
ordered to carry them out, records were sequestered or lost. Where they took place
have remained, as far as this history is concerned, indeterminate and profane spaces
with no opening to history. This is the invisible content of Chloe Mathews’ images, a
presence indicated by its repression. There is powerful sense that we are looking into a
silence; the silence of our own meditation; the diminishing silence of dawn; the silence
of the dead—but above all the silence of history’s denial of remembrance. Like the
executions the photography was carried out at the liminal time of ‘first light’, a light
that illuminated the oblivion into which the condemned soldier was about to be cast
and the oblivion that lay before Chloe Dewe Mathews’ camera.
The second theme is contained is the manner in which the work establishes itself
outside either art or documentary approaches while drawing on both. There is no
attempt to recruit aesthetic conventions and infuse the landscapes with allegorical,
meaning expressionist effects. These are not ‘auratic’ landscapes. The scenes pre-
sented, including the open fields, are more terrain than landscape—to cite Walter Ben-
jamin (see Benjamin in Baer 2002: 191). They are not pictures of sublime, redemptive
or even fallen nature. As said earlier, while the images appear to be straight docu-
mentations, any traces of the events they refer to are almost entirely absent. Against
the normal expectations of a documentary project, there is little or no relevant infor-
mation in the images; there is no evidence, there are no ruins and no witnesses are
portrayed. Instead, the photographs act as questions, they are as much enquiries as
representations. By doing this the photographs emphasise both the essential role of
the visual images in the work and at the same time their insufficiency. The familiar
prospects of the First World War battlefields, while essential documents, can also
have the effect of deferring the events, holding them in the past. The emptiness in
Mathew’s images brings about the opposite effect. By making the sites and landscapes
open to question, Mathews introduces the presence and therefore the present of the
questioning viewer. As a result it becomes clear that the answers do not lie in the
images any more than the executions have been marked in the landscapes and places.
Instead, they lie outside the image in the process of devising and revising history, in
the present of ethical practices.
Chloe Dewe Mathews’ photographs document her own photographic acts of wit-
nessing, of commemoration, of mourning even. These acts place the photographer
within the field of questions she has raised. The act of taking the photographs also
establish her in a particular and rather unsettling position of looking. She speaks of
coming to the realisation that, each time she was setting up for the shoot, she was
placing her camera more or less in the same place where the firing squad once stood,
occupying their line of sight, their line of fire, and staring towards the blind spot where
the doomed and normally blindfolded man had once stood.
In his “Little History of Photography” Walter Benjamin refers to reports that in the
early years of the Daguerreotype the images were so vivid that many were afraid to
look into them too deeply, anxious lest the people in the photographs could see them
(Benjamin 2015b: 69). This seems to me reasonable even if unfounded. It is the true
fiction of presence that underlies the power of many photographs, most effectively
when the human face is the focus. Accepting that a photograph somehow captures
the presence of another person is made possible through a type of “suspension of dis-
belief” peculiar to photography and cinema, in which visual realism is allied with the
acceptance of the logic of “as if” associated with fiction. This is most affecting when
people in the image appear to be looking at us.
Walter Schels’ series Life Before Death, features facial portraits of people with ter-
minal cancer made between 2003 and 2004. Each subject appears in paired portraits:
one in the late stages of their illness and the other shortly after death. There is light
in the eyes of the living faces in which register the fullness of presence and awareness
and, most importantly, indicates an interiority still expressing itself in the face. In
some the eye lines of viewers and subjects match. The fictional presence of the faces
confirms the true presence of the viewer.
Figure 1.4 “Maria Hai-Anh Cao; Portrait 5th December 2003”. From Life Before Death/Noch
Mal Leben vor dem Tod, 2004.
Source: Walter Schels © 2004, Life Before Death/Noch Mal Leben vor dem Tod, 2004 (reproduced by kind
permission of the photographer).
Figure 1.5 “Maria Hai-Anh Cao; Died 15th February”. From Life Before Death/Noch Mal
Leben vor dem Tod, 2004.
Source: Walter Schels © 2004, Life Before Death/Noch Mal Leben vor dem Tod (reproduced by kind per-
mission of the photographer).
After death the faces are folded in on themselves. The eyes are closed. They have
taken on the indifference of pure object, all presence evacuated, all interiority lost.
The faces cease calling to the viewer. No longer signified by their looks, the viewer is
abandoned to a reawakened sense of their own mortality.
As part of the Helsinki-based project Solargraphy, this image was made using a
pinhole camera fashioned from a film cartridge (Figure 1.3). It was placed on a south-
facing window sill and left for 3 months tracking 80 days of northern hemisphere
sunlight. The cartridge was then sealed and sent to Helsinki for processing. The result-
ing image dramatises photography’s in-between condition as neither a narrative nor a
completely still form (Baker 2008: 178–179). As a time-exposure image it is the mate-
rialisation of the spatial-temporal essence of photography, indicating equally presence
and non-presence (de Duve 1978: 117). The philosopher Peter Osborne suggests that
in a photograph, time “might become an ‘object’ ”. He continues, “A photograph is
an objective illusion of temporal objectification” (Osborne 2013: 125). This proposi-
tion seems borne out by the Solarphotograph which is, in a manner of speaking, time
become a substance secreted by time itself.
Presence is registered in the Solarphotograph not in terms of the moment or the
instant but as duration, as a sequence of days compacted into a single frame where
the passing of time is registered within the image, in its depths as layers of spatialised
time. The Solarphotograph is in effect a palimpsest created by the inscription of each
diurnal solar tracking across the sky, one over another through 2,000 hours of day-
light and darkness. While a moving film of this phenomenon would have offered the
appearance of actual movement, the photograph, by foregrounding both its facility
and its insufficiency for representing time and presence, becomes both a representa-
tion of them and a reflection on its own mediating conventions and processes. (See
also the long-exposure work of Vera Lutter.)
The principle we can take from these reflections is that photography is as much a
theory of the real as it is a representation of it. Perhaps we could modify the British
artist Mark Quinn’s description of art as “concrete philosophy” and consider photog-
raphy as “optical philosophy” in which a world is revealed, produced and displayed
for consideration all by the same action. This idea is addressed by Kaja Silverman
when discussing a tension in Lady Elizabeth Eastlake’s thinking between the notion of
Figure 1.6 Solargraphy project, Helsinki/Peter D. Osborne. “Solarphotograph, from a window

in North East London”, 2007.
Source: © Solargraphy project, Helsinki/Peter D. Osborne (original in colour).
photography as a creation of a world and photography as revelation or “disclosure”
of the world (Silverman 2015: 30–33). It steers Silverman, in Heideggerian fashion, to
a proposal of the idea that photography can reveal the otherness of the world that is
always and anyway there and does not have its origin in ourselves. In her discussion
of some examples of Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura-based art, Silverman describes
the way the world arrives in the work from the outside, uninvited and all but inde-
pendent of the artist, as an “ontological intrusion” (Silverman 2015: 35). The beauty
thus revealed or created is as much conceptual as formal, a visualisation of authentic
being open to the world that is permitted its own coming to presence, that “gives
itself to be seen” (Silverman 2015: 24). Here photography gives “pictorial form to a
concept” (Ward 2008: 8).
For the most part the work discussed in this study would be placed along a line
titled “art” or “aesthetic practice”; and certainly much of it displays a range of dis-
ruptions of the conventional realist image commonly encountered in contemporary
artwork. However, I would argue that all photographs with any level of extra-photo-
graphic reference are documentations of an object or event; and share the view that
all photographs are documentations of the photographic act itself. If we re-examine
the notion of the photograph as “pensive” or “philosophical”, we can see that both
are the products of the aesthetic identity and activity of the medium. In a discussion of
Derrida’s approach to photography, Gerhard Richter writes,
Derrida’s interrogation of photography works to open the medium to its own

alterity, to the ways in which photography exposes the non self-identity and inter-
nal self-differentiation that, for him, ultimately condition any act of aesthetic
experience and its ethicopolitical futurity.
(Richter in Derrida 2010: xxi)
To understand, in more practical terms, the folding in of, photography’s philosophi-

cal effect into its aesthetic practice, we might adopt Walter Benjamin’s concept of the
Denkbild as a description of photography’s manifold aspects and applications, and as
a practice to which photography might ally itself to. Denkbild is variously translated
as “figure of thought”, “thought image” or “conceptual image”. In order to describe/
think a city (such as Naples) or a complex economic/cultural phenomenon (such as
the Paris arcades) Benjamin would compress together concrete details, commentar-
ies, observed fragments and sensations, encounters and aphorisms and intermittent
reflections. It is a form that avoids the totalising viewpoint. In the Denkbild the con-
ceptual accepts an equal positional alongside the representational, the observational
or the impressionistic modes. It is neither linear nor primarily discursive. It is as much
poetic—the “resurrection of presences” (Octavio Paz)—as it is sociological. A Denk-
bild is unfinished, or rather its elements are left active so as to continue to form dif-
ferent connections and associations in each reading. Eiland and Jennings describe it
as “a discontinuous network of subtly intercommunicating singularities” (Eiland and
Jennings 2014: 212). Like photography it is a gathering of phenomena, an evocation
of insights and a space that calls for thought.
In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology”, Heidegger quotes from Frie-
drich Hölderlin’s poem Patmos, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also”.
These lines can as easily describe the contemporary irony that photography will be
part of the solution to the problem that, along with other forces, it has itself brought
about. That is, the blizzards of still and moving primarily digital images, assailing us
24/7, discouraging, some would argue, extended reflection, diminishing mnemonic
power and generating a deep scepticism concerning the possibility of accessing the true
or the real. Sign confirms sign. Deletion competes with capture. One pair writes, “This
is what photography teaches us about ourselves today, everything is important, but
nothing is memorable . . . what is not photographed and shared, is lost. Or never hap-
pened at all” (Stavans and Ellison 2015: 119). As noted earlier, some see this resulting
in a disarming of critical opposition to the social and political order of things. The real
can no longer reveal the falsehoods of unjust and deceitful social orders.
In the chapters that follow I am attempting to demonstrate how contemporary pho-
tography engages with these circumstances in such a way that it has become the coun-
ter-culture of visual media. Self-consciously but without apology, some photographic
practices resist the domination of the culture of speed and depthless simulation by
simply celebrating and re-asserting the power of the traditional still image to halt
the turbulence, to feed memory and to recognise the world again in its particulari-
ties. However, as with all counter-cultures, many photographic practices have adopted
oblique strategies. Some of these might be described as “homeopathic”: speed is met
with a photography of speed; political disappearance is countered by an imagery of
absence; the assault on photographic realism is answered by damaged photography;
the death of the sacred produces images of secular spirituality; dehumanised spaces
are mirrored back to themselves in work imbued with the same desolate modernity.
As George Steiner has said of the function of poetry, the task of all these practices
is “the resurrection of non-being into presence” (Steiner 1991: 93). It is the same task
given to art since Romanticism to bring to presence the unnamed world of things and
to overcome the abstractions and estrangements of contemporary culture. Most pho-
tography is pragmatic, instrumental, hedonistic, entertaining, celebratory, complacent,
and sometimes sinister and at times the servant of oppression. At its most complacent
it routinely confirms the established way things are and how they are seen. At its most
testing it challenges itself as it discovers ways to make present, to bring visibility to
what has been concealed or what has exceeded the imagination of the present.
“We do not lack communication,” write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. “On the
contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108).
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2 The Accelerating Eye
Photographic Mobilities
Travel is a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Susan Sontag
A mobile and contradictory whole.
Walter Benjamin’s characterisation of his life
Travel is difference itself.
Catherine Malabou
In Flann O’Brien’s comic novel The Third Policeman, the fictional philosopher, de
Selby, maintains that progression and movement are illusions. A journey, he insists,
is “an hallucination”, because human existence is “a succession of static experiences
each infinitely brief”. This is confirmed, de Selby claims, by photography (O’Brien
2007: 263–4). Without exactly concurring with de Selby’s theory, which is after all
re-heated Parmenides, we might note that it does describe how photography inter-
rupts movement and transmutes it into photographic form—into its own terms and
effects.
Photographs don’t move, although in many of their incarnations they can be
moved around with ease. From early on, photographs have been highly distributable
or transmittable, now streamable, that is, ubiquitous, instantly and globally mobile.
Many types of photographic practice are fundamentally mobile activities. Art pho-
tography is part of the global art system. A significant proportion of its practice is
site-specific requiring the presence of the artist wherever the installation is located.
Photographers and curators are more than ever travellers by definition (Kwon 2004;
Rosler 1996). The typical digital photograph is now always moving both in terms
of its being transmitted and shared and in terms of where its medium specificity is
located. It is now most likely to be a product of convergence culture: a networked
image or, in Régis Debray’s terms, a mediological event, that is an entity and an effect
of the relations between a smart phone, a camera and a search engine. In none of
its contemporary manifestations is the still photograph static (Jenkins 2008; Debray
1996).
Photographers have employed a range of visual forms, gestures and references to
register movement within the image: blurring, multiple exposure, the stuttering repeti-
tion of forms within the frame, the use of the diagonal, of curves and graphic rhythms
and rhymes, the indication of off-frame events from or to which the in-frame events
might flow, depiction of vertiginous spaces, dramatic vanishing points, a variety of
photomontage techniques, glitch aesthetics and of course sequencing, serial forms and
varieties of the photo-essay with its narrative structure introducing movement and
development. However these should not be regarded as attempts to compensate for
some perceived deficiency in the medium, its lack of movement. All, I would argue, are
expressions or utilisations of one of photography’s distinctive facilities, its particular
relationship to movement. It is a facility that enables it to produce significant forms
and revelations particular to itself.
The American photographer, Sole Leiter, once observed that photographs “are
not important moments but fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world”. His
words do more than restate a commonplace about street photography. Taken from the
“unfinished world”, the photographic fragment implies the whole, that is, the fugitive
stream of events that exceeded the moment of exposure. As an act of negation—the
negation of movement—as a momentary fiction of stasis within the irresistible current
of transforming phenomena (cf. Henri Bergson), the stilled event, the photograph,
confirms the existence of movement by means of a necessary relation to its absence. In
the idea of stillness is located the idea of movement (see also Metz 1985). Addition-
ally, as an act of photography it includes the “motivation for that operation of nega-
tion” to borrow a phrase from Deleuze (Deleuze 1991: 17). Leiter’s images of fleeting
contingencies, of forms deprived of visible substance by the optical effects of rain,
mist or ice, reveal being as feather-light, deeply transient—as passing. And yet it is the
difference between arrested movement and the still shaping presence of its source, the
flux outside the photograph, that constitutes photography’s frame, the defining limit
that brings the photograph into existence, the difference through which it achieves
its identity. The “fragile eternity” (“la eternidad vulnerable”) that Lorca saw in the
photograph lies in part in the endless temporariness of the photographic moment, its
quality of “always about to move/on”. Other than the “ça a été” reflected on in his
Camera Lucida, Barthes’ earlier essay, “The Rhetoric of the Image”, identifies another
category of time-space as an effect of the medium: the “illogical conjunction of the
‘here’ and the ‘formerly’ ” (Barthes: 44). For Thierry de Duve, Barthes’ description
requires completion. His “formula”, as de Duve puts it,
adequately describes only half the photographic paradox namely the space-time
of the snapshot. The space-time of the time-exposure would in turn be described
as another illogical conjunction: the now and there.
(de Duve 1978: 117)
George Baker offers a further useful description of the medium as being “suspended
between the condition of being neither narrative nor fully static”, and in so being
embodies something of the nature of modernity itself (Baker 2008: 178–179).
Thus there is always movement in or about the photograph: in its grammar, its ges-
tures, in its influencing outside and in its aesthetic production of a temporalised space.
And yet, as a medium for the representation of movement, it is widely taken as
self-evident that photography is notably less effective than cinema, being assumed to
be the negation of movement. Mary Anne Doane offers a more complex description.
She writes, “the irony of instantaneous photography is that its celebrated capability
of representing movement is attained at the expense of movement’s petrification and
paralysis” (quoted in, Green and Lowry 2006: 26). As Doane indicates, photography’s
The Accelerating Eye 29
stillness is established in the fictional pausing of movement, but it absorbs that move-
ment, is constituted by what it appears to have negated. It is a medium from if not of
movement and this gives it an advantage over film. Where film replicates the stream-
ing illusion of movement, and indeed in its analogue form, represses the multiple still
images which constitute that illusion, the photograph stands aside from movement,
unimmersed, observant and analytical and, having translated movement into a differ-
ent form, is able, as it were, to reflect on it, to offer a space, a moment, for thinking
about it—even for loving it. In this manner the photograph reproduces within the
image something like the structure of thought, the object and the reflection on the
object. It is an internal dislocation, a kind of interior travelling, that echoes Merleau-
Ponty when he writes that “to be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere
else” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 200).
Movement is not lost in the photograph, it is contained and can be traced by the
viewer within the image rather than between them, as is the case with cinema. Thierry
de Duve notes that where painting employs chiaroscuro to visualise movement and
time within the image, photography can employ blur. This effect is described by de
Duve as
[T]he lateral unfurling of the photograph’s resolution . . . that allows the viewer
to travel through the image, choosing to stop here and there . . . The kind of time
involved in this travail is cyclic, consisting in the alternation of expansion and
contraction, diastole and systole.
(de Duve 1978: 123)
In the light of these propositions this chapter will offer some reflections on how
photography has engaged with new kinds of travel and mobility that have appeared
in recent decades; work that seeks to develop photographic spaces homologous to the
effects of movement on the spaces in which have our being.
(1)
I have been drifting through cities up and down the earth.
Homer, The Odyssey Book 15: L.551
All human history is a history of becoming through movement, through travelling. It

is foundational in humanity’s formations and transformations. However, it is evident
that new modes and experiences of travel and mobility have emerged as radically dis-
tinctive or expressive effects and actualities of the ever-protean condition we continue
to call modernity, most dramatically following the industrialisation of transportation
and the industrial production and distribution of light in the nineteenth century and
the arrival of widespread digital communication technologies in the last quarter of
the twentieth. Mobilisation is the curse and blessing of modernity. It determines anni-
hilating and also productive change. It frees us from the static world as it is, and yet
so often exceeds our abilities to understand or control it. It has brought about a divi-
sion in the interiority of the human subject. Reflecting something of Henri Lefebvre’s
portrayal of modernity as a condition pulled between the opposing poles of ‘comfort’
and ‘ferocity’ (Lefebvre 1995: 190), Scott McQuire sees modern life as lived in and
between the home and the car, poles that represent, he writes, a “fault line” in modern
culture lived between enclosed security and shelter and the liminal outside of change,
movement, risk and possibility (McQuire in: Millar and Schwarz 1998: 26). In concert
with MacQuire’s thinking, Said Manzurul Islam describes the contemporary home as
“the threshold of travel” a boundary from where something—the outside—begins its
“presencing” and a degree of nomadism has entered the settlement of the everyday
world (Islam 1996: 15–19, 30).
Eric Leed places travel at the beginning of western modernity, its energising and
realising force being “the soul of the west”, a “primary source of the new in his-
tory and “a central rather than peripheral force in historical transformation” (Leed
1991: 14–15). “Progress”, observes Paul Virilio, “corresponds to the utilization and
search for extreme speeds” (Virilio 1991: 78). For Millar and Schwarz mobilisation
is, “the fundamental process of modernity” and, “a new phenomenon for diagnos-
ing the time” (Millar and Schwarz 1998: 16). Anthony Hoete describes “mobility”
as “one image of contemporary society”, signifying, he writes, “a mechanized space
of modernism—of cars, trains and planes”, that has been “overlaid by the electronic
space, the bits and bytes, of ‘modemism’ ”. He maintains that we inhabit “a transi-
tory, transformational state, reconfigured and self-refreshing, time after time”. “It is”,
he continues, “polymorphous . . . an event-space”, into which is compacted accel-
erating physical, social, cultural and informational mobilities, as well as the result-
ing inertias that seem to trail speed: jams, bottle-necks, hold-ups, overloadings, the
paralysis that follows the traumatising accident, all “triggering”, he argues, “a spatial
schizophrenia—you can be in two places at once” (Hoete 2003b: 11). Terry Eagleton
speaks of the “perpetual movement of capital” echoed in Benjamin Noys’ description
of capitalism as acceleration (Noys 2013: 7). John Tomlinson recognises speed as
hypermodernity’s most essential characteristic (Tomlinson 2007: 119). Utilising Ray-
mond Williams concept to fold experience into analysis, John Urry nominates “mobil-
ity” as one of the most active components in the contemporary “structure of feeling”
(Urry 2007: 6). Paul Virilio, in his notable contention that modernity is “logistical”,
places speed in modernity’s functioning arsenal. Clearly external material and social
dispositions are being transformed by mobility and speed. So too, argues Virilio, are
both human visual perception and the condition of being itself, each transformed
through, he writes, “the synergy of eye and motor”. The “travelling shot” has entered
our mode of seeing, changing both self and eye: “You are speed”, Virilio concludes
(Virilio 2006: 58). Peter Sloterdijk speaks of “the self-mobilising subject” as a “cat-
egory of reality”, an active form of personhood produced in the era of total mobilisa-
tion (Sloterdijk in Millar and Schwarz 1998: 43–44). The degree of agency implied
in the concept is countered in Virilio’s picture of a subject left increasingly stilled and
powerless by the extreme velocities of vehicles and electronic communication which
outstrip the individual’s capacity for reflecting on or reshaping their effects, installing
a kind of reverse or negative velocity in human experience, a view echoes by Jonathan
Crary and Girgio Agamben (Virilio 1991; 2006; Crary 2014: 52; Agamben 2009: 21).
The new conditions and mentalities linked to contemporary travel and mobil-
ity have their equivalents or descriptions in a visual culture in which photography
remains an indispensible presence. But it is not the photography of dutiful Recording
Angels. No stable observation point is available to it. As John Tomlinson phrases it,
“We are, inside speed, in the traffic” (Tomlinson 2007: 33). It is a photography that
visualises the essential uncertainty and sense of impermanence that afflicts, exercises
and excites the mobilised contemporary. It depicts the instabilities of contemporary
spaces, the experience of placelessness, the accelerating modulation between the van-
ishing and emergence of forms, the ceaseless switching between fixity and fluidity.
It is required to capture a world that is moving beyond representation, that hurtles
beyond the means of picturing it—the machine driven speed and speeds of cultural
mixings and transformations that often outstrip the human subject’s ability to man-
age its own experience, or comprehend its own perceptions. If this is the case, then it
requires particular types of cultural practice to engage with such aporetic uncertain-
ties, a task assigned by Gianni Vattimo to the production of “aesthetic experience”
(Vattimo 1992: 45). Merleau-Ponty considered Cézanne’s aim as an artist “to make
visible how the world touches us” (cited in Wylie 2007: 3). Indeed all human rep-
resentations and descriptions of the world are attempts to bring it closer and yet all
representations fail to some degree and photographic representation is no exception.
The accelerated real simply deepens the sense of insufficiency in photographic culture
concerning the medium’s ability to depict things as they appear. This has become more
than an ontological problem but one in which real material forces threaten to exceed
representation because of the facticity of their power, their speed. Yet such anxieties
are photography’s subject matter—an aporia that issues an irresistible aesthetic chal-
lenge. Where the absence of god is the substance of religion—the source of its theology
and its picturings—the absence or elusiveness of the real is the substance of the pho-
tograph and the origin of formal innovation and critical self-awareness. At its most
adventurous photographic practice will reveal something that is not always exactly
visible but is implicit in what can be visualised.
(2)
Forget the Statue of Liberty. The road is America’s pre-eminent symbol of freedom.
Richard Grant, Ghost Riders Travels with America’s Nomads (2003: 3),
quoted in Nathan Coley, Urban/Wild (2004)
For many years the Chinese railway worker turned photographer, Wang Fuchun, doc-
umented passengers on crowded trains during their long journeys across his country
(Fuchun 2012). Fuchun’s work has come to represent an acceptably positive social his-
tory of China throughout the recent decades of turbulent transformation. Where, as
we shall see, the narrative of American travel culture is mostly dominated by the theme
of individual freedom, Wang Fuchun depicts travel as a social or shared experience.
In part this is simply because, in the severely crowded carriages, people co-operate
out of necessity. And yet Fuchun’s mostly amiable groups convey a sense of commu-
nitas. More than being a random aggregation, the passengers seem to have created a
microcosm of a functioning society. In China Wang Fuchun’s series is an intensified
portrait of China’s collective enterprise, as a travelling together out of underdevlop-
ment. When we consider the modern and contemporary photography of travelling
in the West it is the road journey that features most significantly its locus classicus
being that undertaken across the United States. As said, its representations associate
the journey with individual freedom and escape and with transformations in the ways
things are seen and how they might be imagined (Jussim and Lindquist-Cock 1987:
71). In fact, rather than being a conduit of personal freedom, the American highway
is a mechanism for determining and disciplining movement, a means of distributing a
geography of power across the continent (Allen 2003). The most ambitious develop-
ment of an integrated interstate system was initiated by the Federal-Aid Highway act
of 1956, that is, deep within the Cold War. So, while it is a facilitator of personal travel
with its myriad motivations and purposes, the American road is above all a control
system. Like the internet two decades later, the highway system was developed as a
crucial apparatus of the US state, corporate and military infrastructure designed to
further integrate the nation and the economy and if the need arose, to function as a
transportational tool of military defence. The countless automobile promotions that
associate the road and driving with individual freedom constitutes one of its ideologi-
cal manifestations, part of its mythic face. The road is a hodological cluster of func-
tions and meanings; a space and a particular order of experience and, while deeply
associated with personal vision, questing dislocation, aesthetic intensity and the flight
from the familiar, it is at the same time an extensive form of socio-economic organisa-
tion. This contradiction finds its echo in approaches to the practice of the photogra-
phy of the road. On the one hand, there is the necessary yielding to the order, legalities
and direction that the road imposes, and also to what it might randomly throw up as
it is travelled—that is, a submission to the system and a surrendering to chance. On
the other hand, the photographer is free to choose which event, object or encounter
to select, to give value to, that is, to photograph. Overall this might be described as
a process of creative passivity. Somewhat whimsically, one might see here a degree of
resemblance to the characteristics of “allographic art” in Nelson Goodman’s sense of
the term, in that the road might be regarded as a set of fixed notations and the contin-
gencies of the particular journey and the images the photographer makes out of it as
the performance, as the improvisation on an imposed structure or theme (Goodman
1968: 112–122).
To contradiction we might add doubt, doubt concerning whether such an outside,
or some kind of wilderness into whose testing and revelatory realm the photographer
might venture, can still be said to exist. It is the kind of doubt that assails our era,
stalking our notions of what is authentic. If, since the 1950s and 60s, capitalist moder-
nity has enclosed and categorised all areas of existence; if the generalised mediation
and marketing of life has become inescapable; if the authentic is, as Dean MacCannell
taught us, “staged”, and if all outsides and wildernesses have been incorporated into
a permanent global visibility by corporate and popular visualisations and by surveil-
lance programmes, where might such a transcendent outside as “the road” be located?
There is an irony in the fact that the two most celebrated artworks of the road of
mid-twentieth century America, Kerouac’s On the Road and Frank’s The Americans,
appeared just as the interstate freeway system was being installed which standard-
ised and accelerated road travel and threatened to bypass the spaces, places and the
poetics that had shaped those works. Such ironies both haunt and motivate much of
the photography of the road in the last half-century. Their presence is evident in the
modulating shifts in American photography from the early 1960s.
In his survey of the photography of the American road, The Open Road, David Cam-
pany argues that by the mid-twentieth century photography was evolving styles that
reflected the experience and structure of road journeying and thereby inflecting some-
thing more general about the American context and condition. He cites the fragmentary
essay style of James Agee’s written section of his and Walker Evans’ 1941 Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, which modulates, he notes, between lists of facts and objects and
“poetic observations”. Campany observes that, what he calls, the “depiction of the
exemplary and singular instant or scene” was associated with the period up until the
1950s. I would add that this was more than a stylistic choice. What impelled Agee and
Walker and others was an ultimately political vision of a popular cultural democracy,
an attempt to read the times in the everyday artifacts and appearances of the Ameri-
can masses encountered along the road. There was certainly a change of key after the
1940s. Where Walker Evan’s road was a social text of some kind, Kerouac’s On the
Road and Frank’s The Americans saw the highway as the staging of a personal epic,
one of Whitmanesque transcendence, the other of disappointed, exilic Romanticism.
By the early 1960s, Campany detects further shifts. The approaches of Agee/
Walker and, we could add, those of Kerouac and, in some respects, Frank, were being
abandoned by certain aesthetic factions for the expression of what Campany calls
“continuous experience”, a non-climactic vision of a road going on forever, of a “an
inevitable, unrelenting permanent now”, featuring the “non-moments”, the itemising
of everything without comment, registering a condition of “ongoing”: “No begin-
nings, no conclusions, no symbolism” (Campany 2014: 11 and 23–26). Closer to an
art object or a space for inducing aesthetic work, the road would now be seen through
the cool, sometimes serialising, mostly intentionally apolitical aesthetics of Ed Rus-
cha, John Baldessari and William Eggelston. Ed Ruscha’s frieze books such as Twenty
Six Gas Stations or Every Building on Sunset Strip, were governed by the aesthetics
of travelling. Not only were these books rolled out like a road, the car was utilised
as an aesthetic instrument in their making. Rosalind Krauss observes that “Ruscha
is not debunking the pretensions of art photography so much as exploring the mass
produced automobile as an artistic medium” (Krauss 1986: 51). (See also Diarmuid
Costello’s discussion of Krauss’s argument: Costello 2010: 22.)
Later, Stephen Shore’s travelling appeared to generate work based in a non-commit-
tal staring at the normally overlooked and ordinary. Philip Gefter calls it, “a kind of
stoned contemplation” featuring the banality of the motel room, the serial meal, the
dull street corners, the grand landscape long absorbed and occupied by mass visual
and recreational culture and so forth (Gefter 2009: 17). In fact his work transforms its
objects by means of an implicit formal rigour. Additionally, and of greater interest here,
his picturings rescue the familiar from the dismissal and invisibility by re-experiencing
it through an intensified seeing, or intensive pausings, through an eye dilated by travel,
by many days on the road. The world in Stephen Shore returns to us as if seen for the
first time, as if we have just arrived in it having come from somewhere else. As aesthetic
practice, his travelling is about leaving the world in order to arrive in it.
And yet, the road is not fixed. Forming and re-forming constantly it is not entirely
captured by state or corporate régimes. While never free of them, all human practices
go beyond their determinations. Likewise in the ways it is used, in the experiences peo-
ple have of it and on it, the road surpasses its designated functions, just as it remains
restrained by them. The road system is both the expression and apparatus of a totalis-
ing modernity. And like the general project of modernity it produces those people and
spaces which exceed it, which are excluded by it: the refused or the dissident, those
who escape into society’s interior liminal spaces and those who are employed in them.
Plainly, the road is one such space where numerous photographers have portrayed these
kind of communities such as Mary Ellen Mark’s engagements with itinerant lives and
mobile trades, Danny Lyons’ bikers, Randall Levenson’s Carnies and Freak shows,
or Mike Brodie’s and Kitra Cahana’s images of nomadic, hitching-hiking, rail-riding
youth. Cahana sees her subjects as contemporary embodiments of a long established
figure in American culture, the hobo or tramp at once admired even envied, and yet
feared—a figure at once ghost and incarnation of America’s origins in dislocations and
journeys—in homelessness (http://blog.ted.com/kitra-cahana-documents-nomadic-
cultures-from-within/). In German this figure has been known as the Luftmensch and
normally assigned negative connotations such as drifting or irresponsibility. Vilèm
Flusser chooses to associate the type with freedom, one possessed of the necessary root-
lessness and open consciousness for creative thinking, for being adaptable to the new,
for becoming more deeply aware of the world. The Luftmensch might have his head in
the air, but she or he is flying and, being high up, can see further on (Flusser 2002: 107).
Photographers continue to pursue what remains strange, the clues, signs, objects
and intensities that can still be revealed or produced, some would aver, through the
synthesis of traveller-photographer-camera and the events and materials on the road.
Here the road represents a route to aesthetic form or to the celebration of whatever
has escaped absorption into the homogenised culture of sedentary space, the forgot-
ten and overlooked peoples, places and signs often along overlooked or abandoned
routes. In an essentially Surrealist manner in the work of such photographers, every-
thing on the road then becomes a signal. In his poem “Dromedaries and Dung Bee-
tles”, Paul Muldoon writes,
Think of how there lurks in almost all of us a weakness for the allegorical.
(2015: 68)
The camera, as documenter, re-establishes the unique particularity of an object or sign

and through its tendency to make objects aspire to the condition of metaphor, the
camera takes up its function as a kind of naming or more accurately, as an invitation
to name. Rather than a reflection of reality, the photograph gives reality to its objects.
Given the contradiction between the functional and the imaginary road what are
we to make of the approaches that since the conceptualist turn continue to take the
road as some kind of revelatory domain where, in a sort of archaeology, even theol-
ogy of the present, un-regarded and mute objects, images, signs and dwellings can, by
virtue of being photographed, come to be recognised as eloquent clues, symptoms or
emblems? The work of, among others, Susan Lipper (2000), Joel Sternfeld (2012) and
William Christenberry (1983, 2010), come to mind. I will offer some reflections on
one example of this kind of approach, Chuck Forsman’s 2003 book of photographs,
Western Rider, Views from a Car Window. It is a work that could be described as
traditional in that its poetic intensities appear innocent of the aesthetic irony and
foregrounded theorising that seems required in the mediated age. However this work
is able to bypass such formal anguishings by revisiting the theme of the “American
Road” through an open poetics capable of conveying the self-consciousness and the
paradoxes as well as an alertness to the unforeseen intensities of representing the
Western road trip. In his prologue Forsman notes that that contemporary visual expe-
rience is significantly shaped by the fact that “we see most of the outside world from
our cars” (Forsman 2003: xi). Forsman is a painter of landscapes and the album is
a collection of landscapes, but landscapes “motorised” to cite Bob Perelman’s poem,
“China”. Jean Baudrillard’s proposition that “the metaphysics of speed eliminate the
picturesqueness of travel” is countered here with an imagery in which speed is the
constituting energy of a different kind of picturesque” (Baudrillard 1986: 59).
Figure 2.1 Chuck Forsman. “Vanishing Point, Morenci, Arizona”. From Western Rider, 2003.
Source: Chuck Forsman © 2003 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
Around a fifth of the images picture the windscreen-framed road ahead vanish-
ing into the horizon—often into the night—still images of spaces being consumed by
mobility. They register and represent a condition of continuous leaving as arriving,
and arriving as endless departure. They dramatise that uneasy faltering between past
and future identified by Thierry de Duve as a fundamental effect of the medium (de
Duve 1978: 113–125). As the representation defers its object, so the travelling seems
to defer all destinations.
The car-eye pushes on, day and night, through different weathers and topographies.
Details appear, some strange some inevitable—the repetitions and singularities of the
road.
In William Kittredge’s introduction he speaks of the aesthetic effects of the photo-
graphs as the product of a confluence of the driver’s point-of-view and the perceptual
results of speed,
[A]s with montage . . . in rapid transit we see sequences, juxtapositions, connec-

tions, intimations, and implications that are often not so obvious to those moving
at a slower pace.
(Kettridge in Forsman 2003: xiv–xiv)
Linear perspectives alternate with lateral views. As in Lee Friedlander and Patrick
Zachmann, images are complicated by the multiple framings of windscreens, side win-
dows, rear and wing mirrors. At times the viewer is projected into landscapes whose
Figure 2.2 Chuck Forsman. “Intruders near Roundup, Montana”. From Western Rider, 2003.
Source: Chuck Forsman © 2003 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
depth of field is limitless. At others the windscreen is blinded by snow, or dust. In

rain things seems to waver and tremble as in a flawed or broken lens. Forsman and
Kittredge speak of a stuttering, fragmentary kind of seeing, but one attended by the
particular intensity of the glimpse. “Like any stranger,” writes Kittredge, “we get most
of our knowledge from glimpses” (Forsman 2003: x; Kittredge in Forsman 2003:
xiv). This, then is stranger vision: open to the contingent, the accidental and free of
expectation.
Transience and perhaps fatefulness are the qualities at the heart of Western Rider.
It combines a sense of onward resolve with a picturing of drift without destination.
It is, in Eric Leed’s sense, pure passage. And the night roads, the wintry remoteness,
the rain-soaked boulevards, the skeletal woodlands, the violent skid marks, the car-
henge of wrecks revealed in the headlights and the pervasive sense that everything is
passing, are all engagements with melancholy as though something left behind is being
mourned, or that something like death is anticipated up the road ahead. The road is
both a psychic and an allegorical space.
Eventually things modulate towards trance when angelic forms appear on the road:
the spectral deer; the transmutation of a snowplough into pure light; the slow, silent
lightening. Finally, whether from speed or driver fatigue, things lose their substance, as
though the material world is being forsaken, is dematerialising—being transcended—
again, death haunts such images.
Western Rider is a train of visual poetics in that the images exceed what they rep-
resent, born, perhaps, from what Eric Leed has called, when discussing Joan Didion,
“the rapture of the freeway” (Leed 1991: 57). The instrumental material road, the
state highway, is shown as the unwitting maker of its own visual poetics, the producer
of its own metaphors, its unplanned events and as the inventor of other psychic roads
behind and beyond itself. Just as Bruce Chatwin’s “Songlines” were the invention of
his walking, Forsman’s roads are the inventions of his driving.
Western Rider appears to be an instance of an aesthetic practice that retains a com-
mitment to the photograph as the expression of the photographer’s psychic engage-
ment in the world. It is also a symptomatic expression, if not exactly an analysis, of
how visual experience is re-ordered by driving, by the vectors of speed, by the struc-
ture of the vehicle, and by the isolation of the driver within the vehicle, who, like the
photograph, or like Benjamin’s image as “still-motion”, is fixed and yet moving—and
who is, in the final instance, a fleeting presence (Eiland and Jennings 2014: 357).
If we return to the North American context of the early 1960s and after we can
see the development of a different kind of road and travel-related photographic work
linked in different ways to wider conceptual art practices and later to more politically
driven interventions, and to transformations in the culture and political economy of
mobility and travelling which share a scepticism concerning the association of road
travel and autonomy and of the idea of unmediated creativity. Martha Rosler’s descrip-
tion of Lee Friedlander’s imagery of that time identifies well what the new approaches
were abandoning. They were, she argues, drifting away from High-Art photography’s
tradition of “being directed . . . toward some universal message” or the signification
of some “transcendental statement” by means of formal refinements, expressive inten-
sifications and/or the engagement with “exotic or culturally loaded subjects” (Rosler
2004: 114). The work of, among others, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and, later, Bill
Vazan, Robert Flick and Martha Rosler herself, who would introduce political inflec-
tions into her projects, represented a turn in the history of photographic art towards a
late modernism aimed at fitting the medium for a gallery system much dominated by
the concept of the art object as impersonal, self-sufficient and saliently self-conscious
(see Kelsey 2015: 249–260). It also marked a change in the era’s sensibility with cor-
responding developments in other anti-subjectivist intellectual and aesthetic practices,
including a detached documentary formalism. In the work of many of these artists the
photography’s strategic indifference to what it represents, its consciously artless style
and banal contents, and the celebration of the contingent, together constituted an art
uninterested in the idea of the transcendent, or expressive image. Such approaches
were often reinforced through the utilisation of serial forms—“the variations within
limits” (Cotton 2004: 65). By choosing a pre-given structure the approach surrenders
authorship to an external system or process. It displaces the centrality of the hitherto
celebrated expressive subject in the aesthetic process and locates the work in the tradi-
tion of Duchamp’s “ready-mades”. As the serial form pre-exists the work’s intentional
moment and does not favour any one of its elements above any other, and as a series
can in principle be uncompletable, its use erases the possibility of the emergence of
an essential or auratic image (Fer 2004: 35). Rosalind Krauss has observed that the
serial form with its sequencing of doublings or near-doublings, undermines the unique
expressive image necessarily based on the notion of originality and re-locates attention
to the material and formal processes themselves (Krauss 1986: 109). And, following
the demand that an art form should uncover and express its own medium specificity,
formalist documentarism pushed photography’s literalism to the extreme, and serial
composition expressed the seriality inherent in photography itself: its limitless and
accelerated reproduction of the same. Jean Baudrillard saw seriality as a characteris-
tic of the simulacrum, and therefore inseparable from postmodernity in general and
industrial society in particular with its integration of mass production, distribution
and consumption and collateral mass media and visual cultures (Baudrillard 1994).
More than mere formalism, then, or asocial conceptualism, the adoption of serial
compositions in the work being discussed marked a convergence between art photog-
raphy and the seriality of the emerging landscapes of highway and freeway systems
and attendant services, structures and urban developments—Ruscha’s “ready-made”
motels and gas stations for example. As Aron Vinegar observes, Benjamin Buchloh
and Jeff Wall have both regarded Ruscha’s work with its “aesthetics of indifference”
as implicated in the flat, ethically neutral sameness of “the administered society” (Vin-
egar in Costello and Iversen 2010: 33).
The serial, then, operates as part of the formal organisation of these works and at
the same time acts as the reflection of the world referenced, that is, the world that
conditions travel and is shaped by travel—the serialised world of bureaucracy, traffic,
ribbon development, straggling urban sprawls, linear accretions of zero-style archi-
tectures, such as identical tract housing, spreading along the vectors of the highway
and seen in series from lines of mass produced vehicles. Serial forms appear time after
time in work relating to automobile-based developments: William Garnett’s patterns
of mass housing developments near Los Angeles; John Schott’s motels; Robert Adams’
Mobile Homes and car-dependent housing developments; the long desert-traversing
goods trains in Andrew Cross’s images. Thus, while the serial form appears as an
attack on content in favour of surface, its iterative patterning can nevertheless reveal
the underlying order or principle that governs and generates the surface, which is
the content—something the individual image is less able to reveal. Anyway, in pho-
tography the referent resists deferral. So, beyond functioning as aesthetic elements,
Ruscha’s gas stations and motels are documented material-social facts and perforce
signifiers of a wider historical order and social condition.
In the work of the artists of the 1960s, the neutral distance, even blankness that
often seems to pervade their way of seeing signifies something more than the presenta-
tion of the “deadpan” aesthetic coolness of the time as dissected by Aron Vinegar in
his study of Ruscha. It is, I would suggest, additionally the equivalent of the peculiar
passivity-at-speed, the impersonal intensity, the surrendered agency that frequently
overcomes the “spaced-out” motorist during the long drives on the American freeways
where, echoing, O’Brien’s De Selby, it is the road that drives the traveller (O’Brien
2007: 252; Osborne 2000: 170–171). There are further displacements of the driver’s
presence and agency in the work of these artists and of work that followed. In what
amounts to a move away from a photography of immediacy to one of what might
be called mediacy, the materialities and ideologies in which travel is constructed and
represented, the grammars of space, the culture and force of speed and the unstable
elements making up the mobile subject, are foregrounded in the photographic work
and related texts. Mediacy might involve the anxious introduction into the work of
its aesthetic influences. For example, in Rudy Vanderlans’ 2001 book Supermarket, a
photographic depiction and analysis of driving from urban Northern California out
into the desert, via Los Angeles, what he sees in his viewfinder, lying before, within or
beyond what is in front of it, are the work of the photographers and artists who pre-
ceded him, who in some degree constitute his vision. Below an image of a Hollywood
hillside of palms, apartments and condominiums are they listed like a series.
Figure 2.3 Rudy Vanderlans. From Supermarket, 2001.

Source: Rudy Vanderlans © 2001 (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
The effect is to suggest Vanderlans’ photographs, perhaps all photographs, are

quotations, and that all such journeys are repeat journeys. As part of his attack on
the notion of presence, Derrida rejects the idea of pristine performance as all perfor-
mances, he insists, are ritual-like iterations of previous performances of meaning (Der-
rida 1978: 280 and passim; Derrida 1982: 323–326).
At the core of many reflexive approaches is the principle that to understand and picture
car-related mobile perception it is essential to understand it as prosthetic in that the
driver, the vehicle and the road are inseperable components, an ensemble of machine-
body-road in which each is extended and transformed by the others. The theorisation
of this ensemble forms the basis of Charissa N. Terranova’s important study of “pho-
toconceptual” work that has its beginnings in, among others, Ruscha, Baldessari and
Friedlander, and is established on an understanding of what she terms, the “automo-
tive prosthetic” which generates a mobile perception seen as
the interlocked physical experience that begins when one takes the driver’s seat
of a car, the wheel hits the road, the car and human together become a nomadic
vector in the matrices of highway infrastructure.
(Terranova 2014: 57)
In work founded on this description, “the object of art”, she argues, “gives way to a
set of relations: an ecological unfolding of processes in time and space and a catalyst
for and receiver of movement and change” and the expression of what she claims as
a “new mode of human experience, the cyborg experience of the human-becoming-
automotive” (Terranova 2014: 64, 59).
The subject position of the driver-photographer represents a theme in a series of
images taken from the inside of cars titled Views from Transport, by the British artist
Naglaa Walker. They picture the apparent desire of the traveller to immerse herself in
spaces, landscapes and cityscapes whose beauty pulses on the outside, more like radi-
ant energy than places or objects. But the traveller is denied full communion with the
outside, deferred by the domesticating safety of the car-as-enclosure—by the restrain-
ing order of the window and mirror frames.
Contradictory features present in photography and contemporary travel begin to
appear in Walker’s work. Firstly, the manner in which the car imposes a framework
Figure 2.4 Naglaa Walker. “Untitled” (Salvador, Brazil). From series Views from Transport.
Source: © Naglaa Walker 1999 (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
Figure 2.5 Naglaa Walker. “Untitled” (London). From series Views from Transport.
Source: © Naglaa Walker 1999 (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
on seeing is a secondary iteration of the way in which the camera does the same. In the
instant that the camera opens up to the flooding in of the boundless realities of light,
they are subjected to the controlling architectonics of the apparatus, which constitute
a boundary and a limiting yet intensifying regimen of seeing. Walker’s series thereby
offers a reflection on how all forms of representation can be regarded not only as
the visual access to space but also as the repression of it. Secondly, if we, recall Scott
McQuire’s depiction of modern life lived on the “fault line” between home and car,
security and risk, we can see the car in Walker’s images as the substitute for home,
the dwelling. They picture the struggle between the two types of traveller proposed
by Deleuze and Guattari in section 12 of A Thousand Plateaus: the sedentary trav-
eller who holds to familiar descriptions and to a safe distance from otherness; and
the nomadic whose journey is open to becoming other. Walker’s traveller modulates
between both, suggesting that their mutual tension is a likely presence in all contem-
porary travelling and all photographs of travel (Deleuze and Guattari 2004).
Motorised travelling is dangerous, sometimes fatal. It displays a bi-polarity of con-
venience and risk. The tedium of the routine car journey or a flight can turn suddenly
into shock. For Walter Benjamin, to experience industrial modernity in general is to
experience shock—shock continuously delivered by technologies of ever increasing
power and ubiquity which were spreading the experience of the factory worker into
the daily lives of all citizens. He cites two technologies in particular: systems of trans-
portation and systems of image production, that is, Cinema and Photography, whose
combined effects were producing many of the perceptual and somatic intensities of
city life. In the 1920s and 30s of the last century Benjamin was observing how motor-
ised traffic was requiring the pedestrian to negotiate urban space in a constant state of
alertness, always alive to its potentially lethal power producing, he thought, a mod-
ern consciousness ruptured by moments of threat comparable to the photographic
snapshot and cinematic montage. Montage confronted the viewer, he maintained,
with equivalents of the city’s disjunctive effects, simulating the relentless alternation
of surging and fragmenting phenomenon in which the viewer of the film was as much
elated or alarmed as estranged. Jane Arthurs describes this consonance of urban expe-
rience and audio-visual media as producing
a subjective economy which, through aesthetic intervention, hotwires the shocks

of modernity to the rhythmic pulses of systematic motion.
(Arthurs and Grant 2003: 25)
In photography’s engagement with the motorised urban world Walter Benjamin

noticed an effect peculiar to the medium. He describes how it administers to the expe-
rienced moment what he calls a “posthumous shock”, bringing experience to a sudden
halt, as in a crash, in which the living movement is traumatically frozen, transformed
into a kind of death, not of the individual, but of the their own experience—stilled,
killed and yet retained (Benjamin 1973: 177, 2003: 328).
Unsurprisingly then, photography, which Barthes famously also regarded as a
medium of trauma, is strongly attracted to car crashes. They are a significant pres-
ence in Arthur Fellig/Wegee’s dark repertoire that constitutes his morality play of
New York calamities. They were the workaday subject of the professional photogra-
pher Mell Kilpatrick who photographed automobile accidents for the police and fire
departments and included in his pictures the shattered, blood soaked corpses of the
unfortunate drivers and passengers (Kilpatrick 2000). They are central to the work of
the Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides. Nestor Garcia Canclini, citing Virilio’s
adage that each technology creates its own catastrophe, sees the crashes and other
forms of violent death in Metinides as instances of a more extensive precariousness in
Mexico’s experience of underdevlopment. They are tableaux formed from contradic-
tory currents: traumatic, tragic and yet they often show selfless acts of support and
sympathy as if social solidarity re-awakens fully formed in the face of disaster (Can-
clini 2003). The car crash imagery threatens to subvert Warhol’s normally distancing
aesthetics with an unexpectedly sombre immediacy that conveys more than a hint of
Catholic religiosity. Hal Foster speculates that Warhol’s screen of repetitions that seeks
to defer trauma is ruptured “less in the world than in the subject—between the percep-
tion and the consciousness of a subject touched by an image”, an image which never
ceases to point to the real even as it deflects from it (Foster 1996: 132).
The car crash is invariably newsworthy, even spectacular. It can involve the neces-
sary/required deaths of celebrities, tragic import being read into their mostly banal
and random details (Brottman 2002). As the celebrity is a figure who has escaped from
ordinary life, from everyday work time, their association with speeding cars, private
jets, with endless spectacular movement outside and away from normality is fitting;
as is their final transcendence in the fatal crash. In such cases the pictures begin to
commandeer the role of the sacred icon. But, like photography, the car crash is also
democratic. We are all at risk of being in them (both crashes and photographs). The
car crash is still a very modern form of sudden death, integral to our experience of
mobilised modernity and its implicit hazards. It is part of modernity’s wager, the price
paid for acceleration. Additionally the draw of the car crash for photography derives
from some consonance between the characteristics of this event and of photography
as a medium. “In a fatal crash”, writes Steven Bayley, “time is frozen” (Bayley 2016:
15). The crash is, then, “photographic”—movement is cut, brought to a full stop, a
punctuation that completes a (death) sentence, thereby permitting recognition to be
brought to the image, meanings to be attached to it. Benjamin speaks of this process
as “crystallisation”. In picturing the car crash, photography reclaims what had eluded
it—the mobile object, movement itself—and proclaims itself to be its most appropriate
representation. The attraction goes further. The crashes most famously photographed
are the fatal ones. “Absolute stillness is death”, said Pascal, and photography’s for-
mal and cultural preoccupation with mortality and immobility are compacted in such
depictions (Pascal 2008: 126). Thierry de Duve argues that the way photography reg-
isters them is complicated by two different modes, the snapshot and the time exposure
image. Discussing de Duve, Green and Lowry write,
the snapshot takes movement as its referent but betrays it through its petrifiction,
the time exposure has stillness or death as its referent but transforms it into a
recurrent temporality of mourning or nostalgia.
(Green and Lowry: 26; de Duve 1978: 117,121)
It is the brutality of the snapshot that most suits the finality of the crash: the disastrous
stillness, the repudiation of speed, the arrested kinetic energies compacted into the
contorted ruins of vehicles and lives—the violent solidification of time that is both a
car wreck and a photograph.
And then there’s the ambiguous allure of the crash image. If there is an erotics asso-
ciated with such images it will lie either in the desire for ecstatic complete loss of self
in bodily fragmentation or the sadistic voyeuristic pleasure of being the survivor who
can consume the deaths of others; or who imagines being in control of their deaths. To
represent the crash is to bring either or both meaning or the expression of desire to it.
The image of the smashed up car is as equally an object of desire as it is one of fear. If
seen to indicate more than poor judgment or random bad luck, it may be re-imagined
as a staging or projection of the terror of and simultaneous yearning for disintegra-
tion that Freud identified in the Death Drive, an impulse generated by an irresolvable
combat between a desire for life, complexity and movement, and the yearning for the
simplicity, austerity and stillness of death, the re-installation of an imagined original
stasis (Freud 1986: 245–268; Mulvey 2005: 70–72; Boothby 1991). The much-pho-
tographed speeding automobile is the very embodiment of the Death Drive. It is fre-
quently depicted transubstantiating from heavy metal—anything from 800 to 2,000
kilograms—into weightless light, becoming the pure kinetic force pictured by, among
many others, Narahara Ikko, Otto Steinert and Jacques Henri Lartigue. Acceleration
is expressed as vitalising energy. At the same time, the dematerialising vehicle is an
image of death, of the disappearance of the substantial body. The energies that drive
life are also propelling the vehicle towards the convergence with its own annihilation.
While the Death Drive is drawn towards destruction it can also be understood as the
expression of a will to create, to begin again from nothing and out of nothing—a will
towards some kind of freedom. These themes are present throughout much of Doug
Figure 2.6 Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers. I Am a Bullet, 2000.

Source: Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers © 2000 (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the
photographer and the writer).
Aitken and Dean Kuipers’ 2001 book, I Am a Bullet—Scenes From an Accelerating

Culture, a series of analyses and representations of a global range of cultures in states
of accelerated change or simply of acceleration (Aitken and Kuipers 2001). Their
book, not only portrays the instances and appearances of these states, but through the
sceptical meditations of Kuiper’s text and Aitken’s often stressed and crowded visuali-
sations, it attempts to reveal certain conditions of contemporary change and mobility.
Two sections are of particular interest: “Speed as Destruction” on the Demolition
Derby and “Speed as Identity”, subtitled “Long-Haul Truckers Lost in Place”.
Aitken and Kuipers’ title, with its allusion to cinema and its unavoidable evocation
of Peter Yates’ 1968 drive-movie, Bullitt, captures the twin essence and contradictory
mode of being at the heart of mechanised travel that was discussed earlier. Here again
the traveller sees themself as both subject—the driver, the transporter, the ‘I am’, the
agent—and at the same time chooses to become the object of transportation—the
McQueen character, Bullitt-become-bullet—driven or propelled by the machine, chan-
neled by the contemporary systems, social relations and institutions of mobilisation.
But can one really choose objecthood, to become the projectile? Aitken and Kuipers’
descriptions ultimately suggest that such a choice bestows little agency as the power
of the mobilising forces of economics, class and infrastructure are not only irresistible
but are also changing human beings into something other than what they have been.
Through its dissonant orchestrations of photography, text and page design the book

reveals a global condition dominated by endless shiftings, fragmentations, collisions

and giddying perceptual-commercial overload that mirror the disaggregation and re-
arrangement of human subjects.
In the sections on North American truckers and on the Demolition Derby culture
there are two presiding motifs (Aitken and Kuipers 2000: Section 8). The first is the
addiction to movement itself—“dromomania”. The truckers appear compelled to
move endlessly, infused with travel’s transformatory power, a force that is as much
enervating as it is energising. It is also, Kuipers maintains, deluding. He describes their
compulsion to keep moving as a, “disguise, the illusion of becoming . . . an attempt to
escape from time” (Aitken and Kuipers 2000: Section 8).
The truckers own sense of themselves exceeds their function in the service economy.
They picture themselves existentially, at least, as autonomous. But there is a melan-
choly in their voice and a sense of homelessness-at-home expressed in the second
motif: a fatalism approaching a will to disappearance or death. This is manifested
in the assumption of a destiny that all but condemns them to perpetual movement
beyond the present time and place or towards some fatal collision. “They are preoc-
cupied”, writes Kuipers, “with images of death, and with moving past it”. They speak
of living in a permanent outside, forever detouring the settled world (Aitken and Kui-
pers 2000: Section 8). In both word and image Aitken and Kuipers reveal the truckers’
chosen and imposed identification with both their vehicles and the road as forming a
hybrid self extended into technology and enhanced by speed. In her discussion of this
hybridity, described by her as the “automotive prosthetic”, Charissa N. Terranova,
citing the work of the film theorist David Wills, emphasises how the transmutation of
the self as it implicates itself into technology is, like accelerated modernity in general,
a process of both extension and amputation, of both transformation and loss—even
disfigurement (Terranova 2014: 58–59).
Kuipers regards the truckers as “a rolling metaphor for America itself”, expressing
“the American dream” as “a perception of freedom to move especially in the wilder-
ness” to begin again from nothing (Aitken and Kuipers 2000: Section 8). But America
has long absorbed its wilderness and is, in Simon Schama’s words, “running out of
infinity” (Schama 2008). The truckers speak of an addiction to the white line in the
road ahead, a reward pathway beckoning like a white line of narcotics. And as with
all addictions, the ecstasy—the stepping out of stasis—is twinned with imprisoning
dependency and the harsh reality principle governing the need to resupply and to repeat.
At times the pages in I Am a Bullet, the traffic of signs and images becomes jammed.
At others typography crowds everything, the images are pushed aside. On occasion
things approach illegibility when letter and image intersperse or collide. In some places
the text becomes minimal, marginalised, by the imagery, its font diminished. Here the
photographed world refuses to be anchored by a text, a text that speaks of the object
forever deferred, of the impossibility of arrival. Representation has become precari-
ous, a little out of control.

The Demolition Derby section concludes with a broken line of lettering above the
ripped and torn prints, the out-of-focus images flecked with flying paint or ink, of
speeding or wrecked automobiles:
VIOLENCE LATENT IN THE ROLLING AUTOMOBILE __________ A DEATH

WISH MYTHOLOGIZED BY _________(PERHAPS EVEN ESSENTIAL TO)
AMERICAN CULTURE.
Here the repeating antinomies of travel as expressing or even producing subjectivity

and travel as destruction, as death, as some kind of ritual sacrifice, or expenditure is
inscribed into Aitken and Kuipers’ account. Yet there are pages where a white aerial
type upper-case lettering dominates as if the design is seeking something like manage-
rial control of visual meaning. And yet even here as often as not the visualised world
appears to stream past beneath the text, indifferent to any meaning being imposed on
it; or it disperses into multiple images outstripping all further attempts at explana-
tion just as the real accelerating world escapes familiar descriptions. The book’s use
of an overlapping, grainy, unfocused, bleached and at times shredded photography
expresses an attempt to evolve a set of equivalent forms to describe the actuality
and the principle of contemporary mobility, the “culture of speed”, the pell-mell of
modernisation as it races ahead of the perceptions or reflections of those who must
inhabit it. History outpaces culture. Culture races to catch up. More recently Aitken
has returned to the relationship between mobility and aesthetic practice in his com-
plex road-based project Station to Station (Aitken 2015).
(3)
The whole is untrue.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia—Reflections from a Damaged Life, 1974
Writing of the free or personal essay form, Theodor Adorno identifies how it embraces
“the fragmentary, the partial rather than the total” (Adorno 1984: 152; Kauffman
1988: 69). Historically the more enquiring forms of the essay have flourished in times
of crisis that are accompanied by the weakening of traditional certainties and the
consequent need to find new modes of writing and representation. These descrip-
tions are surely applicable to the work of the Japanese photographers Daido Moriy-
ama and Takuma Nakahira, above all the work of the late 1960s and 1970s such as
Moriyama’s Tomitei Expressway: the Road that Drives People, Another Country,
or Farewell to Photography and Nakahira’s, For a Language to Come. As the titles
suggest this is work that is taken up with the need to develop an alternative photo-
graphic form for responding to the permanent shock of post-war Japanese history
and hypermodernity with its shattering transformations beginning in the trauma of
military defeat and Atomic devastation, through US occupation, the subsequent head-
long high velocity re-modernisation and cultural change, mass urbanisation with its
vanished neighbourhoods, disintegrated spaces and identities and confused energies,
and the phenomenology of automobile culture—roads, traffic, speed in which much
of this was summed up. Not only does this work represent some of the most radical
and effective photographic engagements with surges in modernity, with what Ernst
Bloch once described as the “crack of dislocation”, but also and significantly it often
appears in the form of the photo-essay or photo-book (Bloch in Eiland and Jennings
2014: 479). These are notably reflexive genres in which photographic practice aims
to, as Flusser advised, “escape the programme”, in order to invent its own rules,
and to foreground its own substances and procedures, thereby pushing itself to and
beyond the limits of the photograph’s ability to clarify the world, a world that anyway
increasingly outpaces clarification. Like the more adventurous essays, Moriyama’s and
Nakahira’s work offer neither certainties nor conclusions but seek to produce forms
that correspond to a world in which the real is in the same moment ever departing and
still yet to arrive. The arrangements recall the stylistic figure of the asyndeton. Michel
De Certeau defines it as
[T]he suppression of linking words such as conjunctions and adverbs, either

within a sentence or between sentences. In the same way, in walking it selects and
fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and whole parts that it omits. . . .
It practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci.
(De Certeau 1884: 101)
As important, through a non-linear, aleatory sequencing and the abandonment of

margins, divisions or page numbers, the individual images, the still forms—the still
moments—are released from the single page, extended across it or beyond it into other
pages, even many pages ahead or preceding, producing less a sense of fragmentation
and more a rendering of an often vertiginous rushing of time-space, a streaming of the
endless transformations and temporary unities encountered; that is, a representation of
the “multiplicity” that for Henri Bergson, constitutes “duration” (Deleuze 1991: 117).
The city is the object and context of these photographers. It appears in their work
as both a space and as a psychic condition that equivocates between perception and
hallucination evoking Georg Simmel’s picturing of the mental effects of urban life—
especially atomisation and perceptual overload (Simmel in Levine 1971). It is a social
reality and a place of industrial light and darkness, of highways and energy cables, lit-
tered with scriptural fragments and sudden mask-like faces, of fleeting visual encoun-
ters with nameless figures, unknowable lives, with briefly desired bodies—a haunted
city filled with hallucinatory events, a domain of limitless contingencies where Japan’s
“accelerated development” is at its most intense and where the future is at its most
unknowable. Like their own photographic material, their city is permanently under
construction and deconstruction—and always being driven through.
But the full radicalism of their work lies in the meaning of its failure—that is, in the
apparent incapacity of traditional photography itself to develop effective depictions
of these energies and the concomitant chaos they bring about. It is work, in Simon
Baker’s words, “reaching beyond the competency of the camera” (Baker 2012: 36).
The picturing is unbalanced, it pitches and rolls like a vehicle out of control. It is over-
whelmed by a rush of blurred or fragmented detail, shot at speed, bleached out, or
overprinted and too dark to see. Sprocket holes appear along the border of distressed
film strips, positives are produced from abused negatives. It is as if the photographer
and the real have collided rather than coincided. At times representation seems to
have crashed. Moriyama speaks of shooting freely “most of my snapshots I take from
a moving car, or while running, without the finder”, working, he says at “the very
intersection of the fragmentary nature of the world and my own personal sense of
time” (quoted by Alexandra Munro in Philips and Munro 1999: 37). The seeing is
damaged, ruined, all but blinded or blindfolded. The blurrings, the over-exposures,
the fugacious events all abandon photography’s normal referential duties. The result
is catastrophic in its proper meaning, defined by mathematician René Thom as the
“deformations and perturbations generated by, discontinuity . . . occurring within
phenomena”. Catastrophe occurs, he continues, “as soon as there is phenomenologi-
cal discontinuity” (René Thom quoted in Malabou and Derrida 2004: 12). Derrida
additionally shows that the Greek word katastrophe refers to the dénouement in
drama, or to the end of a life, where an unforeseen event “brings about the ruin of the
established order” or “whose surprise interrupts the teleological trajectory”. As much
as signifying a possibly disastrous event, it refers us to the truth the event has laid
bare (Malabou and Derrida 2004: 4). Seen in this light it is clear that Moriyama and
Nakahira’s work is more than the anguished reflection on the efficacy of photographic
language. One can agree with Minoru Shimizu when he writes that in Moriyama’s
Farewell to Photography (and one could add, Nakahira’s For a Language to Come),
“the real world is expressed through a violence to the photograph” (Shimizu in Baker
2012: 61). Simon Baker observes how Moriyama’s “unfocused, dissociative rambles”
become engagements with the “specific experience of travelling (rather than the sights
seen)”, that in turn become “increasingly complex aesthetic engagements with pho-
tography” (Baker 2012: 22).
These photographic renderings of the experience of accelerating social realities
uncover the often violent transformation of place, that is, lived or practiced space,
into placelessness (see Relph 2008; Cresswell 2006 and 2014). In so doing, Moriyama
and Nakahira offer insights into the precarious nature of being in a world restricted
neither to the 1970s nor to Japan but to contemporary urban modernity in general.
Gilles Deleuze maintained that art is not primarily concerned with the reproduction or
invention of forms but with the capturing of forces (Deleuze 2003: 40). If the registra-
tion and visibility of forms and events is problematic in the work of Moriyama and
Nakahira, the presence of forces or their effects is given a palpable clarity. Such forces
that overwhelm form are, above all, the forces and effects of traffic, of driving, that
is, of the road where the most dislocative and delirious energies of the contemporary
world are to be found as well as its tragic finalities.
“When you can’t see where you are, you can’t see who you are”, writes Neil Ascher-
son (Ascherson 2015). In the same moment that Moriyama and Nakahira leave us
lost, our identity unmoored, their work fulfills the still critical task of producing an
aesthetic practice that acts as what Morse Peckham described as an “adaptational
mechanism”. “Art”, writes Peckham, “is the exposure to the tensions and problems
of a false world—art—so that man can endure exposing himself to the tensions and
problems of a real world” (Peckham 1967: 313–4). More radically such aesthetic
practice proposes not, in Gianni Vattimo’s words, “to reach a final recomposed state
but to struggle towards keeping . . . disorientation alive . . . to uphold the permanent
and resolute challenge, pace Guattari, to the freezing of subjectivity and to the con-
striction of transforming desire” (Vattimo 1992: 51).
There is a further dimension that this work brings us to concerning the ontology
of travelling. Other than Moriyama’s New York book, Another Country, the images
are all produced in Japan. And yet they are the products of journeys into estrange-
ment, into foreign territories, across “internal liminality” (Bhabha 1994: 213). Der-
rida argues that the true voyage must be one that, he says, unveils or “delivers ‘the
other’—the unexpected, a type of defamiliarisation if not adventure or exoticism”
(Malabou and Derrida 2004: 2). The otherness revealed in Moriyama and Nakahira
is not only the force of contemporary reality, it is also a condition of photography
when it has all but lost it ability to mirror the real back to us and begins to revert to
non-signifying matter, with its unsettling implication of non-being, and of a world that
fails to confirm our existence. Deprived of the normal certainties of photography this
work has undergone the most testing of journeys. It is neither reducible nor explicable
by reference either to a point of departure, its derivation, nor to that of arrival, its
conclusion. Eric Leed argues that what he calls the “Passage”, the journey itself and
its movements detached from fixed ends or beginnings, strayed from all preliminary
purposes or meanings is, he writes, “an experience with its own structure, logic and
consequences” (Leed 1991: 58). The Passage is where the traveller—and the maker of
representations—gets lost, loses their origins, forgets their points of reference. Cath-
erine Malabou offers a comparable reflection describing the journey as “difference
itself—temporalization, spacing, incessant displacement of the letter and of sense—”
(Malabou and Derrida 2004: 12). A journey is not explained nor is it reducible either
to its derivation, or to its arrival. She continues,
no originary sedentariness pre-exists it. No more than writing is derived from

speech is travel derived from a localized or localizable identity. Every identity has,
always, from its origin, to arrival at itself, to travel as far as itself. Travel takes the
origin away with it.
(Malabou and Derrida 2004: 12)
This is the condition and the predicament that the work of Moriyama and Nakahira
confronts us with. It is a practice that raves and drifts without the “origin” of photo-
graphic indexicality or of a knowable social reality to order it back home.
Contemporary travel is often characterised by a discontinuity between the move-
ments and transformations the traveller undergoes and the frequently constricted con-
ditions in which they are experienced. Syed Manzurul Islam notes that much of the
time travelling is a sedentary experience, more watching than moving (Islam 1996:
10). The condition reaches its most extreme form in air travel where the passenger
who moves at the fastest of speeds—anything from 300 to 600 plus miles per hour
(500 to 1,000 plus kilometres)—is the most inert and restrained, held inside the cigar
tube fuselage, served food and drink like a bed-bound hospital patient and submitted
to unsolicited promotions. Any lingering romanticism of the journey may have died
with the advent of regimented mass air travel. And yet, the commercial flight can con-
vey the traveller to the most desired places and people and to many kinds of intensity
whether in the form of pleasure or danger or transformation—which are all types of
freedom. Such contradictions are familiar characteristics of our time and condition.
Something of them is captured in a work of Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Visible
World 1986–2001, in which hundreds of conventional tourist photographs—sunsets,
landscapes and so forth—are arranged on a series of light boxes which stretch for
some meters across the gallery.
Where Edgar Martins exults in the techno-sublime abstractions of the airport
located on the edge of infinity (Figure 2.9), the visible world of Fischli and Weiss is one
already-photographed, photographically used up. Travel, tourism and multiple pro-
motions have rendered it as a Stock Shop of representations, stagings, performances
Figure 2.9 Edgar Martins. From Airports, 2008.

Source: Edgar Martins © 2008 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
or viewpoints—ever present but whose cultural energy is mostly dissipated. No out-

side to this image system is proposed by their work. Informed by an aesthetics of
somewhat amused disappointment and by Minimalism’s reluctance to add new images
to this visually overstocked universe, Fischli and Weiss imitate, replicate and mimic
tourism’s image repertoires. And yet the luminousness of this installation, the rigorous
grouping of subject categories, the formal rhyming produced by the use of the identi-
cal image and frame size throughout, the grid organisation and above all the scale
of repetition produces a flat sublimity of multiples. And something of the original
Romantic Sublime steals through the work’s inherent irony. One of the manifestations
of that awed encounter with moments of transforming otherness which tourism had
taken and tamed, was the prospect of forces and entities configuring themselves into
repeating patterns and moving towards unitary form. Here such patterns appear out
of a thousand images of sublime nature rendered commonplace by mass tourism and
its imagery. However, by excessive repetition of the cliché the work exceeds it, flies
from it. The conceit is confirmed when the viewer takes in the work from the side of
the installation and looks along its whole length. From that perspective it becomes
a path of light or, rather, a runway paved with the light of a million tourist pictures.
John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay argue that the future of global cities and economies is
inevitably located in and around and by means of the airport (Kasarda and Lindsay 2011).
J. G. Ballard, whom they cite, reveled in the “alienation and transience” it produces
(Ballard 1997 and in Kasarda and Lindsay 2011: 15).
However, those artists and photographers who depict the airport have taken a some-
what less celebratory view of the airport than Ballard’s heroic impersonalism. (See also,
Cosgrove and Fox 2010: 99–138.) For example, Marco Brambilla’s 1999 work, Transit
consists of a series of photographs in airports showing walkways, departure lounges, pas-
senger tunnels, luggage carousels and other throughput and transit spaces and systems
across which the artist’s clearly monogrammed suitcase passes. As the extension of him-
self, the suitcase introduces and circulates as the signifier of individuation into the repeat-
ing impersonality and standardised spaces of the airports. The effect will be temporary,
just one item among a million and, as a text in the book jokingly suggests, the chances are
the suitcase and therefore the self, will sooner or later be lost (Brambilla 1999).
In Martha Rosler’s work on roads and airports the prevailing condition is that of
stasis. Congestion, delay and non-arrival characterise the driving-in-traffic imagery of
her Rights of Passage. The frames are crammed with partly seen cars and trucks, bridge
struts, temporary curbing and other obstacles, all impedances to movement (Rosler
1997). Her airports are mostly still, even pacified places and frequently empty (Rosler
1996). The scenes and spaces in the individual images are sealed off from each other.
There is little sense of narrative movement. But Rosler reveals more than mere appear-
ances. She has developed a use of photography that combines documentary and con-
ceptual approaches that aims to reveal the actual, photographable world as the material
form or concrete practice of a particular political economy and its values. Her projects
show how things are always ideological and always things, because a dominating world-
view will in time construct a world viewed. Thus in her work, the road and the airport
functions as much to transit a particular system of values and relations as it does to
move drivers, passengers and freight around. The exhibition and book of 1996, In the
Place of the Public—Observations of a Frequent Flyer, capture the airport not as experi-
ence but as a system of spaces that determine experience, that function to produce a par-
ticular travelling subject. Michel De Certeau insists that we do space, that we practice
it (De Certeau 1984: 91–110). Rosler shows what space does to us. In the first instance
airports enforce a necessary discipline on movement to ensure the passage of arrivals
and departures. They are functional spaces, but they are more than that. Rosler’s images
also present the airport as a set of abstract spaces with an attenuated reference to the
outside world. Sedated lighting illuminates some areas. Others are overwhelmed by an
unnatural brilliance emanating from back-lit advertising panels, or dazzling Duty Free
shops. This is an off-world space, comparable to sacred space, a transit zone of secular
pilgrimage. Like any consecrated space it must have its sacred narratives and charged
objects. While the airport invokes and services what’s left of the Romanticism of travel
and the temporary Edenic timelessness of the holiday, in Rosler’s airport imagery it is the
idealism of advertising and the tax-free commodity that offers transcendence. The air-
port functions through the non-identical twins of control and surveillance on one hand,
and the provenance of dream and desire on the other. This enclosed, apparently self-
sufficient territory, where passengers are held and forced to bide their time, suspended
between leaving and arriving and subjected to the spectral messages and icons of some
ideal realm, more than resembles Plato’s allegorical cave and its prisoners.
Tim Cresswell maintains that mobility is always embodied (2006: 4). There are
human figures in Rosler’s airports. Some are shown sleeping or exhausted, presum-
ably awaiting delayed flights. We can see their expressions. But for the most part
they are anonymous—silhouettes or photographed from behind, hence faceless, and
normally fixed in the act of moving away. Absence and separation is a notable theme
here. Airports absent their travellers. That is their function. But these depictions sug-
gest the idea that they abolish them too. Rosler’s themes of control, delay, immobil-
ity, emptiness, anonymity and the presiding presence of consumerism converge into
a vision and a concept of the airport as an apparatus of subjectification in which the
traveller becomes a generalised travelling subject, the bearer, conduit and consumer
of a globalised political economy of which airports are the hubs, both ideologically
and materially. The stasis that characterises Rosler’s descriptions of the airport is more
ideological than actual. Passengers and aircraft move endlessly. However history is
frozen, held in an eternal overlit present of the way things are. The values, practices
and power structures of globally integrated capitalism are increasingly unchanging
from place to place in the global order. Airports are instances and instruments of,
what Stavans and Ellison call, “the transnational style of oblivion: the austere vacuity
of airports, worldwide hotel properties, convention centres, corporate headquarters,
universities and museums”. (Stavans and Ellison 2015: 122). Seen from this perspec-
tive, mobility is not to be confused with transformation. Landing at an airport often
seems like arriving in the same place as the one you departed from. That is the mean-
ing of the impedances we encounter in Rosler’s highways and airports. They institute
an order of, to use one of her captions, “Infinite deferral”.
If delay permeates Rosler’s picturings of contemporary mobility, dematerialisation
dominates John Holden’s 1994 airport dominated book, Interference. It is a work that
presciently anticipates the fuller effects of the digital revolution as part of the global
integration of capitalism in the form of the instantaneous speeds of data transmission,
in informational excess and in the accelerating rates and volumes of air travel which
together form an integrated controlling apparatus.
Through a mobilisation of photography, typography and page design, Interference
develops equivalent expressions of how these forces are bringing about a collapse in the
experience of space, in the cognitive processing of information and in the ability of an
increasingly dislocated consciousness to know either itself or its world. A phrase that
appears on the title page emerging from a crush of panicked typography might be taken
as a subtitle. It reads, “Democratic vistas become consensus hallucinations”. This sets a
tone for the whole book by invoking a link between a collective loss of reality and the
diminishment of political agency. There is here an echo of the link Orwell saw between
attacks on the clarity and precision of public language and the erosion of democracy
(Orwell 1970). The last legible piece of text on the book’s final page reads, “the future
is invisible”, and the fading of readability, even of coherent selfhood in these conditions
constitute more of the work’s core concerns. It offers a representation of an uncon-
sciousness brought about by the deep disjunction between the accelerating speed of
constant transportation and information transmission and the limits of human physical
and psychological capacities. Such effects have been the preoccupations of Baudrillard
and Virilio (Baudrillard 1986, 1988; Virilio 2006). And here we are surely in Fredrick
Jameson’s “schizophrenic space”, where, in words penned during the same period in
which Holden was developing the book, Jameson writes, “[W]e seem increasingly inca-
pable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (Jameson 1991:
21). The book represents an attempt to develop a visual and textual language to express
a condition in which human experience has been left not only in a state of shock, not
only left standing but possibly being made obsolescent by technologies of communica-
tion. Between blurred photographs of unknowable human figures dissolving into form-
lessness, anonymous spaces, tangles of light trails, bleaching luminescences, electronic
Figure 2.10 John Holden. From Interference, 1994.
Source: John Holden © 1994 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
pulsings, take-off signals and an aircraft just visible through the shuddering effects of
camera shake, are scattered bits of information: bar codes, receipts, signage, scraps
of random texts, shredded lines of data, broken instructions, graphemes compressed
into a single unsignifying mass and so forth. Found words and textual fragments in
multiple fonts torn from any context that may once have given them meaning hang in
the white spaces of the pages that resemble malfunctioning computer screens or digital
information boards—or pages from Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Des . . . : “unaccounted
movements”, “transmission report”, “town life”, “affix ticket to windscreen”, “call
again”, “and flat perpetual ordering of the light”, “both are dangerous”, “invisible
observers”, “install”, “display board”, “true colour calibrator”, “designated meeting
point”. Every message is interfered with, overtaken by other messages. Sean Cubitt’s
short text is reproduced several times, diminishing in size with each iteration, drifting
off into some unreachable remoteness deep within the page, and soon becoming entirely
illegible. Finally the book disappears, as it were, into the interior forms of what together
resemble a barcode, as if everything is now evolving into the undecryptable information
of an abstract economy, as if everything is moving away from us at speed.

Source: John Holden © 1994 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).

Source: © John Holden © 1994 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
As with all art and representation Holden’s Interference attempts to bring us closer
to the world. Distinct from Rosler’s more remote and sceptical engagement with the
image, Holden’s photography and Ashworth’s typography display a formal joyous-
ness, an aesthetic raving. The work takes into itself the schizophrenia of the condition
it is engaging with. It reproduces it in formal terms and by so doing requires the viewer
to undergo it too. As Sartre has said, an image is not an object, but an act replete with
intentionality. For Sartre perception is passive, in that it takes in what is already in
the world, whereas the imagination is a chosen action that puts something into the
world and consequently can carry political implications (Sartre 1940: 44–50). Inter-
ference replaces the passivity of perception with a conscious act of the imagination,
an aesthetic act. It marks a belief in the possibility that the aesthetic can retrieve for
experience, in the form of aesthetic, reflective engagement, the processes and effects
which had outstripped it. Arguably, it reflects Jacques Rancière’s contention that a
political art needs to manipulate rather than merely reflect the world, as part of the
dream, he writes,
[O]f an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very
logic of meaningful situations . . . political art cannot work in the simple form of
a meaningful spectacle that would lead to “awareness” of the state of the world.
Suitable political art would ensure . . . the production of a double effect: the
readability of a political signification and a sensible of perceptual shock caused,
conversely by the uncanny, by that which resists signification.
Like Moriyama’s and Nakahira’s work, Interference leaves us with a sort of failure
in that once again representation almost founders before a real that conceals itself or
exceeds cognition. And yet like their Japanese counterparts Holden and Ashworth
have produced a set of signifying spaces in which the viewer might recognise that real
in all its strangeness and violence and begin to place themself and see themself within
it and in spite of it.
(4)
The loss of the traveller’s tale.
Paul Virilio, Open Sky
If we widen our definitions of travel to include all instant extensions of presence across
space then evidently highly mediated or dematerialised forms of travelling by means
of electronic systems have, for some time, been radically reshaping our sense of spa-
tial reality, our definitions of distance and our experience and concept of presence.
Towards the end of the last century Paul Virilio traced three historically developing
types of mobile human subjects: the “mobile”, then the “motorised” and now the
“motile”. The exemplary motile subject is, he argued, the wired-in and sedentary fig-
ure of the “terminal citizen”, instantly and continuously connected across space, who
is, writes Virilio, “mobile on the spot” (Virilio 1997: 20–21). The oppositions and
contradictions that characterise this part-disembodied, static traveller have since come
to represent dominant themes in the contemporary condition which photographers
have engaged with. The primary opposition is that of mobile/immobile. From this
opposition a second bonded polarity emerges, that of remote/immediate. Important
themes and questions have been generated by these developments that are altering
or supplementing what is meant by mobility and travelling; throwing into question
how authentic experience is recognised and human presence is defined. They have
instigated new discussions concerning the human subject now so easily and so radi-
cally mediated, dispersed and simultaneously multiply located across spatial distance.
They raise political and ethical questions about how economic or military power is
exerted through electronic systems, which are in turn linked to the issue of responsibil-
ity for actions taken remotely by means of these systems. They have introduced new
iconographies into the visual culture and are rearranging the structure of seeing and
of being seen.
These themes and issues are present in the work of a number of photographers and
related theorists engaged with the effects and imageries of the new visual and informa-
tional technologies. In her 2010 work titled, Hedge, the American photographer Nina
Berman portrays hedge fund traders in Manhattan as they initiate often high-speed
transactions, thereby transmitting their interests and their presence across the planet
without moving from their littered desks and data-crowded screens. In Hedge Berman
portrays the constituents of a form of dematerialised travelling, one with distant mate-
rial consequences in peoples’ lives and economies. There are three notable elements
in the work: close-ups of the eyes of the traders, the computer screens and blurring
effects. While some are bloodshot, presumably sleep deprived, the eyes are cold and
curiously unexcited. They suggest pure impersonality; as if the trader’s are continu-
ous with the non-human systems and processes they are working with. The screens
are a collation of financial information—digits, diagrams, investment data, streaming
updates from Bloomberg and so forth. They resemble palimpsests as figures float over
figures, graphs overlay earlier graphs, amendments replace adjustments, as informa-
tion becomes redundant in seconds.
Figure 2.13 Nina Berman. From Hedge, 2010.

Source: Nina Berman © 2010 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
Berman leaves the precise meanings of the screen information unexplained. For the
general viewer they are incomprehensible hieroglyphs and encryptions.
Both speed and uncertainty are conveyed in Hedge through the blurrings, when the
screens become unreadable, and eyes becoming embedded in forms and data without
focus, values and effects that can no longer be recognised, that are out of sight. As in
the middle ages the right to travel was restricted to certain groups, in the present age
of financial markets only those in command of the mysteries and codes of specialised
electronic trading can transmit themselves globally through the imaginary constructs
and material practices that Arjun Appadurai has named “financescapes” (Appardurai
1996: 33ff). The screens are many coloured, alluring, a little like stained glass win-
dows in a cathedral, through which stream into the yes of this unholy priestly caste
capitalism’s luminous applied scriptures.
In recent years photographers have turned their attention on to the recruitment by
the military and the security state of a militarised mode of mobile vision where power
watches unseen from inside the sky and the citizen must accept constant visibility so as
to be seen to be innocent. The recent instrument of this eye of power is the travelling
eye of the drone. James Brindle reveals the presence of surveillance drones by marking
and photographing the device’s outline down on the ground at spots over which calcu-
lations indicate they would have passed. The lines drawn recall the chalked outline of
the corpse in crime movies, a trope that associates the drone shadow with criminality,
with killing—a reference to forensic evidence, to documentation—and represents an
implicit denunciation of hidden, mobile power.
Working on the same theme, Trevor Paglen, knows when to look into the sky. His
scrutinising camera stares upwards when the patrolling, scanning drones pass over.
Figure 2.14 Trevor Paglen. Untitled (Sentinel Drone), 2014.

Source: Trevor Paglen © (reproduced by courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York).
Like the secretive military bases and desert complexes that Paglen also uncovers in his
work, the high drones are barely visible, appearing as small as insects, which is what
the human figures below must seem like to them. His photographs see into the very
source of light in which these controlling eyes hide. They are less the picturing of air-
borne vehicles than the documentation of continuous acts of surveillance. They reveal
a visuality of power, a condition of seeing and a state of citizenship. On occasion
Paglen reports noticing signs that the remote pilot has seen him. At such a moment
the drone and the institutional subject who controls it, that is, the point from which
power sees, becomes aware of itself as the object of another’s seeing—becomes the
watcher who is being watched. The drone represents a hidden seeing that produces us
as the pure objects of its seeing—that is the essence of its potency. Paglen’s uncovering
of the drones’ presence recalls Sartre’s Peeping Tom who is suddenly shamed when
his voyeurism is discovered, looked on, by a third party (Sartre 1969: 259–266). In
the light of Lacan’s meditations on representation Paglen’s images not only reveal the
reality of the drones and thereby leach away something of their symbolic awe, they
are also a form of protection from them, mediating screens that defend us from the
real, which, as Lacan has argued, is what representations do (Lacan 1994: 105–108;
Paglen and Solnit 2010).
Let me end this chapter with an image and a story. In Bogotá, Colombia, a friend
of mine attended a Catholic private school run partly by North American priests. One
day his year teacher, a Father X, showed the class a photograph of a car crash in the
United States. Inside the mangled wreckage the forms of four dead teenagers, two boys
and two girls, were clearly visible. The priest asked them to look long and hard at the
picture. Then he told them that these young people had been drinking and perhaps
worse when they’d crashed; and that, although he could not know the mind of God,
these four youngsters had most likely died in mortal sin and if so must now be in hell.
This then, he said, might be a photograph of the damned. After the class was over
and everybody including the priest had gone to lunch my friend walked up to Father
X’s desk and looked again at the picture he’d left lying there. After some time peering
closely into the photograph he realised that, just faintly but undeniably, all four dead
American teenagers were smiling.
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3 Relocated Visions
Some Themes in the Photography of
Landscape in England 1990–2007*
Difficult not to see significance

In any landscape we are charged to watch.
Elizabeth Jennings, Introduction
to a Landscape
The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation.

Raymond Williams, The Country & the City (1975)
Landscape is a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape & Power (2002)
(1)
The contemporary and post-imperial English countryside can now be viewed as
picturesque landscape, or even as ‘English’, only through a sort of rueful irony.
Too much history, too much development, too much critical theory get in the
way of any dream of innocence. And if there is a theme that runs through the
work I am examining it is the sense that ‘landscape’ or the landscape has become
unreachable.
The subject of landscape was once central to England’s visual art, rising from the
modest status of topographical views to something placed for a time at the heart of the
nation’s post-Reformation spiritual culture. By the eighteenth century landscape func-
tioned as an immediate, even concrete kind of spiritual epiphany and as the symbol
and embodiment of an evolving national identity. William Gilpin formulated the idea
of the Picturesque according to which one could travel into nature as well as view-
ing landscape art and discover the coherence of the divine in instances of harmony in
the actual landscape where nature’s contingencies, its ‘incorrect compositions’, might
be transcended. The Picturesque disciplined the perceptions so as to intensify certain
aspects and qualities of the landscape in order to experience it as a pictorial represen-
tation existing, somehow, to deliver peace and spiritual sustenance to the dedicated
viewer or, otherwise said, to pleasure and confirm the viewer in his or her social and
subject position.
The picturesque retains a significant presence in England, as does the practice of
identifying prized English landscapes with privileged notions of Englishness. Both
remain pronounced in the repertoires of traditional and popular visual culture, most
notably in the imagery of tourism. This is curious, as England has been primarily
Relocated Visions 67
urban since the last third of the nineteenth century. It would appear that we are in the
presence of some kind of nostalgic idealisation, mystification or displacement here—
the symptoms of an English ruling élite historically anti-urban and ill at ease with its
own modernity and in denial about the ravaging of the real landscape and rural social
life of the present. What is even more curious about this vision is its blindness to the
prodigious widening of the range of origins and ethnicities in the national population
that has taken place since the 1940s. Clearly, landscapes are, as David Matless (1998:
47) says, “moral geographies”, replete with social meaning, or, as W.J.T. Mitchell
(2002: 5–21) insists, forms of “visual ideology”, and therefore undeniably political.
Yet traditions of the idealised or transcendent landscape were from the beginning
never left unchallenged. Constable featured proto-industrial structures in his settings;
and Turner was, arguably, the first painter of the industrial sublime. But clearly it’s in
the twentieth century we see powerful breaks with established landscape traditions. In
any significant art practice the panoptic nostalgia of landscape failed to survive the not
unrelated forces of a profoundly traumatic world war and fragmenting Modernism.
The effects register directly in the battlefields of Paul Nash and others, but in a more
displaced manner in certain paintings of Stanley Spencer in which object and view-
point perhaps more than formal language are transformed. Conventional landscape
prospects and objects are marginalised by oblique or obscured viewpoints or by the
inclusion of the once insignificant detail. Chaotic backlots and gardens recall the kill-
ing grounds or blitzed cities. Familiar vistas are becoming covered by suburban creep.
By having changed the object of landscape, such work revealed it as the ever-
transforming product of human history, labour and technology. It opened the way
for new apprehensions of landscape such as those found in the industrial and post-
industrial spaces of photographers John Davies and Fay Godwin, the rubbish-dump
aesthetics of Keith Arnatt or Jem Southern, Conrad Atkinson’s painted landscapes
of ownership and class; and even, more recently, of Sarah Pickering’s militarised
territories. The long shadow of the Holocaust has also confounded the notion of
any redemptive landscape. Photographs of the overgrown sites of Nazi death camps
“resist any spiritual reading of the landscape” writes Ulrich Baer (2005: 68)—a bleak-
ness that is present in Simon Norfolk’s depictions of the sites of atrocity which appear
in his images like the ritual grounds of hell’s religion, with its altars (tables of bones)
and monuments (the chimneys of death camp barracks) and the obscene beauty of the
pond at Auschwitz where “still falls the rain” through the silence not of contempla-
tion but of an infinite absence.
Finally, the creative scepticism of photographers and artists such as Stephen Shore
and Gerhard Richter has also formed part of the contemporary condition of seeing
when it speaks of the “opaque photograph”; and it’s been said of Richter’s photo-like
landscapes from which the illusion of spatial recession has been flattened, that they
lock us out of the landscape (Shore 2007: 44). In Richter’s 1983 painting, Wiese—
Meadow, for instance, the viewer is denied entry to nature, either by the resistant
veneer of the image, the impenetrable surface of representation or by the effect of our
lost convictions in either the referential depth of photography or in the possibility of
any true congress with the beauty of nature.
Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (1988: 1–8) argue that as much as it is a mate-
rial entity, landscape is a way of seeing. I would restate the same thought by regarding
landscape as a condition, or a situation of seeing which is both within and beyond the
viewer or artist. In this light, the essay will discuss work by a number of contemporary
68 Relocated Visions
or near-contemporary artist/photographers whose condition or situation of seeing can
be linked to these counter-currents and insights I have been describing. All are or
have been resident and active for much of the time in Great Britain, more specifically,
England. Most are in some way not entirely at home in mainstream Englishness—
émigrés or from migrant backgrounds. Some are dislocated from the familiar mean-
ings ascribed to landscape by their gender or ethnicity. Additionally they are shaped
by the reflexivity of modernist and postmodernist theories of visual production and
they inherit a milieu in which what is understood by landscape has been dramatically
rethought in the last half century from being primarily an art-historical concern to
one in which landscape is seen as a material and symbolic resource in a range of pos-
sible manifestations; and historically, as part of a complex of historical, social and
economic processes and as a compound of material and cultural practices. Landscape
has also come to be seen as a type of “being-in-the-world”, and as a textual practice,
as the effect of masculine discourse and desire (see Cosgrove 1988; Gregory 1994;
Pugh 1990; Wylie 2007). Both sets of theoretical debates give special place to the
production of truth and, critically, to the question of the viewing subject and therefore
of identity; and identity is central to most of the discussions of the work that follow.
It is work that attempts to realise new ways of analytically documenting emergent
landscapes; or to reveal the experience of landscape as the product of socially, sexu-
ally and ethnically situated subjectivities; or to uncover the histories concealed in the
landscape and challenge the social subjects it produced and make visible something of
those it condemned to invisibility. The question of the subject is posed in relation to
both photography and landscape. As an inscription of light, photography indicates the
presence of a photographic act and therefore the presence of a photographer. Hence,
photographs become a form of testament, the traces of an act or a statement made by
a witness who may leave no other trace and who may or may not be reliable.
Plainly landscapes too are the marks and witnessing of human presence. “There’s
no landscape without humans” writes Paul Shepheard (Shepheard 1997: 12), and
the quantum physicist Paul Dirac insisted that “a place is nothing, not even a space,
unless at its heart a figure stands” (Dirac in Pickover 2001: 1). This figure is a viewing
subject with a viewpoint, a way of seeing, the product, to cite Raymond Ledrut, of a
“certain ‘investment’ by the ego”, the product of just one kind of social relation to the
landscape, or scopic regime, or of the inherited principles of pictorial organisation, of
spatial configuration, of the re-arrangement of the environment (Ledrut in Deutsche
1998: 197).
While I accept that the direction of landscape theory has moved far beyond con-
siderations of the merely visible, this discussion of landscape photography requires
some bracketing-out of social or cultural geography. I am accepting the premise that
landscape is “always-already a representation” (Wylie 2007: 68) and that it follows
that before anything else the work of the photographer/artist is (a) representation of
or about (a) representation.
(2)
In the 1960s it took an outsider to note a critical shift in English culture. In Michel-
angelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow Up, a murder may have been committed in a
London park. A gunman may have been photographed among the leaves, concealed
in the grain, a presence or most likely nothing more than the insubstantiality of an
interpretation. A body may have been discovered. All this is staged in a public park.
The park was once assumed to be a secure public space, a Victorian emblem of civic
calm, health, good air, well being and certainty, the product of a wealthy imperial
power. In Antonioni’s film, and in the photographs within its narrative, the park
becomes park sinister: a discomforting and uncanny place, where the meaning of what
is seen is never revealed, and where photography serves only to deepen the mystery.
The urban park was once thought of as a fragment of a bosky English Eden, a redemp-
tive space in the heart of the town. Edenic language is transparent, it needs no transla-
tion. But this park is a dark wood full of secrets and illicit assignations, a place where
you are watched. It is also a crime scene, where photography instead of fixing truth
ends up dissolving it; and we wonder: is it the wood that is haunted, is it the landscape
or the photographer? Or is it the medium itself, filled not with proofs but with noth-
ing more than the testament of ghosts—and who believes in them? But it is not only
the benevolence of one kind of English landscape or the reliability of the photograph
that is disturbed in Blow Up. The narrative, in which the sense of place and the sense
of the real are undermined, represents the surface symptoms of a more general unease
afflicting British culture in the 1960s. This rose from a loss of certainty in traditional
values and in the familiar sense of identity that overcame the country as it moved into
the post-Imperial era. As both a malaise and an opening to the future this unsettlement
was the abiding theme of the new British culture of that decade.
These related themes containing the uncertainties of mediation and the fragility of
once secure national values resonate in the later work under discussion. John Goto’s
series, High Summer (2001), to take one major example, focuses on the eighteenth-
century landscape garden, or rather events taking place on the contemporary site of
their ruin. In image VIII, before the Palladian a burnt out car lies dumped in the
lake which seems to be bursting its banks. Clouds of smoke and steam rise from a
power station in the distance. Some children runabout, in the corner of the image a
greyhound pauses. Other tableaux depict civil war and social breakdown. The high
artificiality and materialised metaphors of the eighteenth-century garden are matched
by Goto’s digital fictions. Its Arcadian idealism has its continuity in new, perhaps
degraded, forms of the privileged pleasures and faux-pastoral rituals of the consumer
age, and its inverse in marginal acts of violence and social and environmental catas-
trophe and war. Arcadia has been overtaken by what Goto calls Dyscadia. The now
collapsing values and social hierarchies coded into the landscape garden were always
the dreams of power, arrangements of beauty and violence, mechanism of exclusion
that manufactured the logic of their own destruction. They were also materialisations
of neo-classical models which Goto regards as central to the whole history of subse-
quent picture making in the west. For before us in High Summer is also a disaster in
or rather, of the symbolic. His use of the digital represents the further assault on the
Arcadian fantasy that the analogue image is co-terminous with the real and the true.
In John Stezaker’s Masks a face becomes a landscape, a landscape a face in a pattern
of substitution and supplementation, as though one was the dream of the other. The
masks cover, reveal and then recover. Stezaker’s ‘collages’ are made from coinciding
and overlapping old images of lost landscapes and unremembered film stars, the image
ecologies of celebrity and nature or tourism, which must once have been the bearers
of imagined desire and pleasure. The desire is now unreachable as indeed were both
the identities and the landscapes they symbolised. The context of Masks is a society
of mediations, one saturated with images, where, for example, the Sight, in Dean
MacCannells’ terminology, has been replaced by its Marker (MacCannell 1999: 109–
133). But there is another theme at its core. It represents a seeing that is unable to see
what it desires to see; that either languishes in the symbolic or is overtaken by death.
The cutting and covering produces an object never quite itself—identity, pleasure or
nature. The landscape can never be entered, the self is never arrived at. The images
invoke the desire and yet defer its destination—hence the yearning or the nostalgia
associated with such popular images, that is, the longing for home or belonging.
The masks express this condition as at once comic and tragic, that is to say, ironic.
Stezaker was part of a generation of conceptually driven artists in Great Britain and
North America significantly if not always directly informed by Lacanian theory; and
at this point it is hard to resist the evocation of the great ironist’s various understand-
ings of the relationship between death and the symbolic. Lacan begins by regarding
the symbolic—here the images and their shadow discourses—as the killer of the imme-
diacy of the things of the world, the real. Then the symbolic is seen as the mask of the
death-drive. Finally the symbolic is understood as allied to the pleasure-principle with
its desire for unity with its object but confronted by a death-drive that will terminate
the symbolic order itself. What is consistent through these variations is the impossibil-
ity of reaching what is represented. Only death exceeds the symbolic.
Whatever meanings or poetic energies are released by the aesthetic effects of Masks,
they are never more or less than the product of relations between elements on the sur-
face of the work—in the Symbolic. They are not achieved through the fruitless sorcery
of summoning the Real through representation. The Real is impossible. Masks, with
its image particles, its dream particles of dead stars and dead places opens up a land-
scape of play that outfaces this tragic insight, the tragic understanding that informs it.
(3)
One of the origins of the English term “Landscape”, is the Old Dutch word, landskap
which refers to legal and administrative concepts of community, property and justice.
Andrew Wylie, Landscape (2007: 21)
Yet landscapes are material territories and social processes. In a work that resembles
Steven Gill’s imagery of the same area (Archaeology in Reverse 2007) and bears com-
parison with work by Lars Bober on the ruined remains of the German Democratic
Republic (Verödete Landschaften 2007), a series of photographs by the then London-
based German photographer and urban planner Gesche Wüerfel depicts an engage-
ment with the places and spaces of the Lea Valley in East and North East London on
the eve of their disappearance (Go For Gold 2006). When she began the project the
whole area was about to be re-developed as the site of the 2012 Olympic Games. Most
of what appears in her photographs has indeed now vanished.
This recently lost Lea Valley was neither rus nor urbs. Until 2007 it lay at the urban
edge but the city never fully arrived. It was official and unofficial, half-developed, half-
overlooked, a place Edward Relph would designate as a Space Left Over In Planning.
It was space comparable to Marx’s “social interstice” both part of the general system
of economy and development and yet a “free area” within it, one indicating alterna-
tive possibilities. It was on this idea of Marx that Nicholas Bourriaud (1998) drew
for his conception of art as a free space of practice, as a cultural “interstice”. The Lea
Valley had long been a site of some small-scale enterprises and of informal and impro-
vised economies including scrap yards, taxi repair shops and the like, dog-guarded
and encircled by barbed wire and corrugated iron. And yet, it was as much pastoral
as post-industrial, more benevolent than violent. Nature never quite decamped. There
were pretty copses, secret ponds fringed with May blossom, vegetable plots, a varie-
gated almost-wilderness of pastures and meadows. In the last few years it was much
visited by photographers—a common sign of imminent disappearance.
Where Gill’s imagery is marked aesthetically, calling attention to its over-illumi-
nated surface in the tradition of Stephen Shore’s “opaque photograph”, Wüerfel’s is at
first viewing apparently straightforward, unattended by such strategies. It is, though,
in her mixing of the tableau and the document modes in the same image and in her
titling that the work reveals its complicating ironies (see Chevrier 2006: 49). The
sites are named with the function of their approaching demise; their future is signified
and their transience thereby rendered more acute. No eternal landscape here, and by
implication none anywhere.
A photograph of a broken wall textualated by graffiti is titled, Hockey 1; the Ath-
letics Warm Up Track is a breaker’s yard stacked with battered car bodies; Fencing
Hall 1, a place of sylvan tranquillity. The International Broadcast Centre shows mead-
ows stretching to a tree-lined horizon beneath a high blue sky devoid of messages
or aircraft. In an image evoking the rainforest, vegetation almost overwhelms some
industrial structure above a sluggish green canal. It is titled Basketball Arena 1. The
images picture a visible present soon to be substituted. The titles signify the future as
yet invisible, an abstraction. The titling pronounces the certainty of a plan. The images
display the accidental diversity of what exists. Words pronounce a death sentence on
the visible, they will replace the images as soon as what they signify becomes concrete.
Wüerfel’s images are complete, absolute moments in which places and objects silently
await their destruction. They are, in Vilém Flusser’s terms “scenes” rather than repre-
sentations of “processes”. The process that will overwhelm them is eternally outside
of them. “Photography”, writes Flusser, “has succeeded in carrying the image into
history; but in so doing it has interrupted the (linear) stream of history” (2002: 128).
Wüerfel’s interruptions represent something more than a reactionary nostalgia—some-
thing more than the melancholy pleasure of ruins. In the history of development one
kind of landscape is transformed into another. Modernity rolls on and over. It would
like to live without too much past. Wüerfel’s photographs are now becoming part of
a memory in which this modernity can be judged, a judgment made from the traces of
the landscapes it has engulfed. They can become the unconscious of the new landscape,
disturbing its Apollonian certainties, challenging what Victor Segalen regarded bitterly
as modernity’s regressive transformations (Segalen 2002). They can recall modernity to
what was repressed in order that it might come into being—the spectres of the past, the
artefacts of an archaeology which precedes the ruin—all of which will become folded
inside the new spaces, and through which something of the full story, the multiple his-
tories, of both expectation and loss might be retained and retold.
(4)
The issue of visibility, clearly central to all visual representations, has a particular
meaning in landscape imagery. Who and what is given visibility in the landscape, and
how, can symbolise their status and significance in the general social world. David
Spero’s Settlements (2004–2005) shows a number of dwellings usually established
deep in woodland built by people rejecting the urban-based consumerist world (Fig-
ure 3.1). These vernacular even unauthorised and sometimes precarious architectures
speak of a rurally based counter-culture, of informal economies voluntarily displaced
from the mainstream. The images are as much about invisibility as they are about clear
presence. Many of the shelters are almost completely hidden by trees and bushes. The
effect is to connote a desire for radical privacy, a rejection of majority ways of living,
and perhaps a need to hide—this is in some sense outlaw architecture. (The disman-
tling of the Longhouse is being legally enforced at the end of 2017.) They occupy or
rather produce a space that the Chilean sociologist Benjamin Arditi terms “the Social”,
that domain of the social formation that exceeds, or is excluded from or opposed to
the official, totalising order of the rational modern social order which Arditi calls
“Society” (Arditi 1988). These practices go deep in English culture. Rather than a
landscape of harmony the forest has long been a place of struggle: from medieval
conflicts over the Forest Laws and the Enclosure Acts, to more recent tensions involv-
ing Travellers, rural counter-cultures or free festival movements. It is a contradictory
space of both freedom and restriction. In English art, the picturing of modest rural
dwellings has both democratic and mystifying aspects in the “down among the ordi-
nary folk” tradition of painters like Holland’s influential David Teniers II. However,
Figure 3.1 David Spero. “The Longhouse communal space and new kitchen, Steward Commu-
nity Woodland, Devon, November 2004”. From Settlements, 2004–2005.
Source: David Spero © 2005.
with some exceptions such as F.W. Fairholt’s depiction of bleak Irish dwellings and
Thomas Bewick’s references to rural poverty, the country shelter, from Gainsborough
through George Morland to George Price Boyce, function as part of the set design
in genre tableaux of increasing sentimentalism achieving its sugary ideal in what the
art historian John Dixon Hunt has labelled “the cult of the cottage”, a retrospective
pastel-coloured staging of a roses-round-the-door and hollyhocks-at-the-gate deep
Englishness (1986: 78). It was in essence an imagery raised against the terror of indus-
trialisation and exemplified best by the Victorian artist Helen Allingham. Alongside
this type of popular imagery stood the figure of the picturesque gypsy, the Romantic
nomad, the king of the road—to be encountered in paintings such as S.E.B. Smythe’s
Gypsy Encampment of the 1860s.
Sentimentalism has no place in Spero’s Settlements. It maintains a cool observa-
tional distance. The colour avoids an emotional setting and, as elsewhere in his work
(cf. Churches, 2003–2004), there is a formalism in its theme and variation structure,
and a conceptualism in its archiving character. The work’s aesthetic concerns resist
nostalgia and utopianism. However, there is a further patterning which signals an
engagement in the issues indicated by the actual settlements. This lies in the play of vis-
ibility and concealment—many of the ‘settlements’ are hidden in foliage or sited well
off roads or pathways. This renders the looking more difficult and requires the viewer
to see consciously, with commitment and patience—to notice that the landscape is
filled with details, lives and practices that exceed both the conventional assumptions
and representations and the perceptual indolence of the urban viewer. We are meant
to look into this landscape; to pass into it not by it.
(5)
As will be seen in a later chapter, globalisation is reshaping landscapes to play their
roles in the transnational economic order, and photographers such as Edgar Martins
and Dan Holdsworth are producing a photographic language for these new spatial
realities. One of the expressions of the transnational order is the appearance of new
types of landscape in Europe’s sunbelts appearing as a later manifestation of tour-
ism. The London-based Norwegian photographer, Jorn Tomter, has pictured one of
these emergent landscapes: golf courses, swimming pools, the off the shelf white villas
and the urbanisaciones constructed for retirement communities of northern Europe-
ans strung along the Spanish coastline (Costa del Sol, 2000). Tomter’s images can
be placed alongside Andrew Langford’s of the Invernaderos of Almería, the plastic
polytunnels in which fruit and vegetables are grown on an enormous scale and in all
seasons (see www.andrewlangford.co.uk). Together they form the binary landscape of
the ever-globalising extended economy and of the extended places of dwelling.
We know that painters of the picturesque were often also theatre set designers and
illustrators. Tomter’s costa landscapes of bowling greens and golf courses with their
artificial and utopian perfection of watered fairways and abstract looking greens
deferring the parched landscapes beyond, their figures, disposed in the choreographed
moves and contemplations of the game, recall settings and characters in theatrical
space, or in some re-enactment of the pastoral, a reduced kind of fête galante, outside
of production, preserved from decay and suspended in time in deathless landscapes,
and inside everlasting games of bowls, eternal rounds of golf.
(6)
Culture and the political economy will determine the function and location of what is
understood as landscape. It might be seen as part of the production of leisure, cultural
identity or sustenance. It might be placed within or beyond national boundaries. It
may be seen as rural or urban. Additionally, as both a set of territorial and repre-
sentational arrangements, a landscape may establish which social actors belong in
it, and which will appear out of place. In recent years artists have tested this latter
function by introducing identities or events historically absent or excluded from the
conventions of English landscape painting and literature. One well known, almost
canononical example is Ingrid Pollard’s Pastoral Interludes (1986–1987) in which the
presence of black people in the Lake District of North West England, the holy ground
of English Romanticism and of ‘deep Englishness’, signifies an unease, a sense of being
unwelcome, of not being at home, experienced by black British people in the English
countryside and by extension, the sense of not being welcomed in the national picture,
the national landscape. When W.J.T. Mitchell (2002: 5–34) states that landscape is
“the dreamwork of imperialism” he is making reference to the landscapes not only
of the colonised territories but also to the form and meaning of landscapes within
the colonising nation itself—the inside of the outside. In the culture of post-colonial
England, revisions of this dreamwork are being made by new subjectivities, among
them the children and grand-children of colonial and post-colonial migrants. Let me
take two examples of work by women positioned by their ethnicity as descendents
of colonial subjects and, indeed, by their gender, though reducible to neither, Zarina
Bhimji and Henna Nadeem.
Zarina Bhimji’s 1998 work Cleaning the Garden works to uncover the repression
upon which the social microcosm and the cultural form of the landscape garden was
founded. The subject is Harewood House near Leeds in Northern England, built in the
eighteenth century. It was established by the Lascelles family whose fortune was made
in Barbados from among other things, the slave trade. The gardens were designed
by Capability Brown himself. Barbara Bender, in a study of the cultural politics of
Stonehenge, describes landscape as a “proprietorial palimpsest”, a complex of mul-
tiple, overlaid and mostly hidden inscriptions, functioning as much to disguise and
mystify as to reveal, and always linked to ownership (Wylie 2007: 69). Of course,
while the palimpsest disguises its own foundation it also famously half displays the
means of uncovering it. Cleaning the Garden is a counter-palimpsest. It consists of
a syncretic range of elements that resonate rather than cohere round the themes of
gardens, memory, botany, bodies, and colonialism. The text mixes fiction with reflec-
tions on the work’s themes. The imagery is also variegated: some of the garden view;
others of walls, lawns and plants; an article of furniture within the house. There are
depictions of plants from the Alhambra gardens, mappings of paradise, linked to the
doomed power of the Caliphate, and to the productions of Islam, for long Europe’s
great Other. There is also the reproduction of an eighteenth-century notice seeking the
return of a runaway slave, and a studio installation of organic materials and cloth. In
a formal challenge to the house and landscaping that, through an integration of its ele-
ments and viewpoints, represented the attempt to secure a positioned and integrated
subjectivity, and with it an unreflecting ideology, Bhimji’s work is an opera aperta, an
open work in the sense employed by Umberto Eco (1989). Its elements are multipo-
larities and the viewer must read across the spaces between them, make connections,
uncover contradictions and develop evaluations. This is most effectively achieved in
the exhibited version when the viewer wanders among the images and texts in a spatial
as well as a symbolic event (the gallery), as if entering the garden now taken apart. The
“aesthetic fact” to cite Eco again, is made up of an object and a viewer. As an open
work, it produces, in Eco’s words, an undermining of the garden’s “univocal” symbol-
ism, producing instead a “plurivocal” effect and thereby an “increase in information”
(Eco 1989: 13–20). By dis-aggregating its elements, Cleaning the Garden refuses the
concealments and the allure that the garden system rests on. Their beauty, says, Bhimji,
“reveals a power contained in what is not said” (Continental Drift 1998: 73). The eco-
nomic, aesthetic and psychic system of “house and garden” was the product of power
and also a mechanism for its continuation—and for its concealment. For Bhimji, here
power is applied to bodies—and this house and landscape once contained the bodies
of the masters and the mastered: the bodies of owners, groundsmen, servants—and
above all and most deeply invisible, the absent bodies of slaves. Cleaning the Gar-
den seems less concerned with how we consume this landscape, than with who has
been consumed by it. Bhimji introduces the presence of the body by invoking touch,
attempting to render the visual haptic. There is, for example, an image concerned with
linking apparently unrelated things through their shared tactile qualities. The image
titled Harsh Pubic Hair originated in an experience of stroking a chamomile lawn and
being reminded of the feel of pubic hair. Body, garden and sexuality seem to reside
in these associations as does the sense that this body is female. Another figure links
objects to spaces to bodies, and to the latent presence of an anguished desire: a pho-
tograph which shows a chair upholstered with a red rose pattern. An accompanying
text by Gilda Williams titled The Empire Chair, invokes a female servant looking at
this now empty chair recalling the beginning of the her seduction and sexual use by the
master as he sat on this same piece of furniture. It is itself a device of power. The low
angle of the point of view is that of the dominated servant, the servant removing the
master or mistresses footwear, or completing some other service. The master is absent
but the space of power remains. The floral design in the embroidered upholstery links
the chair and its function to the garden outside. Its warm red florescence contrasts
the heartless cold blue grey of the wintry grounds. The garden is the space and the
context which contain the house. The attraction of the warm red chair also introduces
the disturbing cohabitation in the dominated psyche of fear, hatred and desire—even
pleasure—a complex confirmed in Bhimji’s titling of the image, Strange Domineering
Tenderness. We are in the presence of the dream here and in the unconscious there is
no contradiction, no negation—it is all ‘both/and’. In the gallery installation, the qual-
ity of the dream is enhanced by the mounting of the images on light boxes, the light
passing through as though transmitted from somewhere else, from lux to lumen, from
the other place, the other time, and yet evidently in the present. In re-writing Lascelles’
and Capability Browns’ ‘text’, Bhimji re-enters the garden, re-dreams it and helps to
dream us out of the imperial dream of the master.
The child of Pakistani Muslim parents Henna Nadeem was born and raised in the
rural north of England, aware of both the importance of landscape in English culture
and of her distance from that culture. She speaks of seeing the local landscape and see-
ing walkers and picnickers enjoying it, but that she was looking from the inside of her
Asian household, literally and in terms of her somewhat displaced cultural location.
In her work, A Picture Book of Britain (2006), a series of collages and digital con-
structions materialise that condition of seeing. They revision landscape and identity
by superimposing onto popular and commonplace landscape imagery, patterns, many
derived from Islamic cultural sources. This interference holds up and complicates
the look of the viewer, who by turn sees the patterns, and then the scenes glimpsed
through them. The familiar repertoire is defamiliarised; the illusion of a continuous
space (and visualised culture) shared by image and spectator is interrupted, as is the
habitual identification with these picturings of Britishness. Nadeem has said that she
doesn’t regard this work as some kind of assault on the conventions of British identity
or landscape, but as an attempt to suggest an emerging cultural hybridity, perhaps a
reverse image of the hybridity of colonial landscapes. Nadeem introduces not only
patterns from Islamic visual culture but something of its philosophy. D. Fairchild Rug-
gles (2007: 140) emphasises the centrality of the patterned screen in Islamic architec-
ture through which one views the garden as a form of picturing. The screen creates,
he argues, a disjuncture between the viewer and the object, and it “sets the world off
as an observable spectacle”. The self-conscious seeing that is brought about permits
religious reflection on the separation and relationship between the building and the
garden as analogous to that between the self and nature, and between the body and
the soul. This is distinct from the foregrounding strategies of Western modernist art.
Yet, I think it can be argued that both the contemplative effect sought by Islamic
religiosity and the distancing and critical effect of modernist aesthetics are present
in Nadeem’s project as she attempts to reinvent and enrich the sense and meaning of
landscape and identity. The view becomes itself the object of a view. The photographs
with their naturalised verisimilitude are revealed to be as much abstractions or schema
as the patterns overlaying them. The effect marks the presence of a Muslim perception
and of Nadeem’s distance from it as a woman also formed in contemporary Britain
and in contemporary Western art practice.
(7)
Of all the work I’ve been discussing, Helen Chadwick’s Viral Landscapes (1988–1989)
is both the most intimate and the most generalised, least located culturally. This widely
known series of representations consists of sea and rock photographs made at unspeci-
fied locations, painterly smears produced by Chadwick throwing oil paint on the waves
and dragging empty canvases across them, and by slides of cellular material from Chad-
wick’s own body. The work is an uncovering of three strata constituting the process of
creativity, the making of landscapes, and by association, the making of the world itself
by humans: the geological/mineral; the biological/cellular and the cultural/art practice.
Chadwick (1989: 97) speaks of the “vital relations of incompatible elements”. Against
the view of landscape as the product of a distanced subject, like much work influenced
by feminist theory, Chadwick’s landscape is embodied. The subject is immersed in the
world it perceives, or otherwise said, it is, indeed, ‘enfleshed’. The body is not outside
the landscape. It is, as Elizabeth Grosz, discussing Merleau-Ponty, puts it: “the condi-
tion and the context through which I am able to have a relation to objects” (quoted
in Wylie 2007: 148). To which we might add Sartre’s description of the human being
placed as “an indeterminate between . . . the mineral and the living” (Sartre 1992: 546).
Through “damaging” both the traditional unity of the self and the purity of art
forms Chadwick pictures human being as extended more deeply into what actually
constitutes it.
Viral Landscapes is as metaphysical as it is materialist and seems to state that the
world is never less than material and independent of human will or awareness, and yet
never less than an act of or a product of consciousness. Chadwick herself has said, “It
seems I cannot distinguish anything as separate from myself so perhaps after all, I am
anything I observe” (1989: 109). If, as Christopher Wood has stated, landscape art is a
“symptom of modern loss”, then Chadwick’s Viral Landscapes envisions an overcom-
ing of such alienation free of landscape’s bourgeois fantasies of possession denounced
by Terry Eagleton, and of its phallocentric yearnings for the lost/imaginary maternal
body which Victor Burgin diagnoses. While self, the physical body and the surround-
ing natural material world are shown as continuous, this is not a Romantic vision of
the ego dissolving into nature. Nature is embodied in the physical world beyond the
individual body, and within it as the constitutive matter of the viewer’s and the crea-
tor’s bodies, but both are qualitatively beyond the self, impersonal. This is a picturing
of both the integration of the self in the landscape, and of the necessary detachment of
consciousness from it. It is a picturing of what can never actually be experienced. We
cannot simultaneously know, depict and re-integrate with nature.
(8)
Jean-François Lyotard (1991) has said, Romanticism’s task was to “bear witness to
the inexpressible”, but that the task of contemporary work is to express or bear wit-
ness to “indeterminacy” (Lyotard in Benjamin1991: 196–211). In my view the works
shown here are the intensities that result from accepting this task. Countering the
claims of some writers that landscape art is now an exhausted tradition, by breaking
into and out of it, these artists are remaking landscape with neither the security nor
the restraints of the religious, ideological or aesthetic limitations of the past.
Note
* An earlier version of this chapter was published in The Photoresque—Landscape and Moder-
nity, edited by Steven Jacobs and Geert Goiris, Cahier Photografie, Saint Lukas University,
Brussels, 2009.
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htm.
4 The Unapproachable Light
Photography and the Sacred, Part 1
God, “who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no
one has seen or can see”.
First Timothy 6:16
[N]o religious tradition has a single, fully logical, and universally accepted definition of
God, and therefore of the presence or absence of God in material forms. In any tradi-
tion, God is (in part at least) a transcendent referent, in which the tradition confronts
the ultimate mysteries and ineffabilities of existence. At the same time, God is (in part)
understood to be immanent in the world, and so partakes of all the ambiguities and
uncertainties of human existence and knowledge.
John E. Court, “Installing Absence? The Consecration of a Jina Image”
in: Maniura and Shepherd (Eds.) Presence—The Inherence of
the Prototype within Images and Other Objects
The experience of the absence of God . . . is perhaps one of the distinctive traits of our
epoch.
Marcel Raymond and Georges Poulet, reflecting on the work
of Maurice Blanchot, quoted in Kevin Hart The Dark Gaze
Miss Him when the sunset makes

its presence felt in the stained glass
window of the fake antique bar.
Dennis O’Driscoll, Missing Him
There is a powerful photography of religious practices. The subject preoccupies much

of the work of Abbas for example. For obvious reasons much of this kind of photog-
raphy is located in regions where religion retains a potent and popular presence, such
as in South Asia and Latin America. Take, for example, the sympathetic and post-
colonial vision of the Brazilian José Bassit’s 2003 Imagens Fieis or Tiago Santana’s
Sertao from 2011 (Figure 4.1). To them we can add the work of naturalised Brazilian,
British-born Maureen Brassiliat, with its close and intensive engagement with the reli-
gious consciousness of its Xingu River subjects and the surrendering of the photogra-
pher’s own certainties.
Figure 4.1 Tiago Santana. “O Chão de Graciliano Chã Preta, Alagoas—Brasil”, 2003.
Source: © Tiago Santana 2003 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
The work of the French-born Brazilian photographer-cum-anthropologist, Pierre

Verger, whose, photography was of interest to Georges Bataille, studied and pictured
the rites and beliefs of the African-Brazilian faith, Candomblé (Bataille 1989: 13). Par-
ticipant observation evolved in time into complete immersion when he was inducted
into the religion and later became one of its celebrants. Verger’s spiritual journey is
marked in the changing form of his photography: the images becoming spatially closer
and closer to their subject as Verger’s sympathy for them deepens.
While what is often striking about this work is its ability to step some way into
the epistemological space of its subjects, its intention is to communicate something
of how others in other cultures or social classes experience the sacred. In this chapter
I want to examine work developed as part of contemporary photographers’ personal
engagements with this theme; focusing on imageries in which some kind of immanence
or presence is evoked as the medium approaches the limits of representation in the
attempt, arguably, to evolve a secular visuality of the sacred or the numinous which,
says Rudloph Otto, “is radically unrepresentable” (Laclau 1997: 260; Eliade 1987: 9).
For most human societies in history it has been religious mentalities in the wider
sense that managed and enforced the culture’s essential reality-making descriptions.
Perhaps the most essential of these is Durkheim’s cosmos and culture-forming duality,
the Sacred and the Profane. In Mircea Eliade’s classic study of religion it is understood
as nothing less than the creation of the world as something known, ordered and mean-
ingful—that is, thinkable and thereby, inhabitable. On the basis of this prime binary,
he argues, an endless stream of culture-organising binaries is generated; together they
The Unapproachable Light 81
establish the world, or a world, its order and its limits (Eliade 1987: 30). In the secu-
lar present, photography remains one of a complex range of devices and practices
by which the real is detected, defined and expressed. Its origins and purposes lie pri-
marily if not entirely in what Laclau describes as “the rationalist assumption that
there is nothing which cannot be translated into a positive representational content”
(Laclau 260: 123). Broadly accepted is Walter Benjamin’s proposition that photogra-
phy replaced the quasi-religious ‘auratic’ power of the singular work of art with the
infinite reproducibility of the photographic image. Nevertheless, I hope to show that
all discussions of representation and any fully developed theorisation of photography
contain more than the shadow of their theological origins. Besides, the history of the
medium is well populated with those who have seen the medium as a means of touch-
ing or tracing non-material presences—the dead or the divine. As Jacques Aumont,
echoing Nelson Goodman, notes: “Anything, including an image, can represent any
referent as long as we have agreed that it shall be so” (Aumont 1997: 73).
“Religion has always been attentive to the eye”, observed a contributor to the BBC
Radio 4 programme, In Our Time (February 27, 2014). As if recalling our remote
evolutionary beginnings in a light-sensitive organism, cosmologies and mythologies
invariably place the visual centrally and equate divine power with an all-seeing invis-
ibility. The Catholic middle ages taught a complex metaphysics of light as it was medi-
ated through stained glass from lux into lumen into illumination as the numinous, the
“wholly other” (ganz andere) enters the devotee (Otto in Eliade 1987: 9).
Certain of the theological disputes over the relationship between representations of
the divine have some presence in photography theory. In pre-Protestant Christianity
they were arranged beneath three major interrogations: Can the divine be given visual
form? Is it permissible to even attempt to do so? If so is the religious icon merely a
“depiction” of, say, Christ a means of encouraging observance; or is it a mode of
actual contact with the divine, a transmitter of sacred power, shaped by a force from
the other side of representation? There is a kinship here with arguments over the
photograph as conventional sign or conductor of presence with the two modes cor-
responding to Patrick Maynard’s distinction between the photograph as “depiction”
or “manifestation” (Freeland 2010 in Waldon 2010: 52, 55).
The problem of representing the divine was the consequence of two sets of axioms.
The first taught that God was absent from the world, beyond human perception.
Aquinas and Luther both spoke of the Deus Absconditus. The second held that God is
indivisible and therefore unrepresentable in terms of something else or through some-
thing else such as a material image, as to do so would suggest God was dependent on
difference. As God is causeless this cannot be the case (Belting 1994: 142–145). Along
with prevailing Judaic and Islamic traditions, the Calvinist wing of the Protestant Ref-
ormation re-instituted a strict theological aniconism for the reason that “God himself
(was) the only fit witness to himself” and therefore “any form assigned to represent
him must be a lie” (Besancon 2000: 187). As Niklas Luhman notes, this left religion,
and leaves some areas of contemporary aesthetics and epistemology, to negotiate end-
lessly the relationship between the observable and the unobservable. Religious mean-
ing is produced even though, he says, “something always remains unobservable”.
At the same time, “the distinction between observable and unobservable re-enters
the observable realm” (Luhman 2013: 19). Religion, continues Luhman, produces
a distinctive kind of reality that is defined not simply by existing as it is, but one,
“generated through the existence of something that is different/distinguished from it”,
something arranged for observation, “that did not fall under the category of reality”
(Luhman 2013: 40–41). Here, reality is no longer ‘referentially real’, but rather an
observable mystery, sometimes given perceivable, even tangible form—relics, stones,
other material traces—observable confirmations of what is, and yet is out of reach.
Luhman adds,
as long as a mystery can be objectified in a perceivable state, it can be presupposed

in communication. It remains a mystery, but one that exists (can be shown).
(Luhman 2013: 42)
This effect of religion is described by Luhman as “reality doubling” in which, some

things or events are “bracketed out”, marked, and assigned a special meaning, relo-
cated outside of the normal world, but remaining accessible to it—to a degree all
sacred objects are part objects. Thereby they gain, he says, a “special ‘aura’, a special
circle of reference” (Luhman 2013: 40).
A description that might be easily applied to the activity and effects of photography
as well as one that tests the medium’s supposed dependency on the purely phenomenal.
What makes Christianity distinctive and more conflicted over the issue of repre-
sentation of the divine among the monotheistic religions, is the messianic doctrine of
Christ’s incarnation, the materialisation of God through the taking on of human form
and entering human history in order to change it. From 787 CE/AD, the year of the
Second Nicene Ecumenical Council, the depiction of Christ, that is his human form,
but not his divinity, became permitted in the Christian church. As a consequence the
depiction of Christ becomes the primary subject in Christian visual culture. Images of
Christ functioned to teach the dual nature of Christ as “the materialisation of the Son
of Man” (Belting 1994: 144–152). Christ himself was in some sense an image, what
Saint Paul called the “image of the invisible God” (in Besancon 2000: 93).
In his study of photographic representations of Christ, Nissan Perez quotes a Domin-
ican priest, Marcel Dubois, who regards “photography as an extension of the incarna-
tion” (Perez 2003: 14). They had been discussing the issue of Veronica’s Shroud, one
centred on the conviction that a proto-photographic image of the dead Christ’s face
had been printed onto the surface of his cerements through the action of posthumous
bodily fluids and herbal residues in the material. The truth or otherwise of the Shroud
is here less interesting than how the desire to believe it, how the very possibility of this
belief, arises directly out of the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation and how the question
of representation is secreted by it. The entry of a god into human time and history is
what above all distinguishes Christianity from most other religious traditions. At the
same time, though, the body of Christ was a kind of masking, a veiling. His corporeal
presence signified the more profound absence of his full and invisible divinity, which
was never of this world. The Christological image was a visualisation based equally
in iconophilia and in a violence against the visible. Like the wounded body of Christ
it pictured, the visual was rent, torn between what can be pictured and what kind of
picturing is neither possible nor permissible. It opened up regions of the visible so as
to close it down elsewhere. The oppositions which constituted Christian iconology
has its equivalent in the essence of the photographic image which Donald Preziosi
describes as “ontological dualism”, an essence comprising both materiality and imma-
teriality (Preziosi 2014: 74).
Anxieties remained though and from them we can glimpse the beginnings of photo-
graphic culture. A significant aspect of the Protestant Reformation’s theology held that
God was present in the material world, though not of it. Painting reflected this teach-
ing in different ways. The sacred was not observable but present beyond doubt as the
art was the proof, the sign of the immaterial world of spirituality. Dutch paintings of
the seventeenth century, implied but did not describe the presence of God as imma-
nent within the ordered arrangements, possessions and activities of a well-ordered
and sanitary middle-class life—grace in the everyday: for example, Pieter de Hooch’s
proto-photographic “The Courtyard of a House in Delft” (1658, National Gallery,
London). It is here that we see the beginnings of cultural values associated with pho-
tography. A culture that continued to forbid even religious images in church displaced
their function to a celebration of the everyday domestic domain in the domestic space.
Alain Besancon writes,
In a strange reversal by means of the very representation of earthly things, an

underlying sacred content emerge from the art dedicated to the profane . . . The
Calvinist spirit even as it imposes iconoclasm, allows the iconic light to flood over
secular images . . . because of its concern to foster and extend the work of man,
sanctifying and exerting itself for the glory of God alone.
(Besancon 2000: 188–190)
This Protestant art intensified the experience of light, objects, details, gestures and
unrepeatable moments of ordinary life. It sought the sacred in the profane. What began
as a religiously inspired practice formed the beginnings of Romanticism’s sacralisation
of aesthetic experience and eventually photography’s secular repertoire, the celebra-
tion of the everyday, the dedication to the subluminary human world. The intensifi-
cation brought about by photography produces a kind of physicality of knowledge.
Slavoj Zizek wonders if a universal principle might be incarnated and eternalised in
an image, mental or materialised. Reflecting on a witnessing by the imprisoned Span-
ish Communist, Jorge Semprún, of the murder of two small Polish boys pursued,
dog-savaged and beaten to death in Buchenwald concentration camp, Zizek notes
how at the end one boy ceased to run and instead took the hand of the other, “till”,
in Semprún’s words, “the blows of the clubs felled them and, together they dropped,
their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity” (Zizek 2014: 85). Zizek
comments, “the freeze of eternity is embodied in hand as partial object: while the
bodies of the two boys perish, the clasped hands persist for all eternity like the smile
of the Cheshire cat” (Zizek 2014: 85). This ‘image’—and it could have been photo-
graphed and having been written almost becomes one in the mind’s eye—is reduced to
one intensified element, the clasped hands, which then becomes a gesture embodying,
materialising, abstract and eternal principles: Pathos, Courage, Stoicism, Friendship,
the call for Justice and so forth. The unique and transient event becomes sacralised,
leading Zizek to conclude that, reversing the Platonic creed that the real or phenom-
enal is the shadow of the idea, “ideas are nothing but the very form of their appear-
ance, this form as such” (Zizek 2014: 86). In the same place Zizek draws attention to
something of particular interest for this discussion. He cites the Danish philosopher
Kierkegaard’s claim that Christianity is the only religion “of the Event: the only access
to the Absolute (God) is through our acceptance of Incarnation as a singular historical
occurrence” (Zizek 2014: 38). As we shall see spirit of the doctrine of the incarna-
tion has been applied to photography at times in ways that extend beyond the merely
figurative.
A case could be made for the proposition that photography is the product of Chris-
tian cultures, civilisations organised around the belief in a God incarnate, an invis-
ible God who once became manifest in material human form. That is, Christ could
have been photographed (the fantasy of which Sir David Brewster entertained himself
with). More precisely it was, at least in Britain, brought into effective being by a Prot-
estant even Puritan culture, a culture notably engrossed in technological and scientific
innovation and in the business of a material world it was refining into value but which
still saw the presence of God in the things and arrangements and events of that same
world. In them God was immanent, if not visible, present within and of the world as
well as transcendent of it.
Régis Debray describes the advent of photography around 1839 as the expression
of a “new perceptual faith withdrawn from the icon”. The new medium determined a
shift from “the icon, the prayer, as it were, of the hand, inspired by the Spirit, to the
imprint of things seen”. The advent of photography represented, he adds, a relocation
of where meanings were to be authenticated to “an image directly peeled from things
by the lens”. It would be believable as it had “a counterpart in the reality available to
the senses” (Debray 2004: 219). Nevertheless in spite of its affiliation with rational-
ism and science it is striking how much the language of theology was utilised in the
early descriptions of the new medium. Sabine Kriebel describes them as proclaiming a
faith in the medium’s “nearly divine representation of ‘absolute truth’ ” (Kriebel 2007:
in Elkins 2009: 7). For some this was far more than rhetorical. Two of the late nine-
teenth century’s most eminent scientists, Sir William Crookes and Sir David Brewster
made no ultimate separation between science and religion. Crookes was a Spiritualist
who sought the shade of his dead brother by means of photography. Brewster was
a devout Christian, biblically inspired, and an inheritor of pragmatic Puritan and
Calvinist beliefs who conceived of the progress of science including photography as
nothing less than part of the process of divine revelation, of the evolution of humanity
towards divine perfection.* Also present in his thinking was the Lutheran belief that
God is present in nature. Ralph and Joanna Harley sum up Brewster’s theological
theory of photography.
[S]ince God is light and at the same time is manifest directly in the structures of
creation, a self-delineated image made by the sun (“the pencil of nature”) is a true
representation of Deity incarnate in its creation.
(Harley and Harley 1988: 300)
It is an observation that will bring us to a more focused consideration of the relation-

ship of the sacred and the visual.
While Brewster’s sort of religious perspective may be less common and all but
absent from most discussions of the visual image or of photography theory, the same
themes and even the terminology of metaphysics, if not precisely of theology, persists
in many. Either a religious turn is underway, or we are left to answer in different ways
the same questions religion was once expected to resolve. In secular or post-religious
culture, caught, as Donald Preziosi observes, between the inability not to believe in the
“impossibility of representation” and a “disbelief in the artifice of belief”, a curious
exchange has taken place, in which lost or shaky religious convictions migrate to and
attaches themselves to aesthetic experience. He writes,
In the first case disbelief renders artistry a perpetually paratheisitc practice, and in
the second case the disbelief renders religion a perpetually paraesthetic practice.
(Preziosi 2014: 3)
Some utilise a religious or religioid vocabulary casually or figuratively when discuss-

ing photography. Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin both speak of the photograph
as a form of redemption. John Sarkowski talks of photography “immortalising” its
subjects. As we shall see, more considered or complex uses of this kind of language are
encountered in theoretical studies. For example, in François Laruelle’s reflections on
photography and philosophy the terms immanence/ent and transcendence/ent, recur
with some frequency.
Roland Barthes dedicated his Camera Lucida to Sartre’s L’Imaginaire. Barthes’
meditations on the modulation of presence and absence in the work of the photo-
graphic image share Sartre’s materialism and yet reflect the same preoccupations as
many analyses of religious representations. “Religious icons have never been”, writes
Bruno Latour, “about anything other than absence” (Latour 2010: 95). The mourning
that haunts the whole of Barthes’ book—the agonising desire for some reunification
with what is no longer in reach—gives the writing, at times, a ritual quality, reading
like the prayer of an unbeliever to what has vanished, as though writing could restore
it to presence. But absence is what photography struggles with. It is ultimately the sub-
ject of all photographs whatever their content or purpose, and is of course one of the
core themes in religion and its representations, that is, the figure of the deus abscondi-
tus, the absent God. François Laruelle, argues that photographic resemblance, is more
than a question of verisimilitude, but rather one of, he writes, “[R]esemblance to the
absent but supposed perceptible . . . object . . . not a copy of the real . . . an emana-
tion, an eidolon (a simulacrum) of the referent that it poses as absent or as past—a
mode of absence” (Laruelle 2012: 62). Photography, he continues, accommodates a
“double discourse”. In the same moment it doubles what it represents, “its emanation
and its positive substitute” and signifies its failure to be what it represents, “displaying
illusionism, lack and absence” (Laruelle 2012: 65). In the same instant the photograph
then produces both an image and a foregrounding of the principle of its limitation.
Photography’s uncertainties are analogous to the central anxiety in religious repre-
sentation. As, indeed, is the phenomenon of doubling. Niklas Luhman has pointed
out how religion engages in what he calls “reality-doubling”, by which he means the
invention of the special realm of the sacred. He writes,
Certain types of things or events are assigned a special meaning, taking them out
of the regular world (where they are still accessible) and granting them a special
“aura”, a special circle of reference.
(Luhman 2013: 40)
With photography’s now central place in contemporary art practice it is useful to take
note of Bruno Latour’s observations on what he sees as the interdependency between
secular contemporary art and religious art. Latour argues that much contemporary art
is so concerned to defer representation, so determined to resist its being deprived of
autonomy by some external dominating referent beyond it, that in certain instances it
becomes preoccupied by religious imagery mobilised as a critique of worldly reference
(Latour 2010: 94–95). A sort of negative symbiosis is being described here in which
a visual cultural system, religious art, once the font of authentic and full meaning,
has become both negated and valorised as part of a secular project whose aim is to
establish the self-sufficiency of aesthetic objects. If this is true then clearly theological
themes, or strategies, either continue to haunt cultural thought, or are judged useful
to it as a metaphorical acquisition. We shall encounter this later.
From the traditional religious perspective, any entity or meaning that is antecedent
to or transcendent of the representation will have been revealed not invented by the
process or act of representation combined with the belief of the viewer. For secular or
materialist contemporary aesthetics, such an entity will be seen as the product or effect
of the process of representation, of the artistry of image making; that is, a construc-
tion, a real fiction which may provide some kind of truth or intensification of meaning
and emotion. Where Bishop Berkley took matter to be the language of God, the mate-
rial forms of representation transforms material into signifying matter, matter pos-
sessed or appropriated by consciousness. There is a critical moment in Sartre’s 1938
novel Nausea, when Antoine Roquentin, the story’s central figure, listens once more
to an old recording of the great Jazz standard, Some of These Days. He has loved
the song and the presence of the singer which returns each time the disc is heard. But
the record is damaged, scratched from countless playing, the needle ‘stutters’ and the
finite, fragile materiality of the apparatus is magnified. And yet, as if it were located
in some domain below or beyond the assemblage of machinery, shellac, dyes and pul-
verised minerals, in which it is inextricably embedded, the song, the audio image, the
immaterial product of representation, the trace of a long past act of human intention,
has superseded its material substrates. It has become free of and irreducible to what
makes its empirical existence possible:
It is so far away—so far behind. I understand that too: the record is getting
scratched and worn, the singer may be dead . . . but behind the existence which
falls from one present to the next, without a past, without a future behind those
sounds which decompose from day to day peels away and slips towards death the
melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.
(Sartre 1965: 249)
Sartre’s materialist metaphysics permits an understanding of consciousness, and the

production of meaning, as independent and yet inseparable from the material world
without needing recourse to either transcendentalist theology or determinist mate-
rialism. It also pictures how a media-based aesthetic practice, whatever its manifest
content, is working across the same ground as religion once claimed as its own. Where
religion speaks of god being the source of the necessity of human beings, Sartre spoke
of art transforming the material world, indifferent to the existence of human beings,
in such a way that this world has its foundation in them. Through the necessary fic-
tion of art, not god, human beings inhabit a world in which they are needed. Art is
how humans overcome their contingent status in the universe (Sartre 1966: 115–119).
Maurice Blanchot discusses something comparable to Roquentin’s epiphany and
echoes something of Sartre’s theme. “In the very moment of re-presentation”, he says,
[T]he principle of disappearance, of absence, is reinforced: . . . once it has become

an image it (the object) instantly becomes ungraspable . . . the present thing in its
absence . . . appearing as something that has disappeared . . . the strange heart of
the distance as the life and the unique heart of the thing.
(Blanchot 1981b: 80–81)
Again, a materialist aesthetics of representation, occupies the place where theology

once reigned. The “distance” that Blanchot refers to here is, it seems to me, that space
across which religion was once the almost exclusive guide and navigator, the space
between the material and the immaterial, the observable and the unobservable—the
space of representation—where now art and philosophy speak and expect a hearing.
Before embarking on a closer discussion of possible affinities between photography
and the nature of the sacred, a primary observation needs to be made. That is, it can be
argued that the creation of something like the sacred is an effect of all acts of representa-
tion. Visual representation invents a space, or rather implies the existence of a space that
lies between appearance and invisibility, the between the material and the immaterial, the
space wherein the sacred is encountered, where god is or was once thought to be at work.
Maurice Blanchot speaks of “that ecstasy that which is the image” (Blanchot 1981b: 87).
Ecstasy is “stepping out’ ”, out of stasis, out of the unshifting ordinary, free of the deter-
mined. It is the sharpening of perception, the ‘making strange’. Ecstasy is at the heart of both
religion and all effective aesthetic practice, it is an essential quality of the sacred. Visual rep-
resentation intensifies, makes special, what is pictured, an effect akin to a process of sacrali-
sation and comparable to the “grace in the everyday” theology of the early Modern Dutch
Protestants. In a more Catholic manner of speaking, it is a process of transubstantiation.
Religions have commonly represented the absent and unobservable through the
presence of perceivable and theologically permissible mediators, chosen things that
stand on the frontier between the worldly and the divine, the empirical and the trans-
cendent: events, objects or the bodies of individuals that emanate numinous power.
These may be visual images. They may be depictions or the actual presences of holy
individuals. They may also take the form of objects, rocks, trees, sites and so forth
transmuted into representations or transmitters of the sacred. In the history of religion
they are known as “hierophants”, revealers of the sacred and as markers of a division
in the order of things. They are instances of the practice described by Niklas Luhman
as “reality doubling”, that was noted earlier (Eliade 1987: 11–12; Luhman 2013:
40). Through them the sacred can be experienced and perhaps worshipped. By means
of them the sacred is revealed as partly manifest in the material and natural world.
Meaning is shown to exist in or through the things of the world. David Morgan’s
notion of a “spiritual correlative”, an adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “objective correla-
tive”, also offers a useful description of such objects (Morgan in Elkins and Morgan
2009: 49). Similarly, while photographic meaning is generated as much by non-visual
processes as visual ones, its primary if no longer exclusive manifestation is the pic-
turing of material objects, events or bodies that by dint of being photographed have
become non-abstract signs, offered for interpretation. Like Schopenhauer’s artist, who
“recognizes the Idea in the particular” by means of intensification photography also
uncovers meaning in things, presses meaning out them or infuses meaning into them
(Schopenhauer 1909: 319). The concrete-visual becomes transformed into a value—or
into an idea. Maybe it’s in the nature of the image to change matter into its idealised
form. In his essay “The Two Imaginaries”, Maurice Blanchot writes,
Doesn’t the reflection always seem more spiritual than the object reflected? Isn’t
it the ideal expression of that object, its presence freed from existence, its form
without matter? And artists who exile themselves in the illusion of images, isn’t
their task to idealise beings, to elevate them to their disembodied resemblance.
(Blanchot 1981b: 81)
Félix Guattari describes an adjacent principle. He writes, “[T]here is no effort bearing

on material forms that does not bring forth immaterial entities” (Guattari 1995: 103).
Photography was not designed for the picturing of non-material forms. And yet,
the very automatism of photographic seeing has its counterpart in the non-human all-
seeing eye of god. Derrida detects the resonance of a particular theological precept in
another of photography’s essential characteristics—it’s promiscuous gathering of all
the details streaming into the lens from the light of the world. Fox-Talbot wrote of “a
multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation”
(Fox-Talbot 1844: Plate X). Derrida suggests that the photographic act requires the
photographer to “empty” her or himself before the world, as the camera is an openess
to the world’s infinity of particulars. He compares this to the religious state of kenosis
in Christian mysticism, in which the devout empties the self before the demands of the
divine will as Christ emptied himself to become incarnated in human form. “Is there
anything photographic,” Derrida asks, “without kenosis?” (Derrida 2010: 19).
As photo-technology advances, there is no corresponding diminution in non-
rational expectations of the medium. Hans Belting, discussing the decline of indexical
reference in the digital era and the disappearance of images into the “black box of the
database”, adds,
We discover here the symbolic and sometimes magical aspects of our engagement
with photographs. We conceal their physical existence as though we wanted to
make of them immaterial images dwelling in our imagination. Since we tend to
mistrust the real, we delude ourselves into believing that we can remove the old
barrier that separates images of our own making into those that are visible and
those that are invisible.
(Belting 2011: 150)
God is invariably defined as being free of or outside of time. Photography’s subject

is time, or rather, how the stemming of temporal flows, how the invention of a state
between two moments of transformation might be pictured. It confers on time a visu-
alisable, spatial form. In Camera Lucida Barthes writes of the “immobilisation” of
time by the photograph thus freeing us of time, if only fictitiously. Alert to the still
audible religious resonances encountered within so many of these discussions of the
medium, the philosopher Peter Osborne lays particular emphasis on the clear echoes
in them of the doctrine of incarnation. He writes, it
represents a naturalization of the theological structure of the icon, via time,

because meaning participates in the real through becoming “carnal” of light.
(Osborne 2013: 130)
In the photograph time is visualised, ‘fossilised’. It permits a reflection on time from

outside of time, a looking into time by means of the transparency of the image, and at
time because time has become an object, or at least a pictured event. The stilled event
calls attention to itself, demands to be reflected upon from the outside of things. As
was noted in the opening chapter, Daguerre’s picture of the man on the Boulevard du
Temple represented the usurpation of one of god’s most awesome powers, the ability
to see from beyond time. Hilary Putnam has described the approach to knowledge
from the external, socially, ideologically unsituated position as “God’s Eye point of
view”, as “metaphysical realism” (Tweed 2006: 16).
Derrida characterises all photographs as fetishes (Derrida 2010: 33). An important
manifestation of the religious sign has been the relic, the religious fetish. The relic was
the fragmentary presence of the sacred in the world, one functioning as both symbol
and index, a link to the fullness of an immortal afterlife. In the form of the body parts
or hair of saints and martyrs, of the splinters of the True Cross and so forth, the relic
was a haptic sign—a touch of the sacred. It was a physical (part) object and a material
sign signifying immateriality. The treasuring of the small physical remains of departed
loved ones—locks of hair, even teeth—were prevalent in the Victorian culture of
mourning. Their use interweaved with the period’s Protestant “material Christianity”,
and commonplace superstitions, but also informed by an inheritance of a residual
half-life of popular Catholicism (McDannell 1998). Almost as soon as it appeared, the
photograph, with its incantatory potency, was added to the inventory of such relics. In
her study of the expressions of Victorian grief and mourning, Deborah Lutz notes that
the early non-reproducible forms of the photograph were closest to the traditional
notion of the relic, the treasured and unique object, radiating the absolute uniqueness
of the dead person—Daguerrotypes, Ambrotypes and Tintypes among others. Like
the photograph which in endless viewings restores not the lost person but the sense of
loss, relics are, Lutz observes, “the material sample of a being that will never be given
to grow, to be seen or felt again” (Lutz 2015: 126). In this case it is the metaphysics
of presence and absence that is the presiding effect of the photograph as relic. Where
the photograph-as-relic is multiply reproduced, the effect is to replicate over and over
again the act of mourning. To adapt some words of Boris Groys which apply as much
to the religious image as to a Victorian photograph, “The Invisible remains invisible
precisely by the multiplication of its visualizations” (Groys 2008: 85).
Theological echoes do not fade with the arrival of digital imaging. Peter Osborne’s
description of photographic presence in terms of incarnation or, by suggestion, the
Incarnation, was noted earlier. There is a metaphorical plausibility to such tropes
when applied to the evident materiality and causal patterns of analogue photography.
But are they useful tools in the discussion of the digital photograph? This is, after all,
the product of a putatively dematerialised, multiply located medium; a representa-
tion independent of a prototype, a representation whose source is its programme not
necessarily some external referent. The truth of an image of Christ lies in the shared
belief in its connection with the absent, sacrificed, humanised form, and through it
with the invisible divinity out of which Christ emerged and into which he returned.
The “epistemic value” of the analogue photograph depends on an acceptance of its
causal connection to a referent beyond and before the image (Freeland 2010 in Walton
2010: 66). Boris Groys, whom Osborne cites, argues that the invisibility of the digital
image’s original is comparable, he writes, to the “Byzantine icon—as a visible copy of
an invisible God” (Groys 2008: 84). In digital photography the ‘aura’ is reinvented
by the invisibility of the image’s origins. “Nothing”, he writes, “has more aura than
the invisible” (Groys 2008: 86). Groys maintains the theological register as he contin-
ues arguing that, given the absence of any visible origin, all digital photographs are
therefore interpretations, performances and for that reason a possible betrayal of the
original, a destruction of the aura of the invisible, comparable to a ‘profanation’. He
writes,
The visualization of digital data is a sacrilege—comparable to the attempts to

depict the invisible God of Judaism or Islam.
(Groys 2008: 86)
If the digital photograph is now more of a question of the production of an image

rather than the recording of an object; if the photograph can no longer rely on the sup-
port of a causal origin to guarantee its factuality then any discussion of photographic
meaning or authenticity inevitably becomes resituated. Establishing the meaning or
authenticity of a photograph has drifted away from questions of reference or the accu-
racy of the device and more towards theoretical disputes over how meaning is made,
how viewers participate in the process. The question of photographic representation
is now posed in the same kind of disputational space as that of theology.
David Morgan wonders if the preoccupation with presence reveals a desire to
uncover something more profound than photographic semiotics, a desire for some
kind of transcendence. If, he asks, hidden materiality of the image, among the grain or
the pixels exists, “the primordial substrate of being” then
the epistemological covenant begins to merge with a metaphysical covenant: this

“first look” or glimpse into a domain of mystery is alluring because it promises an
even more encompassing knowledge.
(Morgan 2005: 79)
As we shall see, while there is the desire for transcendence, or some kind of spiritu-
ality, it is not necessarily dependent on theism. For now let us return to the theme of
how representation itself appears to generate a ‘spiritual’ effect. With photography,
it is the still, the fragment taken from the flow of time that produces it. Photogra-
phy sacralises by extracting the single image not only from the flux of real world
events, but increasingly from the relentless blizzard of images, including photographic
images, which has become in this era, the actual nature of the unreachable Real. Hans
Belting writes,
We search there for a mystery, one that would escape our customarily quick and
superficial gaze. The photo functions for us not so much as a document but as
a reminder of our mostly lost sense that the world possesses hermetic meanings.
(Belting 2011: 151)
Here, Belting proposes a description of the photograph as a practice that resists the
instrumentalism of visual marketing and media—as art uncompromised by the art
market—and the photograph as the attempt to restore to visual experience the search
for significance within phenomena. The echoes either current or residual of the reli-
gious origins of art remain entirely audible.
The opening chapter featured Francois Laruelle’s description of photography as a
“utopian activity”, as it “ ‘grasps’ its objects, a way that originates ‘in itself alone’ ”
(Laruelle 2012: 37, 31,15). Laruelle appears to be claiming for the medium some-
thing like self-sufficiency, albeit conditioned. The quasi-theological echoes around this
description are sustained when he all but assigns to photography the power of access-
ing the in-itself, the revelation of immanence. He writes, “The photograph, owing to
its being immanent on one hand, to its reference to the perceived object on the other,
is incontestably the in-itself of that object” (Laruelle 2012: 21). As Niklas Luhman has
noted, having access to the “thing in itself”, proximity to the source of meaning, is a
facility that religion has privileged to itself (Luhman 2013: 4). Laruelle is hardly claim-
ing this, but his consciously insufficient materialist theology of photographic represen-
tation offers a way of thinking about how the sacred might be re-imagined, re-defined,
re-presented by photography-based engagements in a post-religious culture.
Photography neither ended the presence of religion in culture nor is it simply a
continuation of religion in another form. But, like all cultural forms, photography
is syncretic: both a transformation and a carrier of the practices and their attendant
beliefs it is thought to have replaced. Antonio Benítez-Rojo writes,
[T]here is no pure cultural form, not even the religious ones. Culture is a dis-
course, a language, and as such it has no beginning or end and is always in trans-
formation, since it is always looking for the way to signify what it cannot manage
to signify.
(Benítez-Rojo 1996: 20)
Note
* My thanks to Dr Patrizia Di Bello of Birkbeck College, University of London, for bringing
these texts to my attention.
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5 “Life’s Redemption”
Photography and the Sacred, Part 2
Photography instead “has something to do with resurrection”; it is not memory but

“reality in a past state”—the presence of death—and hence our astonishment at pho-
tography is “religious”.
Jay Prosser, Light in the Dark Room quoting Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in nar-
cotics. It lies in profane illumination, a materialist, anthropological illumination.
Walter Benjamin, Surrealism
In the West and in many highly modernised sectors in societies beyond it, contem-
porary arts and related cultural practices are either predominantly secular or at least
operate in the knowledge that religious belief has ceased to be the single determinate of
any shared symbolic order. And yet, if we agree with Blanchot, the loss of god, or that
transforming intensity and transcendent source of authenticity represented by the idea
of the sacred, remains a pervasive theme in the contemporary condition. For me the
most interesting consideration lies in the possibility of art that approaches the sacred
without the expectation that it can will reassurance, let alone host a god; that art, reli-
gious or not, might take us to that interface between the everyday and the sacred, into
some encounter with the possibility of transcendence is not a mystery. If, as we are told,
art is creation ex nihilo then art must perforce represent an encounter with that space
wherein the sacred is revealed or constructed and some kind of re-imagined sacred
is brought about. Wallace Stevens wrote, “After one has abandoned a belief in god,
poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (Stevens 1991: 158).
In his study of the viability or otherwise of religious thought in the present era, a
period he characterises as “without a supreme sacred or singular ultimate concern”,
Victor E. Taylor argues that the traditional notion of the sacred as the transcendental
source and ground of all human meanings, is a “much abandoned concept” and yet
can still be invoked through the recognition of the “possibility of its restoration and,
perhaps, redemption after its fall(s) from God into language” (Taylor 2000:14).
Taylor maintains that the conventional idea of the sacred has been overturned by
what he calls “anti-foundational epistemologies”, exemplified by Derrida’s now well
known rejection of any “transcendental signified”, any organising, anchoring centre
from which all meaning might proceed (Derrida 1978b: 278–293). As a consequence,
Derrida argues, “[E]verything becomes discourse. . . . The absence of the transcen-
dental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely” (Derrida
1978b: 280). This means there can be no demonstrable “isomorphic relation between
language and the world” (Taylor 2000: 12). As with any production of meaning, seen
in this light, the sacred cannot be distinguished from how it is thought, described or
depicted. Nor can it be immune from the scattering effects of the heterogeneous and
intertextual activity of language and discourses in general. The more the sacred is
described or represented the more remote it seems to grow—the familiar agony of
representation.
Nevertheless, though deprived of a belief in the “supreme ultimate”, the contem-
porary artist or writer still faces the same questions that the sacred once answered or
provided a language in which to pose them, that is, as Taylor puts it, “our own fini-
tude, our own mortality” (Taylor 2000: 52). “Where” he asks, “do we, can we, find
expressions of the sacred in postmodern existence?” (Taylor 2000: 52). Responding
to his own question, he proposes the concept of the “parasacred”, a conception of the
sacred that foregrounds and accepts the deferring effects of its own descriptions and
the indeterminacy that they inevitably bring about. This “disfiguring” of the sacred,
as he calls it, abandons the sacred/profane duality replacing it with a description that
places moments of an experience of the sacred, the “liminal divine” within the world
of experience, the “liminal world”, which is, he writes, “neither entirely fleeting nor
entirely lasting” (Taylor 2000: 51). The possibility of the sacred is retained but no
longer as an “ultra-determining reality” but as a “limit-concept” (Taylor 2000: 52).
The parasacred is a re-description of humanity’s sense of incompleteness and its desire
to overcome it. In this way the sacred is understood as the “condition of humanity not
the content” (Taylor 2000: 72). It is located, or performed on the “limits or margins
of sacrality . . . where ultimacy is inscribed, but veiled” (Taylor 2000: 52, 51). The
parasacred “offers”, he continues, an approximation of ultimacy through a process
of negation” (Taylor 2000: 52). It represents the re-acceptance of the sacred, but seen
as a “necessary fiction” through which we define or re-define ourselves through the
encounter with limits. It is placed at the edges of rationality, sense and mortality in a
place where language, cultural values and representation begin to fail. This place is
directly comparable to Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the “Outside”, the beyond of
representations and meaning and the entirely unreachable and imaginary grounds for
them. It is what is not given in experience. Kevin Hart pictures the sacred in Blanchot
as being like the experience of time but not our time. (Hart 2004: 145). “Nothing is left
of the sacred”, writes Hart, “but the eternal murmuring of the Outside” (Hart 2004:
227). The sacred thus becomes the failed but necessary attempt to reach it. “Here”,
writes Hart, “one encounters the ghostly image of language, of words without being”
(Hart 2004: 66). Blanchot imagined god as a failure of language. For that reason it is
within Taylor’s “parasacred”, or in the face of Blanchot’s “Outside”, where art and
creative thought that fully accept indeterminacy come into being.
James Elkins relates how the nineteenth-century Orientalist painter Jean-Léon
Gérôme regarded theatricality not only as the most effective way of grasping religious
truth, but thought that “theatricality is religion” (Elkins 2004: 9). Placed at the heart
of this theatricality has been the staging of the body. Often it is the artist’s own or sur-
rogate body presented as a performance and complex of significations—an incarna-
tion of self and idea. The body, Nelly Richard writes,
[I]s . . . a repository of memories, an actor in the theatre of power . . . the body is

at the boundary between biology and society, between the drives and discourse,
“Life’s Redemption” 97
between the sexual and its categorization in terms of power, biography and his-
tory, it is the site par excellence for transgressing the constraints of meaning or
what social discursivity prescribes as normal.
(Richard 1986b: 65)
The presence in the image of the artist’s own body acts as a performative signifier
attached either to an orthodox belief, as in the case of the late Victorian Fred Holland-
Day whose photographs act as testaments to incarnations of himself as if he were
Christ. Contemporary performance-based work, when not seeking to confront and
disrupt received iconographies and doctrines, displaces them into reflections on other
mysteries. For example, in the third panel of Marina Ambramovic’s 1983 triptych,
Anima Mundi, the “Pietá” seems more stage photograph than affirmation of religion.
It is the presence of photography and performance that is the reality of the work.
The woman looks up into the darkness above her as if appealing for meaning to be
bestowed on this death. None seems forthcoming. The darkness is empty, silent—it
contains no signs, no descending radiance. Transcendence no longer succeeds vio-
lence; resurrection is no longer the reward of martyrdom. A woman’s assigned role
as mourner of sons destroyed by other men’s barbarism now seems like meaningless
complicity. The moment is not exactly one of revolt, but perhaps the beginning of a
withdrawal from the imprisoning sacred, a separating from, in Julia Kristeva’s words,
“the catastrophe of mourning, which women know in the flesh and which makes them
eternal hired mourners, with or without dead bodies” (Kristeva, cited in Pollock and
Sauron 2007: 10). It recalls the post-religious ambience of Manet’s 1864 The Dead
Christ with Angels, a depthless picturing of the sacred.
A significant proportion of the photographers incorporating religious themes or
conventions were raised as Catholics producing work that can modulate between
affirmation, distancing and rejection in relation to their confessional inheritance.
As Catholics they were formed in a culture with an accentuated focus on the carnal
aspects of Christianity and one often notable for its iconic overload. The Catholic
theologian, David Tracy, has advanced the idea that the Catholic imagination is fur-
nished differently from the Protestant. According to Tracy, Protestant belief maintains
the “dialectical” principle that a fundamental separation exists between God and the
world (Greeley 1990: 45). In his discussion of Tracy, Andrew M. Greeley, sees in the
Catholic imagination an analogical tendency rising out of a belief that God
is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and
all its events, objects and people tend to be somewhat like God.
(Greeley 1990: 45)
While the Protestant god who resides in a deeper absence is from necessity imagined
as closer to idea than to manifestation, Catholics are more likely to envisage a mate-
rialised description of divine presence. Thinking through images is a foundational
facility for them if one accepts Tracy’s argument. Adopting photography enhances this
with its power as an incarnating medium. It would be mistaken, though, to assume
that such practices are the reserve of those from a Catholic formation. Colm Tóibín
argues that both the lapsed Catholic James Joyce and Elizabeth Bishop, who was
raised as a Baptist, shared the same view of language as a consequence of losing their
faith. Tóibín writes,
When faith disappears . . . then the language of transcendence can have a special
power because it invokes something that was once familiar, once possible, and is
now lost.
(Tóibín 2015: 60)
Much contemporary work has been produced out of the struggle with religion.
While the Church’s overbearing intellectual orthodoxies and moral restrictions have
fuelled the desire for personal and artistic autonomy, Catholicism’s rich visual and
narrative world has provisioned some artists with an iconographic and dramatic rep-
ertoire out of which to elaborate new and frequently transgressive visions, antithetical
to Church values. The imagery that subjects the imagination is re-imagined to re-
invent the creative subject.
An identification of and with the artist’s own sexuality converges with religious and
art historical themes in pieces by two gay male photographers working in the United
States throughout the first decades of the Aids/HIV epidemic, John O’Reilly and John
Dugdale. Central to their projects is a preoccupation with the limits of representation,
even the limits of seeing itself—Dugdale was all but blinded by an Aids/HIV-related
condition.
In directed imagery incorporating the artists’ own bodies/presence as true simula-
tions of Christ’s body or of those of other biblical personae, the gay male body is sanc-
tified through an exchange with the sacred. In this way the images invite the reflection
on the afflictive and suffering male form and on the consequent redemptive caring of
men for each other. From a Catholic formation, John O’Reilly employs photomon-
tage’s mix of aggressive cutting and fragmentation and the movement towards a syn-
thesis of elements which remains ever uncompleted. He installs himself, his own body
into the history of art by combining his own image with particles cut and released
from canonic paintings. Christian themes and references are notably active in two
of his pieces, Holding 1997 and With Felipe Próspero (Figure 5.1) from Velasquez’s
portrait. Like Christ being lowered from the cross he lies in the arms of the sickly heir
to the Spanish throne.
Held by John from 1988 shows ‘O’Reilly’ in his incongruous Mr. Ordinary-Middle-
Aged-Man twentieth-century spectacles being lifted down from the cross like or as
Christ in the opening moments of a Pietá re-staged as a gay tableau. Glass domi-
nates the work. There are glasses you can see through; glass that is broken through—
sections of jagged picture glass subdivide the picture space, indicating O’Reilly’s raids
on art history; and glass that reflects, that creates secondary images, revisions of
already-existing imagery. An oval mirror occupies the bottom right of the frame. In
the background as in the original painting, is placed the mirror detail from Velsaquez’s
Las Meninas which reflects the subjects of a painting, in a painting about the placing
and displacing of subjectivity, in a work that displays how power oversees its own
representation. This power is appropriated by O’Reilly who imagines in this work
how the visual order might be re-arranged. Indeed, Las Meninas is itself undecided,
a loosening of the painting’s enclosure, of the interior and the exterior. Religion, art,
sight, subjectivity and identity—are revealed in their conflicted interactions as unend-
ing processes of destruction, construction and deconstruction. The title of O’Reilly’s
Figure 5.1 John O’Reilly. With Felipe Prospero, 1986.
Source: John O’Reilly © 1986 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
Figure 5.2 John O’Reilly. S/SGT Killed Over Germany 1944 Age 24, 1991.
Source: John O’Reilly © 1991 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
collection is Occupied Territories. Indeed in this work, the artist-persona has taken
over the territory of the sacred: the image spaces of canonical art and artists and the
theological-aesthetic spaces of religious representation. These spaces have been sub-
ject to fragmentation, a method that, as Richard Wollheim has argued, can be linked
to an aesthetics of Diaspora that pictures the exilic subject as disassembled, deprived
of the lynch pin of the familiar cultural and psychic order (Wollheim cited by Noch-
lin 1996, in Suleiman 1996: 43–44). Of a long excluded sexuality, whose exclusion
was historically sanctified by religious as well as political-ideological enforcements,
O’Reilly breaks in and re-arranges the pieces, above all, those representations of the
sacred, the ultimate source and guarantor of all other meanings and identities. In a
familiar strategy of transgressive culture, O’Reilly also lays unsanctified pornographic
material alongside the consecrated. The conscious pollution brings disorder, disturbs
the established meaning of images and the texts that secure it and opens up pathways
for new meanings to enter. The sacred, as the transcendental theological-ideological
source and guarantor of meaning and identity that had excluded the being of homo-
sexuality, is now taken over, occupied, re-imagined. In so doing O’Reilly invents the
source of his own being and reveals the sacred as located inside the social, part of the
profane, inseparable from its representations and eternally unstable.
John Dugdale utilises nineteenth-century photographic processes, above all the
Cyanotype which goes back to Sir John Herschel. It’s blue cast causes the events in the
image to withdraw. It brings about temporal, emotional and interpretive dislocations.
Blue is the colour of distance, of Leonardo’s aerial perspective. Blue is the colour of the
past, of old photographic time. It is the cold, bloodless colour of death; the estranging
colouration of dream and of the infinite ocean of the unconscious. The blue cast places
a screen between the viewer and the events in Dugdale’s images. They are located in
some other place or condition of being: between life and death, between seeing and
imagining. And yet, their unattainability attracts the intimacy of the viewer’s read-
ing, always a kind of identification. His Psalm 42 Morton Street NYC 1996 shows
a man of evidently poor eyesight endeavouring to read (one presumes, Psalm 42, the
great religious praise poem that simultaneously expresses the yearning for god and the
anguish at god’s deafening absence). The figure struggles to see, to read, to apprehend
the sacred, which may lie beyond the text.
Dugdale’s Cyanotype, Lazarus, Brother of Martha and John, 1999, invokes the rais-
ing of Lazarus by Christ related in John’s Gospel. Christ’s intervention was motivated
by pity and by the interceding Martha’s sisterly love. As life is restored to Lazarus
by Christ’s intervention Dugdale’s configuration of gestures speak of the dream that
brotherly love might overcome sickness. The dead or revived figure looks out of the
picture space towards the viewer. He seems to pose all the unanswerable questions the
image provokes.
As tableaux and performances weighted with allusions to religious painting and
through them to original texts and teachings, these representations operate allegori-
cally. Indeed as Derrida has pointed out the word Icon can be translated or understood
as allegorical as all images have an “internal meaning” are more than the presentation
of surfaces or self-evident truths (Derrida 1993: 126). To allegorise is to speak of the
other. Visual allegories “speak” the relationship between what is seen and the ‘other’
meaning that underplays, that plays under, the image we see. Religious allegory spoke
of the ganz andere, the wholly other—the numinous. The works of these artists speak
from the place of the other gender, the other sexuality, out of other pleasures and
transportations. They speak of the possibility of becoming other.
Figure 5.3 John Dugdale. Psalm 42 Morton Street NYC, 1996. Cyanotype.
Source: John Dugdale (original in overall blue colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
We can group into two categories photographically based work that pursues the
sacred effect on the edges or limits of representation and without being underwrit-
ten by traditional religious certainties. One group emphasises the physicality of the
medium itself and the carnality of human embodiment, suffering and desire. The other
group concentrates more on the dematerialisation of the medium, and what exceeds
visual representation. More than familiar modernist exercises in defamiliarisation,
each represents the attempt to re-work the tradition of art as redemption. In so doing
they rehearse, usually in some remote or oblique sense, aspects of religious practice.
All approaches to the sacred demand self-estrangement. This can be seen in pilgrim-
age where the spaces and identities of the everyday are relinquished throughout the
time of travelling; or in the strangeness of the heightened language and expressions
of ritual. And, as we have seen, the self-emptying practice of Kenosis, which, we may
recall, Derrida associates with the photographic act, is a form of self-estrangement.
Religious practices and visual culture which foreground the injured and afflicted
body bring the viewer into the closest visual proximity with the carnality of human
embodiment and desire, above all their relationship with mortality. Such approaches
utilise the transformatory estrangement of the horrifying or radically unsettling image;
the image that assaults taboos, that takes things beyond normality. They descend from
visual traditions each with strong links to religious significance: the Crucifixions, Mar-
tyr Paintings, Still Lifes/Mementi Mori and the darker aesthetics of the Sublime, with
its Gothic-Romantic provenances. All of these contemporary practices to be discussed
are rescue missions aimed at the recovery of whatever in our being-in-the-world has
been denied, lost or diminished in the domestication of the sacred that Georges Bataille
famously denounced in Christian bourgeois society. It is the point at which photo-
graphic work encounters the otherness that surrounds human existence and meaning:
mortality, finitude, the indifference and recalcitrance of matter, the relativism of values
and the culture-specific nature of signs. It is often death-haunted and accompanied by
religious references that foreground the provisional or distressed materiality of the
work—its constructed and frangible character. We can cite the scratches, striations,
stains, damaged props, masking tape and torn backdrops in the productions of Joel-
Peter Witkin, David Nebreda or Luis Gonzalez Palma. In an analogous relation to the
body of the work is placed the human body—sometimes that of the artist—presented
as abject, fragile, suffering, even destroyed. The two registers parallel each other, con-
noting the vulnerability of human physical existence and the tenuousness of the mean-
ings and representations that humans produce. With their religious forms and motifs
such works are meditations on the common religious practice of distressing the human
body as a means of accessing the sacred, of regarding the profane body as both a
means of reaching it and a barrier that obstructs it. In parallel, the photographic pro-
cess is also presented as a medium that at once represents and defers the sacred. In
its photographic form this type of practice is directorial, consisting of staging, props
and performances. An allegorical event is arranged for the camera and yet, though
in this sense fictional, photography’s realism, its indexicality, is central to the works’
efficacy. We need to believe that Witkin’s hermaphrodites or severed body parts are
real. Its documentary realism is as important as its evocations of the history of classi-
cal painting or religious art. We need to accept that David Nebreda’s self-injuries and
deprivations are true before we might reflect on the meanings of such extreme acts
before the camera.
It is also a practice commonly regarded as transgressive. When charged with its
most powerful energies religion is transgressive. One of Bataille’s objections to con-
temporary religion in Europe was that it had become “insufficiently terrifying” (his
italics) (Bataille 1998 in Richardson 1998: 47). Niklas Luhman highlights the para-
doxical unities in theologies proposing that “Salvation lies in danger, redemption in
sin” (Luhman 2013: 4). Certainly Christianity once mobilised unrestrained depictions
of the crucified Christ and the agonised deaths of martyrs. But these religious deaths
signified redemption and the resurrection of the soul. If their disruptive intensities and
wounded, distorted human forms were in some way transgressive in their awesome-
ness, they were immediately translatable into god’s love. In his discussions of Hegel’s
aesthetics, Alain Besançon considers how the philosopher understood the use of the
unpleasant or ugly in art. Quoting Hegel, he writes,
The unbeautiful appears at a necessary moment. But the ugly is transfigured

by the holiness that surrounds the scene, by the “infinity of grief, present as an
eternal moment in the spirit as sufferance and divine peace”.
(Besançon 2000: 214)
Religious images, whether violent or ethereal, functioned to confirm the beliefs of

the viewer or to bring about some transformation in them.
While the human incarnation of God might be exclusive to Christianity, the incar-
nation of the sacred is not. Georges Bataille, whose influence on contemporary trans-
gression culture and thought is difficult to overestimate, drew upon non-Christian as
well as Catholic traditions in his promotion of a sacred that is sited in the body in all
its physicalities and impulses. He regarded the disavowal of the sacred in the modern
Western world as a profound deprivation, a diminishing of life’s intensity, a loss of
the full truth of being human. “Life”, he writes, “has its greatest intensity in the icy
contact with its contrary” (Bataille 1998 in Richardson 1998: 47).
There are two instances where Bataille’s engagements with the question of the
sacred converge with photography. His famous/infamous reflections on the photo-
graphs of the prolonged execution of Fou-Tchou Li by Leng-Tch’e (death by multiple
cutting) express Bataille’s near unraveling as his reactions took him beyond moral-
ity. Its violence brought about, he writes, “an infinite capacity for reversal” (Bataille
1989: 206). He speaks of a sense of ecstasy, a stepping out and away from himself and
his normal expectations and in the ecstatic face, as Bataille saw it, of the victim. What
overwhelmed him finally, and what, he writes, “delivered me from the anguish”, was
“the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposites, extreme hor-
ror”—he had experienced the true lineaments of the sacred (Bataille 1989: 207) (the
photographs are reproduced in Les Larmes d’Eros/The Tears of Eros). To embrace
the sacred in its fullness it represented, he believed, an essential and energising com-
munication with this otherness where opposites such as, sexual and religious ecstasy,
the impure and the pure, the accursed and the sacred, violence and spirituality co-min-
gled, were part of each other, where the truth and the force of life was located. Bataille
was struck by how the Latin adjective, sacer can mean both “holy” and “soiled” (see
Hart 2004: 41).
The denial of the role of violence in the sacred was also characteristic of what
Bataille opposed, above all the denial of sacrificial violence. As much as life springs
back out of decomposition, where meat is eaten, life depends on the sacrifice of ani-
mals. In the entry under “abattoir”, in his Critical Dictionary, Bataille used Eli Lotar’s
1929 photographs of the abattoir at La Villette in Paris (now buried beneath a sci-
ence park). As Patrick Keiller has noted, the photographs were used to “unmask” the
repressed meanings of the abattoir, now invariably hidden away on the edges of cities.
Bataille saw the abattoir as, to quote Patrick Keiller,
the modern counterpart of sacrificial temples in which animals were killed for
both religious and alimentary purposes.
(Keiller 1982, in Danino and Mazière 2003: 79)
For Bataille the revelation of the sacred in the contemporary world was inevitably
a transgressive act, a shocking disturbance of the reigning cultural order. He writes,
“Whatever is the subject of a prohibition is basically sacred. The taboo gives a nega-
tive definition of the sacred object and inspires us with awe on the religious plane”
(Bataille 1998 in Richardson 1998: 58).
As to whether Bataille’s vision represents the route towards the establishing of new
values, the Nietzschean fashion, the overthrow of all values, or the path of nihilist
egomania, remains moot. The question here is how such a project might be realised in
photographic practices, which, in Bataille’s words, “bestow sight” on whatever within
the object, has the power to excite desire or horror (Bataille in Richardson 1998: 49).
One unsettling contemporary instance is the work of the Spanish photographer/artist
David Nebreda.
In the series, Autorretratos/Self Portraits (2002), Nebreda presents the self in diverse
performances. The performances present his injured and abused body accompanied by
objects, substances, texts and inscriptions assembled into the appearance of allegorical
tableaux that make insistent if obscure references to some kind of theology. Degrada-
tion is shown as a form of sacralisation accomplished by the discovery of those points
where the transgressive and the sacred converge, and through the heretical importa-
tion of religious motifs and themes from the Catholic tradition. The ruling logic of
the work is that of transubstantiation—the self transfigures into multiply performed
emanations, existing across time, doubled in mirrors and re-invented in photographs.
Gross and abject materials transmute alchemically into exalted substances. The soiled
becomes the holy, becomes the soiled. The method of the work itself mutates continu-
ously between the categories of the document and the performance, between collage
and in-frame text, inscriptions and allegory. Above all it is on the body of the artist
that the work violently writes itself. Nebreda is shown bleeding, scarred and slashed,
injured by pricking, lancing, laceration, burning. He is covered in ashes, smeared with
his own blood and spit, or his face is buried in his own excrement. He appears in a
state of extreme emaciation. All of this is self-inflicted, deliberate actions documented
by his camera, performances that seem like moments in the construction of some
desperate allegory, or the externalisation of an inner condition, a personal cosmology.
There are clear references to religion. Nebreda resembles an abused, anorexic Christ.
There are allusions to redemption, to angels, the book of life and the book of Genesis,
and to penitence (ashes). There are modulations in the work between art historical and
religious frequencies. Nebreda appears as a famished painter in one image. In another
Caravaggio is cited. Religion and art are shown as convergent. An instance of this is
how the compositional pyramid of classical painting translates into the divine triangu-
lation of the Holy Trinity. Another is the appearance of the artist as a martyr. In many
images Nebreda’s features are transported in pain or visionary excess. In this condi-
tion they call to mind the figure of the agonised Christian martyr pictured in the art of
the Counter Reformation, such as in José (Jusepe) de Ribera’s painting, The Martyr-
dom of the Saint Philip (1639) held in the Museo del Prado. Hegel regarded the evolv-
ing cult of the “artist as genius” as an attempt to equate the modern (Romantic) artist
who sacrifices himself for art and its visions with the religious martyr, thus retaining
for art a valorising link with the sacred (Besançon 2000: 224). Clearly Nebreda has
sacrificed normal life for that of his art—like a hermit he lived with almost no social
contact for years. He has chosen a régime of pain and self-denial comparable to that of
religious martyrs and anchorites. For them withdrawal or martyrdom were the means
of uniting with the sacred, a radical renouncement of the world, a painful refining
of the body’s material substance into spiritual form. One image makes direct refer-
ence to photography. Nebreda places his hand in a flame burning within the drawn
outline of a pyramid. The other holds a cable release button. The hand is held in the
flame, the title informs us, for the length of time required for the exposure to be made.
If Nebreda is proclaiming here an allegiance to esoteric thought, his gesture would
signify a belief in the notion of the pyramid as a generator of transformative energy.
One, disputed, etymology of the original Greek word for pyramid is “fire in the cen-
tre”. The fire refines what it destroys. It converts the immobile weight of physical
entities into light and into substances that rise free of the earth. Photography, fire, the
pyramid—and pain—all are agencies of transformation in this kind of alchemical cos-
mology. One is tempted to suggest that Nebreda sacrifices himself so as to produce a
transformative aesthetic fulfillment out of ascetic rigour. He gives all of himself to the
work, including his flesh, his blood and his excrement. However, when interviewed,
an evasive Nebreda insists he is uncomfortable with such a notion, as he is with the
idea that his art is linked with sacrifice or the sacred, though he doesn’t exactly deny
either (Nebreda 2002: 105–7). If we take him at his word the work might be seen as
placed between or, rather, among these various goals and practices, just as it wavers
between types of representation. Though dense with symbolism, intertextual allusion,
inscriptions and gestures, the images should be viewed less as visual metaphors, more
as documentations of the properties of things and substances that are both themselves
and in a condition of transformation: the transformation of the life process towards
death; the religious process towards the sacred, the aesthetic process towards form,
the material into signification. So blood is life, which so willingly bleeds away. Blood
is paint, a colouring to make art with. Blood, as well as shit and ashes, becomes the
fluid of writing, the ink of the body.
Nebreda makes reference to anointing. In the Catholic tradition sacramental anoint-
ment rituals apply blessed oils on the body to mark the sanctified transformation of a
person: the transition into religious identity at Baptism; into the professed believer at
Confirmation; from ordinary into extraordinary life in priestly Ordination; and from
life to death to afterlife in the sacrament once known as Extreme Unction. In the Autor-
retratos self-anointing (“como unición”) is carried out with spit and blood, bodily
substances frequently deemed abject. Overall the work is a series of messages from
the body by means of its materials. The body becomes a writing surface on which the
pen/knife inscribes its marks. The body provides the materials for writing with. The
material body speaks, and thereby transcends its origins by becoming signifying matter.
The starved physique, the damaged and degraded condition, might imply the proc-
lamation of some nihilistic sublime. There are references to sterility and to the failure
of the work itself (a theme unsympathetic to Bataille’s kind of transgression). The text
accompanying the burned hand image mentioned above, states that the 2-second expo-
sure time, or perhaps photography itself, is “not sufficient”, suggesting the work has
failed, that the esoteric belief is groundless. There is, indeed, a theme of entropy and
failure in the Autorretratos. And yet there is a sort of vigour present too. It is there in
the desire to make this art, and in the energy needed to survive its exacting procedures.
In one of the last images in the series, Puta de la Regeneración, the work curses the idea
of revitalisation or renewal and yet seems to accept the determination of life to return.
If Nebreda’s work represents an engagement with the sacred by means of extreme
visibility, there are bodies of work that utilise the medium to indicate the impossibility
of its representation; work by artists free of traditional religious beliefs yet haunted
by a notion of the sacred, which remains unnamable and unseen. Such work might
be seen to enter a space comparable to Blanchot’s “space of literature”, which Kevin
Hart describes as
the place, or better, nonplace where discontinuity reigns and everything we

encounter is strange . . . approaching this space . . . we are led to figure being
human by way of the possible as well as the impossible.
(Hart 2004: 8)
In work belonging to this second category the “space of literature” has its equiva-
lent in a “space of the photographic” where photography estranges itself from itself
through the exploration of the themes of an imagery suggested through absence,
dematerialisation, de-realisation, effacement and other modes of non-representation.
The photographic work contains what cannot be photographed, or, to borrow Blan-
chot’s terminology, a revelation that encompasses the limits of revealability (Hart
2004: 214). Of course there is no guarantee that anything more than nothingness
is indicated beyond representation. James Elkins discovers photography’s most pro-
found revelation to lie in the way it “confirms pitilessly the world’s deadness . . . its
inherent resistance to whatever we may hope or want” by confronting us ultimately
with the immense materiality of the world—rock, chemicals, fluids, dust and light—
and of photography itself (Elkins 2011: 14).
Otherwise, it is a set of practices that for the most part engage with the sacred or,
more precisely, the parasacred, in the sense used, as we saw above, by Victor E. Taylor
to mean a “limit-concept” (Taylor 2000: 52). The engagement with these themes and
conditions risks the complete negation of photography’s representational viability.
Yet, in the same instance these imageries hold out the possibility that things will open
up onto new and transformed perceptions and aesthetic languages, reflecting Lyotard’s
notion of a postmodern sublime, which Hans Bertens describes as an art of
a perpetual negation . . . Lyotard’s postmodern aesthetic is based on a never-end-

ing critique of representation that should contribute to the preservation of hetero-
geneity, of optimal dissensus. The sublime does not lead towards a resolution; the
confrontation with the unrepresentable leads to radical openness.
(Bertens 1995: 133)
Such denials of visibility normally seek to displace the viewer’s involvement from
the representation and onto the aesthetic process itself. In art motivated by spiritual
ends or absorbed by limits and absolutes, the viewer’s attention is re-focused onto
the absence of the absent prototype (Latour 2010: 92). The denial or rejection of the
world of everyday perception aims to suggest the possibility of either other modes of
experience and cognition, or other forms of belief. It is a type of aesthetic interruption
that Louis Marin calls, opacité (Marin in Latour 2010: 92). Common in the Christian
art of the past, it is also present in secular and revolutionary Modernism and Sur-
realism and in contemporary work taken up with the sacred. Rut Blees Luxemburg’s
Liebeslied (Lovesong) (2000) depicts an uncanny (unheimlich) urban nightworld of
stages bereft of performers, a series of encounters with spaces that are the residual
appearances of passed moments. Close to abstraction the images provoke reverie and
untethered readings (in Luxemberg 2001). They uncover a city where, more than
merely changing the appearance of things, the night has transfigured them. The Zone’s
of both Atget and Tarkovsky are called to mind. Like them, Luxemburg’s locations are
as much metaphysical as spatial. They are non-descript scraplands or unremarkable
sites and yet, like allegories, they intimate something beyond themselves. More than
empty, they exude abandonment. It’s not that nothing is happening in them rather it is
that something has just happened, that somebody has just been there. Their darkness
is filled with unaccountable luminosities as if darkness was itself the source of light,
the accent lighting for those lost appearances. The city has become a condition—a
haunted state of Being, sometimes degraded, and yet where a transforming beauty
might be encountered in the most marginal, profane and degraded of corners, the
beauty which indicates the faint presence of the sacred. The stream-of-consciousness
text accompanying Libeslied by Alexander García Düttmann wonders if all photo-
graphs are images of God or the act of a photographer-god, creator of the world by
means of the photographs. Luxemburg’s scenes have the quality being seen but not by
either the viewer nor the photographer.
Figure 5.4 Rut Blees Luxemburg. Liebeslied, 1997.

Source: Rut Blees Luxemburg © 1997 (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the
photographer).
Clearly the most immediate subject is that of the night itself. Night is the daily
encounter with otherness, with the outside. It is the image of death. It is blindness
and secrecy and transgression. The night is metamorphosis. Things at night take on a
different being, one independent of function or utility. If we are to treat Luxemburg’s
images as more than formalism, we might wonder who is wandering these streets.
Tradition would assume it was some unsettling outsider. For centuries “nightwalking”
was illegal in England and “nightwalkers” regarded as potential evil-doers or devi-
ants, or insane. “Who walks alone in the streets at night?” asks Matthew Beaumont
in his study of nocturnal London,
The sad, the mad, the bad. The lost, the lonely. The hypomanic, the catatonic. The
sleepless, the homeless. All the city’s exiles.
(Beaumont 2015: 3)
If this fictional nightwalker is such an exile, we might place these images in a Roman-
tic tradition as picturings of a spiritual homelessness, of the search for a lost source
and centre of meaning that has become denied to the dislocated stranger? (Lukács
1971: 1). The abject gives out towards the transcendent and, as in Brassaï’s Paris
night, much older worlds and significations move among the shadows. The night dis-
places things, disassociates perception, undermines time. An erased poem, or undeco-
deable message appears on the walls of a desolate walkway as though inscribed from
the other side of things. The same grimy walls are stained red and gold, streaming the
chromatic symbolism of the middle ages: red for love, gold for divinity—transcendent,
ecstatic states promised in a place of dereliction—as if “something signified (is) com-
ing out of the unmarked space of the world” (Luhman 2013: 12).
Luxemburg’s images are silent interrogations. Like all photographs they offer them-
selves as evidence for something that took place. We think perhaps of Walter Benja-
min’s comments on Atget here (see Benjamin 1973c: ii, 228).
Luxemburg’s places also seem traumatised by something. García Düttmann thinks
of suicide. They are unable to speak but demanding, if not an explanation, the invo-
cation of meaning. In Figure 5.5 are these the footprints of a suicide or of a killer, or
some other kind of visitation? One set appears to be returning. Is this a crime scene, a
place that has become its own memory, a proleptic sacred site? Is this how the world
looks to the dead? We are at the edge, of the river, of some other world. The darkness
transmutes into a golden brilliance—the luxury of desire, the numinous, a momentary
exultancy? And yet it remains attended by shadow. The image is bi-polar. Visibility
teeters on the edge of blindness. It touches the limit of what is representable at the
places where the city ends. And finally, as much as the work visualises an apprehension
of what we might call the sacred, it also suggests its irrevocable loss. “The world”,
Edward Relp writes, “is full of the skeletons of dead places” (Relph 1976: 32).
One variation of these approaches is erasure. It can involve the near obliteration
of the image or the text, its endless repetition or the serial presentation of multiple
variations of the same subject resulting in the disappearance of precise meaning. The
work of Idris Khan does both. Most of it has some relationship to the sacred in its
concerns with the work of artists, thinkers, composers and musicians of almost trans-
cendent significance to Khan. Some of his pieces have a more direct relationship to
religion itself in their figuring of Islamic themes and forms. There are parallels here
with religious practices less concerned with overcoming the absence of the divine and
Figure 5.5 Rut Blees Luxemburg. Nach Innen/In Deeper, 1999.

Source: Rut Blees Luxemburg © 1999 (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the
photographer).
achieving the perfect union with it, than with the presence or actuality of worship,
with ritual, text and representation. In his 2004 piece, Every Page from the Holy
Qu’aran in which all the pages from the Qu’aran are condensed into a single image,
Khan’s use of layered serialism forces our attention onto the surface of the image—an
aesthetic effect. The hundreds of repetitions demanded by the procedure of copying
the text page by page connotes the iteration of prayers and calls in Islamic ritual—a
religious effect, one that functions to invoke the possibility of the divine, and recharge
the intensity of faith. The resulting image, like the most compacted of stellar objects,
is at once dark, dense and impenetrable at its core, and yet it emanates an immaterial,
auratic radiance around it. The image is more or less unreadable. The photography
does not see through the text to its proclaimed divine origins within or beyond it,
somewhere prior to signification inside the profound shadow where the pages divide.
It never could, and for some it would be blasphemous to attempt to do so. Though a
powerful visual and physical presence, Khan’s image de-iconocises itself and re-directs
our attention, conceptually speaking, back towards the Qu’aranic text. It is at least
comparable to concrete poetry, which moves between two modes. It iconocises the
readable, and makes the textual iconic. Khan’s concrete poem visually celebrates what
cannot be visualised, and is pleasured by the ghostly, ineffable traces of the sacred
Islamic script.
In its revelation of “unreadability” it resembles too, the practice of “apophatic” or
“negative theology” that involves the rubbing way of the “possible attributes of God,
until nothing remains but an unknowable, negative term” (see Elkins 2004: 107, 109).
God remains as the only entity that remains unnamable, whose existence is verified
because of that unnamability.
Nelson Goodman’s two kinds of art forms, the “autographic” and the “allographic”,
resolve in this work (Goodman 1968: 112–122). It is “autographic”, in that it is con-
cerned with the unchangeable work of an author, complete and authentic, as with
literature, the visual and the plastic arts. The Qu’aran is “autographic” in that it is
believed to be the word of God, directly received by the prophet and cannot be altered.
Khan’s transformations of the book into an image does not interfere in the text, indeed
it confirms that for the believer its truth lies beyond any human reading of it.
His image is also “allographic”, art that exists as a set of instructions, a theatrical
text, an architectural plan, musical notations, and can be interpreted, applied or per-
formed by many people. In reality, the Qu’aran is interpreted in different ways and by
virtue of its reflexivity Khan’s artwork is a form of visualised interpretation if not of
the Qu’aran as such, then as a set of reflections on representation and meaning car-
ried out in its presence and in relation to it. Indeed Khan’s image resembles a musical
score, an artifact that appears frequently in Khan’s work. The Qu’aran is, after all,
performed: recited, chanted, called—effectively it is sung.
We have encountered the idea of strangeness a number of times in these reflections.
Plainly strangeness haunts the experience as well as the discussion of the sacred and its
representations. A peculiar kind of strangeness inhabits the work of the German art-
ist, Thomas Demand. Typically it depicts modern architectural spaces, often interiors.
Many are the spaces of management and administration: office, meeting room, confer-
ence podium, photocopy room, archive, etc. An even light illuminates everything with
unnatural brilliance, but casts no shadows, as if the three-dimensional forms have
neither volume nor substance. The spaces seem airless, like those of Virtual Reality.
There is no sense of an outside, or of any depth, and there are no people present. These
are immaculate constructions: antiseptic, uninhabited and therefore unblemished by
signs of human usage. There is no damage, no dirt, no stains, no scuffings or scratches.
In a few instances we see some indication of a presence, of an event: paper strewn
around an empty office, archive boxes whose neat serialism has been disturbed, a
slightly ruffled bath mat. These might have been the effects of some absent inhabitant
had one ever existed. Instead, in spaces without causation and with neither time, nor
history nor change, such apparent perturbations will have been there at the unknow-
able beginning.
Demand creates these spaces out of volumetric forms built from paper and thin
cardboard to resemble architectural structures, furniture and so forth. He then pho-
tographs them with great care. The deathless world he creates, or rather its models,
could in fact be destroyed in a puff of wind. It is the camera that bestows on it the
appearance of immortality as though Demand has discovered a photography of Pla-
tonic Forms or of the Thing in Itself, a camera whose dials are set permanently on the
metaphysical mode. His depictions are not so much of spaces as of ideas or conditions.
They seem to convey the way the world might appear if there was nobody to see it,
independent of all human presence, that is, as a-human.
Demand’s work is often discussed as a series of statements about the estranging,
dehumanising abstractions of a bureaucratised modernity—as metaphors of Adorno’s
“totally administered society” (Durand in Demand 2000: 83). From this perspective
we can regard Demand’s work as a critique of modernity’s pursuit of the perfection of
the sacred and its installation into the structures and spaces of its world from which,
inevitably, mortal bodies and unpredictable subjects are expelled, the ideal but lifeless
paradise of a bureaucracy. There are, though, themes in his work closer to the con-
cerns of this discussion. In his text for Demand’s exhibition at the Fondation Cartier
pour l’art contemporain in 2000, Francesco Bonami describes the universe Demand
presents us with as sealed-off and free of language: “no language enters (or) leaves”,
he writes (Bonami in Demand 2000: 25). This is a description of the alterity of the
sacred, the self-sufficiency of the divine. Bonami argues that, by portraying a universe
of spaces that precede or exceeds language, Demand understood himself to be “a
religious photographer, one who was trying to build icons for a time devoid of faith”
(Bonami in Demand 2000:29). The complexity of his work lies in the co-presence of
both para-theological and the social themes embodied in the same forms. Above all,
Demand’s aesthetic practice demonstrates again how art, while free of overt theology,
so often ventures onto theology’s terrain in order to reflect on the impersonal sources
and limits of meaning or form and above all to confront the spectator with what is
outside of experience, with that which thwarts recognition and demands reflection
and thereby frees the imagination and the intellect from the over familiar or insuf-
ficient world. In a chapter titled, “The New Theology of the Image”, Alain Besançon
discusses Kant’s concept of the art of “free beauty”, which Besançon links to twentieth
century abstraction. It is an art whose beauty is “unrelated to any object whose end
could be determined by concepts, objects that ‘please freely’ ” (Besançon 2000: 196).
This can surely be applied to Demand’s art. While these photographic images bear
some kind of resemblance to recognisable forms, structures and devices, and while
they induce thought and reflection, they constitute a photography that is not reducible
to any theoretical policy, a photography that has pulled free from the representation
of any world we are likely to experience. In this sense each of his images is an instance
of a metaphor that is, in Hugo Friedrich’s words, “no longer a mere figure of com-
parison” and which “now creates an identity” or “absolute” meaning, I think, the
creation of an entity, or a space or a condition of things that is its own cause (Hugo
Friedrich cited in Donoghue 2014: 100). Metaphor not only generates new additions
to the lexicon, it is also a displacer of the real and an inventor of realities or rather,
para-realities, necessary fictions that test our normal restricted assumptions concern-
ing the real. It establishes, in Habermas’s words, “a virtual relationship to reality”
(Habermas 1998b: 389–390). With noble exceptions religion so often does so only
to crush the real with oppressive metaphors which deny their metaphorical nature
and restrict speculative freedoms, acting, in Edward Said’s words, as “an agent of clo-
sure . . . in deference to the authority of the more-than-human, the super- natural, the
other-worldly” (Said 1983: 292). Nevertheless religion and art are shown once again
to be at work in contiguous cultural spaces, even if committed to different outcomes.
It is easy to mistype the word sacred and signify fear. This should be no surprise
given that the sacred’s promise of a deeper experience of Being carries the risk of the
complete loss of self, that is, death of some kind. Photography is hardly a stranger to
death. Yet, most photographs of death are depictions of death, they make reference
to it. Few bring death into themselves. According to Eduardo Cadava this is to deny
something in photography’s essential effects. Expatiating on a theme of Walter Benja-
min’s, Cadava maintains that, not only does the photograph bring “death to the photo-
graphed” in that what is photographed “withdraws from the photographic image” and
deepens the mortal essence of what it pictures. The photograph is itself a “grave for
the living dead”. The photograph buries what the camera has photographed, that is,
it buries itself in itself, that “writes, that harbours, its own death” (Cadava 1997: 10).
Maeve Berry’s series, Incandescence (2008), documents the stages of a human
body’s cremation with an unveiled realism unrelieved by its almost graceful visual
lyricism. It concludes as the material body disappears and dematerialises into fire and
radiance, marking at once the loss of the visible object, the sacrifice of representation
and at the same time the transformation of matter into light, the essential energy and
material force of photography itself. Rather than the death of the photograph, the vis-
ible mutates into its purest form, as it is before and after representation. Nothing and
everything is lost in this moment of transubstantiation. Incandescence concludes with
an image of the fact of death as disintegration and disappearance, yet which at the
same time might be seen as a picturing of refulgent resurrection.
Some of the most haunting photographs are haunted photographs. This is not to
speak of spirit pictures and the like, but of photographic representations in which
the essential alchemies of the medium—the impossible transmutation of matter into
presence and the revealing of the mortality of the living while giving to the dead an
afterlife—become the photograph’s subjects and not its means. I want to discuss two
examples of work that operate at this level. Both are concerned with death and pres-
ence. Both engage with the theme of incarnation.
Figure 5.6 Maeve Berry. Incandescence, 2008.

Source: Maeve Berry © 2008 (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
Employing some new processes, the media archaeologist, Michael Shanks, scanned
a number of badly damaged mid-nineteenth century Daguerreotypes in which the rep-
resentations had become reclaimed by their material base. Overwhelmed by cracks,
scratches, smears, discolourations and chemical disaggregation the likenesses of por-
trayed subjects had long vanished. However, like some water diviner, Shanks’ was
able to bring faces up from deep within the murk emerging to just under the surface
of the present as if drawn up from death itself, as though Being had re-emerged from
Nothingness.
These are unsettling and sad images. The spectral presences of conscious subjects
seem to rise transcendentally from the material order in the tragic understanding that
they must remain forever imprisoned within it, as they are inseparable from it. While
Shank’s scannings reflect on the co-presence of the material and non-material in pho-
tography, on that threshold where the image is born and dies, they cause us, at the
same time, to look into the face of what is no more or less than the terms of our own
being, trapped like these faces, these others that return our look, in mortal embodi-
ment. The effect of Shanks’ Ghosts in the Mirror is to bring us to that abyss of which
Blanchot speaks, “where truth can find no traction” (Blanchot quoted in Hart 2004:
65). It reveals how we, in Kevin Hart’s words, are linked, “to the neutral Outside, the
space of impossibility”, and exist in what Lévinas called the “interval . . . forever an
Figure 5.7 Michael Shanks. From Ghosts in the Mirror, 2013.

Source: Michael Shanks © 2013 (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
interval”, the space between the knowledge and consequent possession of our own
death and the impossibility that death represents for us (Hart 2004: 65–67). It takes
us to the threshold, “the moving point between, the unsettled/limit” (Shapcott). What
is left here of the sacred is, as we saw above, the “murmuring of the outside” (Hart
2004: 227) and the Sartrean anguish in which we know ourselves.
“It is a corpse that speaks,” writes Friedrich Kittler in his reflections on playing a
wax cylinder recording from 1897 (Kittler 1999: 83). Ghosts they may not be, any
more than the figures in Shanks’ Daguerreotypes, but media technology has filled the
world with the disembodied presences generated by its devices. While, as Friedrich
Kittler states, “the wheel of media technology cannot be turned back to retrieve the
soul” there were many who insisted that these mechanisms had revealed what was
always there, spirits that were now given access to the perceivable world, a universe
of spectral beings (Kittler 1999: 83). As Derrida has said, “every culture has its phan-
toms and the spectrality that is conditioned by its technology” (Derrida 2010: 39).
Joanna Kane‘s The Somnambulists Photographic Portraits from before Photogra-
phy consists of about 50 photographs of life and death casts made for the Edinburgh
Phrenological Society in the nineteenth century. The casts were undertaken less as
records of individuals and more as exemplars of character and personality types which
phrenology understood to be expressed in the features and cranial structures of indi-
viduals. Many were alive when the casts were made and the images now look like the
sitters were rehearsing their own deaths.
As with much work that shares its ground with the sacred, Joanna Kane’s images
are representations of representations, images of facial casts made between one and
two centuries ago, some before the age of Fox-Talbot and Daguerre. Now they have
changed into photographs, the subjects summoned to re-appear in another present,
the image mode transformed. As they emerge from the darkness these presences seem
to be approaching, entering our presence. They seem curiously modern, of our time.
There are no elements such as clothing that permit us to return them safely back to
their moment so as to prevent them from contaminating ours. I think of Walter Schels’
faces of the recently deceased. And yet these faces indicate distant interiorities, selves
unavailable to us. We can neither capture a gaze nor exchange a look. The eyes refuse
to open. There is no “mutuality of looking”. And while these presences appear to drift
close to us, they remain absolutely remote and unknowable, in the deepest solitude,
“behind the world” (Blanchot 1981b: 82). As Blanchot also observes, such images
recreate their object and return it containing its own disappearance, “the return of
what does not come back, the strange heart of the distance as the life and unique heart
of the thing”(Blanchot 1981b: 81).
Joanna Kane’s subjects float outside of time, silent and self contained. As images,
not bodies, they were always free from mortal decay. One thinks again of Christ’s
incarnation, of his human form that was ultimately immortal, as, according to Saint
Paul, it was in the representation of his human embodiment, the human appearance
of his divinity—the perfect image. The eerie perfection of these faces, their profound
strangeness, brings to mind another of Blanchot’s propositions, that the perfect image
is the corpse that is its own image. No longer of this world it remains present as an
obscure possibility, a shadow which is constantly present behind the living form,
far from separating itself from that form, completely transforms itself into a
shadow.
(Blanchot 1981b: 83)
Figure 5.8 Joanna Kane. “Unknown Woman, Cautious Type”. From The Somnambulists Pho-
tographic Portraits from before Photography, 2008.
Source: Joanna Kane © 2008 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
“Art”, writes Tvetan Todorov, “ is not merely a play on nothing, or on itself; it

also interprets the world, or rather incites us to engage in its interpretation” (Todorov
1987:14). I will conclude this chapter with some reflections on issues concerning doc-
umentary photographers who, while less absorbed by aesthetic or ontological ques-
tions, are nevertheless equally taken up with the question of the sacred—the sacred
understood as located in or as constituting the social. There is no radical divergence
here from what has been discussed. Blanchot’s metaphysics is ultimately a materialist
questioning of the conditions of socially located being; Lévinas makes it clear that, as
Edith Wyschograd writes, “ontological significations cannot be disengaged from their
empirical conditions, the relation with the Other may call the world into question but
is not produced outside the world” (Wyschogrod in: Sherwood and Hart 2005: 54).
The photography that communicates extremes of human conflict and suffering
where the social itself is under assault, is implicated in what is as equally sacred as
it is sociological in that it reflects Émile Durkheim’s premise that the sacred is the
social, that religion is the “apotheosis of society”. Durkheim writes, “[I]t is the unity
and diversity of social life which make the simultaneous unity and diversity of sacred
beings and things” (Durkheim 1915: 413). The ‘god’ that Social documentary follows
is that of Stephen Dedalus in the Nestor section of Ulysses: the god that is the, “shout
in the street”, the, “Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!” Joyce (1922) 1964: 42). It may present
encounters with the precise and particular actualities of the social world but, by the
very act of representation, of intensifying some event, as well as leaving the viewer
with the political or ethical responsibility of their response, it raises the transcendent
question of the meaning of human existence. When disclosing human suffering or
deprivation a photograph requests from the viewer an act of reconnection with the
lives of others, and a meditation on the morality of human actions. This is a religious
response in as far as the etymology of the term religion encloses meanings cognate
with re-connection (relegare) and re-reading or reflection (relegere) (Oxford English
Dictionary). Gilles Peress’s devastating book on the Rwanda genocide, The Silence, is
divided into a trinity of theologically titled sections: “Sin”, “Purgatory” and “Judg-
ment”. The “Silence” is the silence of death, of trauma and the silence of photography.
It is also the silence of the language of the world, rendered unspeakable by the atroci-
ties that confront it. Thus, Peress goes to the lexicon of the sacred as though it is more
able to reach into the darkness that lies inside his images.
If the practice of social documentary photography is an immersion in the social,
in the real that extends beyond the self, it is also a communication, a communing
with the other: the other in the image and the other who will view it. Photographs
are always open, and therefore forever open to question. No baseline dot or end-
of-sentence rule, or final cut completes them—which makes them an uncertain and
inconclusive form of communication. If this is a limitation, it is one that best facilitates
that relationship at the core of Lévinas’ concept of the sacred: a relation to the Other
which does not claim to know the Other but which can become open to sympathy and
imaginative empathy while accepting the Other’s difference, autonomy, even their final
unknowability (Lévinas in Hand 1989: 164; see also Peters 1999: 21). Other thinkers
whose notion of the social and the community at least approaches the quality of the
sacred equally valorise the role of sympathy. Martha Nussbaum contends that sympa-
thy is integral to mutual understanding and indispensable for social cohesion; a type
of epistemology based in imaginative literature, the social novel above all (Nussbaum
1995). There are strong echoes here of Raymond Williams’ ideal of the “Knowable
Community” also dependent on the imaginative empathy he believes can be brought
about by immersion in literature and drama and by democratic communications (Wil-
liams 1973b). A further association can be made too with Niklas Luhman’s submis-
sion that theory needs to
[T]o replace the idea of humanity with that of communication, thus replacing the
traditional theory of religion centered on anthropology with a theory of religion
centered on society.
(Luhman 2013: 6)
We can apply such sympathetic functions and effects to social photography. Being
moved by a photograph of the Other’s predicament, of their distress, forms a neces-
sary component of a fuller comprehension of it. The viewer who is ‘moved to tears’
by what he or she sees, whose vision seems obscured, sees more completely. “Tears”,
writes Derrida, “and not sight is the essence of the eye” (Derrida 1993: 126). The eye
sees outwards, but the blurred visions of the weeping organ clarify sight with insight,
a seeing that touches, that has been touched and which seeks the meaning of what has
moved it. Derrida describes this as “imploration rather than vision in sight, to address
prayer, love, joy, sadness rather than a look or gaze”. He adds,
The revelatory or apocalyptic blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes,
would be the gaze veiled by tears . . . It implores: first of all in order to know from
where these tears stream down and from whose eyes they come to well up.
(Derrida 1993: 126–127)
Marcuse saw the function of art as an exercise in disappointment. Through the

production of aesthetic intensity and accomplishment, the insufficiency of the world is
disclosed. In doing so art, he argued, declares the necessity of transforming the world.
In Marcuse’s materialist transcendentalism art appropriates the task once undertaken
by the religious image and attendant practices (Marcuse 1979: 8–10). The social docu-
mentary photographer achieves something comparable, uncovering, “a world unfit
for habitation” (Linfield 2010: 38). To show the devastation of the social: the vio-
lence, the hatred, the deprivation, the exclusion, is to proclaim the need to re-connect
(re-ligere) the broken pieces, to regrow the ligaments of sympathy and understanding
and thereby rebuild the social, that is, to restore the sacred to the world. After all, to
agree with Julia Kristeva, human life is sacred as it brings meaning into the world (Clé-
ment and Kristeva 2001: 14; Pollock and Sauron 2007: 9–16).
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6 anredoM acitpO or Aztec Cameras
Cultural Hybridity and Latin
American Photography*
(1)
Somebody once said, “You can’t talk your way out of language”. In this chapter,
using the word “language” in a somewhat extended way, the work I’ll be examining
by mostly contemporary Latin American photographers, appears to do just that. Or
rather, such work uses one kind of visual representation to talk its way out of another
and in this represents the attempt by those trapped, estranged or restrained in the
monoglot and monologue of dominant voices and conventions originating in colonial
or post-colonial formations to speak through, around and beyond them.
The chapter is focused on the specific characteristics of a visual medium studied in
a post-colonial context. If it produces any insights into the study of the actualities of
post-colonial cultural practice it does so by means of some reflective descriptions of
the historical, political, cultural and intellectual environment in which Latin Ameri-
can art photographers work. I will be looking at photography that has engaged itself
in what might be called the politics of the visible, to evoke Rancière; a photography
that, in effect, has committed itself to the questions of cultural identity and cultural
hybridity. The discussions will be developed in relation to reflections on the particu-
lar characteristics of Latin American photographic and visual culture. For the most
part the focus will be on the 1990s when there appeared to be something of a shift
in radical visions from the social or political art of utopian leftism of the preceding
decades. While the shift was most likely the consequence of the brutalisation or defeat
of revolutionary hopes during the periods of the “dirty wars”, dictatorship and reac-
tion, it was also the expression of a desire to correct the left’s tendency to invoke a
somewhat mythical Latin American political subject, usually the idea of the working
class or a unified peasantry, at the expense of underestimating the profound variety
and complexity of Latin American selfhoods. In Brazil, for example, a number of
photographers had produced serious work on the country’s indigenous and African-
Brazilian cultures and religions. From the 90s, as Anna Carboncini points out, there
was a notable increase in this kind of work and an extension of its field into more
extensive forms of “popular religiosity” (Carboncini 2001 in Edwards 2001: 15–19).
Driving much of this work was a desire to engage with the many interiors of national
cultures, identities and temporalities of the region, and to evolve a revelatory pho-
tographic language able to see, think and celebrate them. Like the hugely successful
1998 film, Central Station /Central do Brasil, it held that Brazil, and by extension,
Latin America, would never be renewed or reformed unless it was better understood
and understood from within. Walter Salles, the film’s director, had worked with pho-
tographers immersed in the popular religions of Brazil’s North East. To achieve this it
would be necessary to make a journey into the country’s popular imaginaries as well
as documenting its actualities. Consequently the preceding political art of the social
is followed by a social art of the cultural and an indirect politics of visual representa-
tion. The photography that accompanies this change is more oblique and, at times
ironic. It is a more self-conscious and dispersed kind of practice, secure in its open
combination of documentary, formalist and fictional or constructed representational
modes, and in certain cases, the product of a conscious synthesis of the interiorities of
the photographer and the cultural worlds being depicted. Further shaping influences
and forces in visual culture in the 1980s and 90s were postmodern theory, the concept
of cultural hybridity and the early effects of digitalisation. Haunting the minds of
many was another consequence of the political violence and also linked to the issue
of visibility, that is, the tortured remembrance of the Desaparecidos/the Disappeared,
the many thousands made to vanish by the death squads and security forces from the
1960s to the 1980s. The task of engaging photographically with their absence, with
the question of memory and commemoration has represented one of the most chal-
lenging questions in Latin American photography and art taking the medium to the
limits of it capabilities.
(2)
The mestizo, the impure, the capacity to absorb and
encompass contraries is one of the characteristics
which mark the Hispano American the most.
(Arturo Uslar Pietri in Larrain 2000: 149)
The appearance of photography in Latin America has its fictional account in Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s mythical-materialist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the his-
tory of a distant and obscure Colombian town, Macondo. Like the spectre of moder-
nity, the gypsy Melquíades returns to Macondo after a long absence travelling the
world. He’d even died on his journey but, unable to bear the solitude, had repudiated
death and returned to life excommunicated by his tribe and stripped of his supernatu-
ral powers. But in his possession he carried rational magic—he’d brought with him
the Daguerreotype:
José Arcadio Buendía had never heard of that invention. But when he saw himself
and his whole family fastened on to a sheet of iridescent metal for an eternity, he
was mute with stupefaction. That was the date of the oxidized Daguerreotype in
which José Arcadio Buendía appeared with his bristly and greying hair, his card-
board collar attached to his shirt by a copper button, and an expression of startled
solemnity, whom Ursula described, dying with laughter, as a “frightened general”.
José Arcadio Buendía was, in fact, frightened on that clear December morning
when the Daguerreotype was made, for he was thinking that people were slowly
wearing away while his image would endure on a metallic plaque.
(Garcia Marquez 1967; 1995: 53)
Fuelled by a mental compound of positivism and mysticism, José Arcadio Buendía

resolved to prove once and for all the existence or non-existence of God by means of
photography. This was to be achieved by making superimposed images taken in differ-
ent parts of the house in the expectation that deities dispose themselves in sublunary
anredoM acitpO or Aztec Cameras 123
space. To catch God there, though, he would have had to photograph space from
every possible angle and from every point on earth—a project requiring, I suppose,
eternity.
Melquíades had something else with him when he reappeared in Macondo. Just
prior to his return the people had lost their ability to sleep and were disappearing into
a profound forgetfulness from where they could recognise nothing, neither objects
nor faces. When he’d begun to realise that memory was slipping from the town, José
Arcadio Buendía hung labels on things with instructions for their use:
“This is a cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk,
and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and
milk”.
Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily cap-
tured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values
of the written letters.
(Marquez 1967; 1995: 51)
A drug supplied by Melquíades cures the collective amnesia. But the coincidence
of the return of memory—and therefore of identity—and the introduction of the
Daguerreotype, urges on the reader a connection between the two. Through sil-
ver salts and oxidised mercury and a modernising gypsy’s unspecified medication,
Macondo, which is, after all, a microcosmic, imaginary Colombia, returns to itself,
starts again but now with a machine that secures its sense of the past and adds to its
capacity for mystifying it; a history machine—photography. With the help of the “fan-
tastic camera”, as Ursula Buendía calls it, Macondo remembers itself, seems to escape
from obscurity, just as it might be said that photography helped invent for the actual
Colombia a memory of imaginary nationhood in the same moment as it was brought
into historical existence.
The effect of Melquíades’ rational magic on the remote community of Macondo
reveals the town’s sense of isolation, its melancholy, its feelings of terror and fascina-
tion when faced with a modernity imported through the machines and systems of
strangers—the Daguerreotype and the US owned United Fruit Company. The passage
brings out the clumsy syncretism of beliefs and practices, uncovers the frailty of mem-
ory, the transience of identity, and the desire for being. These are among the general
themes of the novel. They also play through and around the photographic work I am
discussing. More generally, the cultural heterogeneity that characterises Macondo has
its equivalent in the general culture of photography in Latin America—the symbolic
context or the visual culture within which we need to understand these images. To this
I shall return.
One of the earliest images in modernist Latin American art photography was made
in 1931 by the great Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, titled Parábola
Optica (Figure 6.1). It shows an optician’s shop window in Mexico City from which
is suspended the giant image of a pair of bespectacled eyes. The photograph is nor-
mally reverse printed so that the words on the shop’s facade, Optica Moderna, read
backwards as, anredoM acitpO. As so often in his work the title is crucial. Here there
are two: Optica Moderna or more commonly, Parábola Optica, or sometimes, just,
Parábola. One announces a modern way of seeing, with its use of visual technology
Figure 6.1 Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Parábola Optica, 1931.

Source: Parábola Optica © 1931 (reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York
City, USA).
(optics, photography), its modernist taste for cool geometrical forms, its promotional
typography and the projectile energy connoted by the word parábola. But parábola
can also mean parable; for this is also the story of an eye, of a looking that sees from
some other place, from the reverse side of things—the seeing of some other eye, or,
depending from where you’re looking, the seeing of the eye of the Other. Additionally,
and linked to this distinctive visuality, the presence of a different spirit or mentality
is connoted, or possibly uncovered, by the reversed name of, presumably, the shop
owner, “otiripS.E/E.Spirito”.
This photograph documents an actual cultural/visual event. Perhaps more critically,
it introduces a motif or theme that would recur throughout Alvarez Bravo’s career
and is present in the imagery of many other significant contemporary Latin American
photographers. It is a modernist theme concerned with displacing habitual modes
of perception and producing forms for expressing a transforming urban experience.
But in Latin America the modernist impulse becomes combined with the effects of
cultural hybridity and the problem of how to represent a multiplicity of ways of see-
ing in which traditional visualities and epistemologies both combine and conflict with
modern, often globalised and technologically transformed ways of seeing and under-
standing. The photograph’s aesthetic and semiological operations are overdetermined
by their location in a post-colonial space. Parábola Optica/Optica Moderna is a self-
conscious, formal and metaphorical gesture made by a photographer formed in and
in relation to the art movements, institutions and markets of an extended Western—
more precisely, Parisian—world. At the same time it is a figuring of the powerful social
realities and cultural imaginaries within a country characterised by the co-existence
of pre-industrial symbolic and material cultures, extensive underdevelopment and yet
also the most radical modernity. The work is both a dwelling in and a dwelling on
Mexican modernity by the post-colonial artist who both participates in and observes
his own seeing. The hybridity of the cultural order from which the image emerges—its
trans-cultural nature—may explain the way the photograph proclaims that the vis-
ible is not the only true; that the visible is a mask concealing yet indicating what is
concealed. First, within this cultural condition where different cultural systems are co-
present, appearances are already constructed and understood in fundamentally differ-
ent ways before any act of visual representation occurs. Secondly, cultural production
in Latin America has often been a type of either measured or spontaneous resistance
to dominant modes of seeing and representation. The anthropologist, Christopher
Pinney, speaks of varieties of popular photographic practice in post-colonial situa-
tions as “vernacular modernism” in which the real surface of the photograph calls
attention to itself through techniques such as doubling, collage, over-painting and so
on. As interferences in the visual field such techniques problematise or challenge the
single unmediated truth that photography has historically so often laid claim to in
mainstream Western traditions (Pinney 2003: 202–220). In Latin America at least,
such practices, refined, elaborated and often theorised, are central to the work of
art photographers; but they retain a connection with the defiant impulses of popular
visual culture. Indeed, for all its preoccupation with the uncertainties of photographic
truth, Alvarez Bravo’s work and the contemporary work it has inspired—especially
the stylistically hybrid work often described as postmodern—continues to address
the social, if obliquely. In the struggle with their own forms and materials this work
establishes an analogical relationship to the conflicts and complexities in the social
world that has induced its production—in particular where they bear upon the con-
struction of cultural identity. We can be guided here by Andy Grundberg when he
writes, “postmodern artists are interested in photography not as a distinct means of
describing the world but as an embodiment or metonym of how the culture represents
itself” (Grundberg 1993: 232).
(3)
Latin America has been shaped by a psychic system that, in the manner of the identifica-
tion of the Latin American with Caliban . . . assumes the confrontation of a threatening
native Id with an introjected European Superego.
(Vidal 1995 in Beverley et al 1995: 285)
The anxiety of cultural identity preoccupies the work I am looking at; it forms its
subject matter and determines its form. Indeed identity is perhaps the central issue
in Latin America. The Chile-based writer, Nelly Richard, argues that “all aspects of
identity there are born from a colonising venture” (Richard 1987 in Mererwether
1987: 64). But it was a colonising venture of a particular type—one containing a
number of colonisations within it—that has resulted in Latin America being both
a part of and apart from the West (Paz 1987: 114). As a group of Euro-American
colonies and settler societies that tore themselves away from the colonising ancestor,
and which contain significant indigenous populations, Latin America, of all regions
that can be considered post-colonial, most dramatically contains both the West and
its other within itself. Jean Franco sees all identity there as marked by “others”, by
“alterity” (Franco 2002: 239). Ethnically and culturally many parts of the region are
Mestizo, Mixed or Hybrid. It is probable that some kind of negotiation with hybrid-
ity concerns the interiorities of all Latin Americans, whatever their status or ancestry.
The condition of hybridity is compounded by the experience of exile. In the view
of many of its authors, conquest, domination, patterns of displacement and migration
have made Latin America a subcontinent of exiles. One has gone so far as to suggest
that the Latin American is “a kind of European who is not the owner of his identity”,
who is, in effect, the possessor of a “non-identity” (Pérez 2000 in Larrain 2000: 186).
Exile also has had close links with the kind of artistic modernism that continues to
influence contemporary visual arts in Latin America, and so many of modernisms’
practitioners were exiles or émigrés. Edward Said notes how exiled or expatriated
artists, deprived of their familiar world develop self-conscious and sharpened percep-
tions, acquiring more than one set of eyes. Exile, he says, is “contrapuntal” (Said 1990
in Ferguson et al 1990: 366). An acute self-consciousness is imposed on the cultures
of the displaced and the colonised, as is the need to improvise with what history has
fragmented and what it has enforced and with what emerges from chance. This is the
heart of Paul Gilroy’s concept of “diasporic aesthetics” with its emphasis on sampling,
improvisation and the mixing of normally unassociated cultural forms and elements
(Gilroy 1993). In comparable fashion Susan Suleiman links montage and visual and
textual fragmentation to the condition of exile (Suleiman 2000). Exile, or rather, self-
exile is also part of an anthropologist’s working practice, the necessary dislocation
for making ethnographic judgments. Given its culturally complex and existentially
exiled condition, and given the fascination that the strange, the marginal and the other
hold for contemporary art and literature, it is unsurprising then that Latin America
produces so much art that is anthropological and so much anthropology that is art.
A Cuban, Fernando Ortiz Fernández, originated the concept of “transculturation”.
Another Cuban, Alejo Carpentier, developed a literary form capable of describing the
variegated character of the island’s culture. He called both the style and its object,
“lo real maravilloso”, usually translated as the “magically real”. The focus on the
syncretic nature of New World cultures was pioneered by the French anthropologist,
Roger Bastide, studying Afro-Brazilian religions in the 1950s (Bastide 2007). Latin
American art and literature have become renowned for their revelation of mental
universes unfamiliar to most of its publics, local or global; and any ethnographic
description of its own cultures is as likely to be a mode of self-expression, or self-
analysis, as it is to be an attempt to describe the cultural universe of the other—in
the sub-continent it so often amounts to the same thing. Renowned twentieth-century
examples would be Miguel Angel Asturias, Wilfredo Lam, Juan Rulfo. The projects of
such artists were compelled by history. They are free from the “ritual of self-othering”
of the Ethno-Surrealists so disapproved of by Hal Foster (Foster 1999: 175).
In a series produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s titled Us for Example, the
Brazilian photographer, Bauer Sá dramatises these issues (and see also work by fel-
low-Brazilian, photographer Cravo Neto) (Figure 6.2). In this studio-produced series
the most tangible presence of self, the body, provides no certainty as these identi-
ties manifest themselves as changing performances, representations, studio fictions,
in which the multiple historical conditions of Black Brazilian identitities materialise
in the forms of the elusive metaphors, gestures and moments of selfhood, but not as
Figure 6.2 Bauer Sá. “White Shoe”. From series Nós Por Exemplo, 1993.
Source: © 1993 Bauer Sá (reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York City, USA).
stilled essences. One image, titled “White Shoe”, is a high contrast monochrome half-
profile portrait, against a dark background, of a young black man who is carrying on
his head a white casual shoe. It’s meaning is somehow at once obvious and mysterious.
It exemplifies how, in Bauer Sá’s work, the self is shown as present in other times still
present—the time of slavery for one. The self is shown objectified in terms of some-
thing else, something other than itself.
Us for Example dramatises the displacement and restlessness of post-colonial iden-
tity. It reveals other conditions of identity. The more the self is revealed in its historical
and imaginary reality the stranger and the more uncanny the images become. Homi
Bhabha writes,
The uncanny structure of cultural difference is close to Lévi-Strauss’s understand-

ing of “the unconscious as providing the common and specific character of social
facts . . . not because it harbours our most secret selves but because . . . it enables
us to coincide with forms of activity which are both at once ours and other”.
(Bhabha 1994: 163)
We might regard this kind of image as visual tourism for the viewer—exotic, even
racist in the quality of its fascination. But, alternatively, it is possible to regard it as a
manifestation of how black Brazilians are viewed, of the identities imposed on them.
Other images in the series, all of black males, show a boy with a gun in his mouth
(Figure 6.3); a man with a whipping scar and an antique long-stemmed tobacco pipe; a
Figure 6.3 Bauer Sá. “Dando”. From series Nós Por Exemplo, 1993.
Source: © 1993 Bauer Sá (reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York City, USA).
youth wearing bananas as a headdress. Seen in this manner Bauer Sá’s photographs are
resistant mirrors, portraits of othering, and, potentially, portraits of the white viewer’s
own look. We may also want to consider that as these selves are at once so elusive and
provocative that there is nothing stable to possess. The realism of the medium makes
reference to social realities, but the beauty of the photographic surface signifies only
surface, hence the absence of any concealed or latent authenticity beneath it. In the
manner of Victor Seghalen’s “aesthetics of diversity” we may argue that Bauer Sá’s
images acknowledge difference but do not seek to possess it (Forsdick 2000).
(4)
Postmodernism is not a style but the tumultuous co-presence of all styles, the place
where the chapters in the history of art and folklore are crossed with each other and
with the new cultural technologies.
(Canclini 1994: 244)
Linking the concern with identity and the engagement with anthropology is a pre-
vailing interest in syncretism and hybridity in the themes in Latin American thought
referred to above. What is striking is how dramatically this tradition promotes aes-
thetic practices as essential means of depicting and celebrating the syncretism of Latin
America’s cultures and selfhoods, of contesting the dominating and restrictive descrip-
tions and representations of them, and even of freeing an emergent post-colonial sym-
bolic culture from their spell. This view of art is predicated on the understanding that
art transforms the world not by negating it, but by re-making it; that it frees itself from
a particular world by embodying it in aesthetic form. It is an essentially modernist
approach according to which art renders its own process of making or representing
palpable or foregrounded, pace Russian Formalism. In doing so it emphasises the
fabricated or constructed aspect of all worlds, and thus of all cultures and identities.
What we see in the work under discussion are visual fictions, or, to adopt some terms
favoured by Habermas, as artworks they “virtualise” their relationship to their actual
world. Released from “the business of the world”, to which speech acts are normally
directed, Habermas argues, poetic language invents its own world, or, through the use
of innovative language, playfully discloses new worlds (Habermas 1998b: 389–401).
The strategy destabilises the way the present reality of the world is perceived and
loosens its grip on the imagination. It is a set of techniques that Latin American artists
and writers have famously mobilised in their confrontations with the post-colonial
order. They have also used those other effects of modernist and postmodernist art, the
fragmentation of spaces, times, selves and viewpoints. Richard Wollheim notes that
a consequence of fragmentation as it upsets the integrities underpinning our familiar
sense of reality, is to invoke the condition of the uncanny, the unheimlich, that is, the
“unhomed”—a condition which haunts post-colonial subjectivity with its undertow
of exile and the traces of the cultural homelessness identified by Fanon as part of colo-
nialism’s existential legacy (see Suleiman 2000; Canclini 1994: 242).
Disruptive and resistant forms of aesthetic practice, colonial and neo-colonial dom-
ination, post-colonial anxieties—especially in relation to cultural identity—appear
causally or expressively connected. Two new world writers, Aimé Césaire and Nestor
Garcia Canclini, have offered some of the most considerable contributions to the
understanding of these relationships and to the project of bringing about what Homi
Bhabha terms a “postcolonial” agency capable of producing its own modernity with
or against the dominant forms—a “counter-modernity”, something Octavio Paz also
dreamed of (Paz 1987: 173, 252). For the Martinican poet and politician Césaire,
writing from the 1940s onwards, the process involved questions of language, repre-
sentation and identity. For these reasons, the activities of the artist and writer were
indispensable to it. Insisting that colonialism had maintained dominion over its sub-
jects in the imagination as well as in the world of social institutions and material
life, Césaire argued that that the imagination had to be seen as a potential domain
of resistance to colonialism and its post-colonial aftermath. The resistance was to be
conducted by means of what he called “miraculous weapons” (the title of his 1946
collection of poems, Les Armes Miraculeuses), that is, the resources of poetic language
allied with a cultural politics that sought reunification with a lost Africa that was more
virtual or inspirational than actual.
Like Alvarez Bravo, an associate of the Parisian Surrealists, Césaire favoured Leo
Frobenius’ romantic/irrational African anthropology over the positivism of French
ethnography, above all because of the visionary function it gave to art as the expres-
sion of a whole culture. He called on post-colonial writers and artists to draw on the
transformative and unifying powers of mythical and poetic language, especially its
ability to reshape reality, to secrete texts and images out of profoundly hostile opposi-
tions and contradictions, to speak where the poet was not, from a place in which mul-
tiple and contradictory beliefs and identities co-existed, in which the voice spoke and
the eye saw from several different places, positions and dimensions at the same time.
Césaire’s mythopoesis sought to make whole the broken realities of colonial and
post-colonial life in which the future might only be rescued by way of the past, where
the self might also be the other, where the Slave had once both feared and introjected
the Master, and where the Master had once both romanced and murdered the Slave.
His verse, influenced by Surrealist automatic writing techniques, is a poetry of hybrid-
ity, a language of otherness uttered at times in a ventriloquising voice speaking from
somewhere else, by ghostly personae, in bits of language and out of the remnants of
selves drifting in diasporic space. It is built out of the fragments and fractals of the
lost culture, the recalled or re-imagined culture which had survived transportation and
slavery; the imposed, borrowed, or parodied elements of the culture of the colonists,
the beautiful music of the brutal slave master, the enforced and disgraced religion,
now part of the life world of the colonial subject; all the debris and cultural flotsam,
the often conflicting practices and beliefs that history had left the subordinated with—
all these would have to become the source of some future coherence (Césaire 1969,
1985 and see Arnold 1981). The “miraculous weapons” were the means of unhook-
ing the imagination from the unendurable real; of dreaming oneself out of the colo-
nial nightmare by means of another dream; of conquering one myth by means of an
alternative one. The cultural energy of an independent imagination would then bring
about liberation from the icons and metaphors of the master and permit the invention
of other worlds, other possibilities—if only, in the first instance, in the poem, in the
painting, in the Magical Realist novel, in the film or in certain types of photographic
work—that is, in the provisional reality, the Utopian space, of the Poetic.
Césaire’s ideas continue to influence New-World cultural practitioners. Their char-
acteristics are present in the work of Guatemalan photographic artist, Luis Gonzalez
Palma.
La Lotería (Figure 6.4) is a multiple piece consisting of a set of a dozen images that
reworks icons from a card game introduced by the colonists to encourage the acquisi-
tion of Spanish and its attendant cosmology. The aesthetic process draws full attention
to itself. We see chemical stains, masking tape, scratches and blemishes. A variety of
effectively acknowledged visual styles and traditions coincide within the image. For
example, there are documentary portraits of contemporary Guatemalans, but dressed
awkwardly in the kind of theatrical props once common in nineteenth-century photo-
graphic studios: angels’ or birds’ wings, crowns, flowers and other devices antithetical
to the conventions of documentary realism. Yet even in their outmoded amateurish-
ness these elements are able to summon up pre-Columbian stories and myths concern-
ing the after-life and the overlapping of human and animal identities. Additionally
they visualise imposed identities that are worn uncomfortably, that don’t quite fit.
The work is rich in Catholic references in the form of pastiches of the Baroque and
Figure 6.4 Luis González Palma. La Lotería, 1990.

Source: © 1990 Luis González Palma (reproduced by kind permission of the Schneider Gallery Chicago,
Ilinois, USA).
its allegorical impulses; indeed the brown surface of each image has been seen to con-
note the countless religious paintings that hang in Latin American churches darkened
by centuries of candle soot.*1 In its reflexivity and its use of collage and pastiche La
Lotería also cites North American postmodern art practices—the work of Joel-Peter
Witkin in particular. As the Russian semiologist, Juri M. Lotman has taught us, we
always interpret or simulate the texts of another age by means of codes unavailable
to those ages (Lotman 1977 in Lucid 1977: 216). Although La Lotería mixes the ico-
nographies of different epochs it is a work entirely situated in and concerned with the
condition of the present. It reflects García Canclini’s contention that art “exacerbates
the heterogeneous”, and that Creole formations generate aesthetic hybridities (Can-
clini 1994: 242).
And it is Canclini’s work that continues to represent one of the most useful contem-
porary Latin American expositions of the hybrid cultural condition and of the impor-
tance of art for its revelation. In his book, Hybrid Cultures, Strategies for Entering
and Leaving Modernity, he writes that Latin America is a region, “ [W]here traditions
have not yet disappeared and modernity has not completely arrived”, it is, he says,
“a heterogeneous continent consisting of countries in each of which co-exist multiple
logics of development (Canclini 1994: 1). He continues, “Latin American countries
now are the product of sedimentation, juxtaposition and intercrossing of Indian tra-
ditions . . . of colonial Catholic hispanism and modern political, educational and
communicative practices” (Canclini 1994: 46). When speaking more precisely of taste
and artistic production he asks, “What are the painters looking for when, in the same
painting, they cite pre-Columbian and colonial images along with those of the culture
industry, and then elaborate them using computers and lasers?” (Canclini 1994: 2).
Perhaps one answer lies in the work of the Mexican photographer, Pedro Meyer,
who uses digital imaging to better simulate a Mexican social imaginary that is lived
simultaneously across a number of different times and traditions at once (Figure 6.5).
Within a single constructed space Meyer mirrors this hybridity by mixing historical,
mythical and religious iconographies, personal and collective memory and narratives.
He compounds distinct technologies (analogical and digital), different modalities of
representation and discordant ontologies all within the single image. His aim is to
visualise how a world is experienced by means of how it is imagined; that is, to depict
the real fictions of cultural life. His work embodies a Mexican cultural condition
characterised by what Canclini has termed, “multitemporal heterogeneity” (Canclini
1994: 3).
Meyer’s digital work appears to be saying that only when Mexico incorporates its
own otherness will it fully develop its own modernity. Homi Bhabha has argued that
post-colonial modernity remains undescribable and unrealisable unless the repressed
antagonisms and temporalities and excluded otherness on which such a modernity
rests are re-inscribed into its conscious discourses in the form of what he calls “the
projective past” (Bhabha 1994: 252).
In contrast to Bhabha’s somewhat psychopathological account of the postmodern
condition, Canclini celebrates the possibilities for new kinds of cultural practice it
offers. Out of its “multitemporal heterogeneity” Latin America has produced, he says,
a culture of, “pastiche and bricolage where many periods and aesthetics are cited”,
in which oppositions such as the copy and the original, the metropolitan and the
peripheral are losing their force (Canclini 1994: 6). While the modernisation process
in the region is deficient in so many ways, and the process of hybridisation is neither
Figure 6.5 Gerardo Suter. Coatlicue, 1990.

Source: © Gerardo Suter 1990 (reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Arts, New York City
USA).
equal nor positive for all involved—inseparable as it is from a history of domination

and violence—Canclini nevertheless celebrates the exuberance that comes from it; the
collapse of cultural hierarchies it brings about. Additionally he notes that the sheer
density and complexity of the cultural grain means that Latin American cultures pos-
sess the means of resisting easy cultural domination from outside, by refracting and
reshaping whatever external influences they accept, or by being able to absorb and
transform whatever they ingest, a strategy adopted by Latin American cultural and
artistic movements such as the Brazilian Cannibalists of the 1920s, or the Tropicalists
of the late 1960s. Canclini speaks of cultural hybridity as an objective condition, one
inherited from history characterised by domination mostly from outside. Nevethe-
less, Canclini, argues that this inherited hybridity no longer needs to be seen as an
alien force replacing “tradition and traditional identities” but as part of a process, of,
“renovation whereby diverse sectors take responsibility for the multitemporal hetero-
geneity of each nation” (Canclini 1994: 3).
As an example of how this is registered in an artwork we can take the series, All
Saints are Dead, by the Venezuelan artist, Nelson Garrido. It consists of parodies of
religious tableaux made from a scandalous mix of elements borrowed from the tra-
ditionally segregated iconographies of religion, promotional culture, mass media, air
hostesses a smiling bearded female Christ figure hanging from the cross, vegetables,
bones, child stars and pornography to dramatise the loss of a shared symbolic order—
or the arrival of a new one.
Garrido’s tableaux resemble religious allegories, a form of no small interest to con-
temporary Latin American artists. But allegory depends on the evocation of collec-
tively known stories and representations. When the great shared narratives of both
Catholic Christianity and progressive modernity have either lost their way or must
jostle for space with increasing numbers of other stories and picturings, allegory, as
Garrido’s work demonstrates, becomes almost impossible. All Saints are Dead ridi-
cules a loss of meaning in contemporary Latin America culture. Of this work Lois
Parkinson Zamora writes, “the visible no longer signals the invisible” (as in alle-
gory) “but rather the manufactured, the simulated, the sentimental” (Zamora 1998 in
Watriss and Zamora 1998: 349). But All Saints are Dead counters any melancholy of
loss. Bakhtin once spoke of Rabelais laughing modernity into existence. The comedic
force of Garrido’s scandalous and kitsch constructions is powered by the irreverent
energy of the region’s new cultural confluences and laughs one version of the Latin
American postmodern into life.
There are a number of photographers in the region who share the same preoccupa-
tions as Meyer and Garrido. These are marked off, though, by the attempt to develop
a distinctive Latin American cultural practice which allows cultural, even religious
force of the Amerindian and Catholic pasts to energise their work. Before looking at
an example, there are some further distinguishing characteristics of Latin America’s
visual culture we need to consider.
(5)
At the limits of scientific-representative space, the poet even takes on the “role of alle-
gory”. Beyond the order of signs he will rediscover the role of correspondences.
(Buci-Glucksman 1994: 135)
Latin American photography shares the technologies and all the contending aesthetic
and epistemological theories that surround photographic practice in the modern world
in general. Additionally, it has absorbed and been absorbed by beliefs and practices
rising from the region’s own visual traditions. Lois Parkinson Zamora writes that we
need to recognise that Latin American Photography is a western visual medium that
“expresses western cultural constructions” but that it does so “with difference ” as
it contains “the presence of non-western traditions”. To recognise this, Zamora says,
is to, “develop our second sight as critics and viewers” (Zamora 1998 in Watriss and
Zamora 1998: 315). As Zamora herself acknowledges, Juri M. Lotman’s typologi-
cal descriptions of culture are useful here. According to Lotman, what distinguishes
one culture or one cultural epoch from another is, unsurprisingly, how each defines
authenticity, order and spatiality. But what is assigned primordial importance in his
approach is the culture’s distinctive theory of signs, its semiotic system (Lotman 1977
in Lucid 1977: 220).
In this light we can see hybridity in Latin America’s visual culture but also note
the presence of contradiction. Implicit theories of the sign there conform both to the
post-Enlightenment view which holds the relationship between signifier and signified
to be unmotivated and conventional, and to views that appear to conform to Lot-
man’s pre-modern, medieval or religious type, which is distinguished by its high level
of “semioticity” in which everything in the world is filled with significance (Lotman
1977 in Lucid 1977: 217). In this type of culture the sign stands in an iconic or moti-
vated relationship to what it represents. Widespread in Latin America are visual tradi-
tions that carry within them the mentalities of pre-modern cosmologies, non-secular,
non-scientific values. They can be embodied in the use of ritual masks and costumes,
Catholic and pre-Columbian statues and images, ex-votos, landmarks or topi or natu-
ral species imbued with spiritual meanings, and a variety of popular, often syncretic,
religious and quasi-religious forms and devices. These are utilised as iconic signs, even
as affective mechanisms such as charms or relics which, to use Lotman’s words, “par-
ticipate in the divine”. Their semiotic value is established, “not by their intrinsic value
but by that of the thing they represent” (Lotman 1977 in Lucid 1977: 217–218). In
religious cultures, Lotman notes, “the actual materiality of the sign becomes an object
of adoration”, not magical in itself, but able to reflect the power or presence transmit-
ted through it (Lotman 1977 in Lucid 1977: 217–218). Zamora quotes the historian
of Meso-America, Alfredo Lopez Austin. “Indigenous images”, he writes, “do not
resemble their object, but contain it” (Zamora 1998 in Watriss and Zamora 1998:
315). Photographic practice in Latin America is often as deeply marked by such tradi-
tions as it is by an adherence to both modernist notions of photographic truth and
postmodern scepticism regarding all truth claims.
Take the work of Gerardo Suter, an Argentinean photographer long established
in Mexico. In the early 1990s he produced a series of photographed studio-made
constructions and performances titled, Codices. Using the human figure to personify
Aztec deities Suter’s images are sign-events which bring to life pre-Columbian religious
or mythological drawings and ideographs of the kind destroyed by the Spanish in
enormous numbers soon after the conquest. Coatlicue (Figure 6.6), to focus on one,
depicts a story concerning the eponymous Aztec goddess in whom birth and violent
death, vengeance and maternal love are encountered within the same being.
The co-existence of apparently contradictory qualities is given formal equivalence
in Coatlicue through the presence within the same representation of mutually exclu-
sive symbolic orders, one based in Lotman’s medieval or religious sign, the other in
his post- Enlightenment mode of signification. Religious signs are ritual devices. They
conjure presences. The palpable words, symbols, moves, sounds and spaces that form
any ritual must fuse with the sacred forces and entities it desires to connect with. The
ritual sign either becomes the thing it represents, or is transfigured by it. Its beauty—
an excess that passes beyond representation, an intensification of perception—is the
embodiment of the divine presence within the religious sign. To achieve this the ritual
must always seek its own perfection. Suter’s 1992 exhibition was titled Escenarios
Rituales and his images imitate ritual practices in two ways. Firstly, they are “enlight-
enment” signs, visual documentations of an aesthetic act and photographed fictions or
performances that bestow physical presence on metaphysical entities. Through them,
the ideograph is translated into the photograph, the mythological pre-Modern into the
technological Modern and beyond. Secondly, the photographs are invocatory images.
Suter employs the silver gelatin process that has strong associations with fine print art
photography and its commitment to the exquisite surface, the perfect image. This, in
turn has links with Western post-Romantic notions of aesthetic transfiguration where
the aesthetically intensified materiality of the image, like some spiritualised substance,
is equivalent to the immaterial or spiritual qualities of its object. The sign becomes one
with its referent (Zamora 1998 in Watriss and Zamora 1998: 315). The aesthetics of
Codices mimic the qualities of the religious icon that, rather than merely representing
the divine, either becomes itself a sacred object, that is, it transubstantiates, or, where
this would be idolatrous, becomes the privileged transmitter of a sacred presence.
But Suter’s work is not the expression of a desire to return to some lost authenticity.
The Aztecs and their cosmology remain unreachable and indeed are unacceptable.
Photography does what it is famous for, gives presence to what is absent and yet cru-
elly confirms its irretrievability. Suter’s work is firmly placed in the present closer to
Raymond William’s notion of “critical nostalgia”, signifying a sense of insufficiency
in the contemporary Mexican condition brought about by the repression or devalu-
ation of its non-European traditions made invisible, spectacularly exotic or confined
in museums to testify to their own disappearance. His work challenges modernity’s
incapacity for thinking within more than one symbolic order. Dead cultures are given
life in Suter’s performing bodies; invisible cultures are brought to the attention of light.
Suter’s imagery can be regarded as embodying some of the qualities of what has been
called Latin America’s “Baroque Modernity”, and thus as relatable to the more recent
art-category, the “Ultra Baroque”, one derived from Alejo Carpentier’s notion of an
intensified “New World Baroque” (Larrain 2000: 156; Armstrong and Zamudio-Taylor
2000). The Baroque tradition and its association with the use of allegory are important
elements making up the region’s visual and literary cultures. Faced, as Canclini puts
it, by “an excess of objects” and the “diverse and Baroque nature of our history” no
synthesis or “nostalgic searching for non-existing traditions” is possible (Canclini 1994
in Preziosi 1994: 498–506). It might be said, too, that when behind one language there
persists another and perhaps another behind that, and all in the same cultural space,
artistic recourse to allegory is inevitable. In the Baroque, writes Christine Buci-Glucks-
mann, “the visible refers to the reverse side, to an invisible that is at once present and
absent” (Buci-Glucksman 1994: 135). Of allegory Craig Owen writes, “In the allegori-
cal structure one text is doubled by another . . . one text is read through another . . . the
paradigm for the allegorical text is the palimpsest” (Owen 1994 in Preziosi 1994: 317).
Allegory is not about uncovering some lost original meaning; it has nothing to do
with any endeavour to denote a real outside of representation, rather the allegorist,
Owen writes, “adds another meaning to the image . . . only to replace: the allegorical
meaning supplants the antecedent one; it is a supplement” (Owen 1994 in Preziosi
1994: 317). The European Enlightenment and the rise of Scientific Method caused
the partial abandoning of the old semiotic order based in resemblances and analogues
and its replacement by the sign. However as the arts and sciences diverged, poetry or
the poetic in general took over the ground that science had disowned and entered the
domain of correspondences. The allegorical and the play of correspondences appear
to displace any claims of verisimilitude in most of the works I am looking at. But they
are gestures of uncertainty rather than religious faith, they resort to the procedures of
an earlier aesthetic language thought able to evoke a cultural reality and an existential
condition often typified equally by an excess and a diminishment of meaning—a pro-
liferation of signs occurring in the absence of a single shared symbolic order.
Fredrick Jameson, who regards allegory as the most appropriate narrative form in
post-colonial societies, notes that “the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a
matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream” (Jameson
1986: 71). These qualities we have encountered in the photographic work. Its truth, if
that is the appropriate term, will not be found in the immediate revelation of some sin-
gle event, object or subjectivity, but in the display of uncertain correspondences between
different modes of being, different historical periods, and cultural artefacts, different
types of representation and varieties of photographic practice, and even between differ-
ent living species. The photographic surface is more textual than transparent.
Buci-Glucksmann reminds us that the term allegory derives from Greek words
meaning both “to speak” and “the other”. She writes,
For allegory consists precisely in saying something other than what one means, or
in saying one thing so that, by oblique procedures, another thing will be under-
stood. But this discourse through the other is also discourse of the Other, a vocali-
zation and staging of an otherness which eludes direct speech and presents itself
as an elsewhere.
(Buci-Glucksman 1994: 138)
And yet, however allegorical contemporary Latin America photography becomes,

its commitment to realism or, rather, to reference, remains ultimately undiminished.
Before and after anything else, the photographs under discussion are the documen-
tations of aesthetic acts that are the expressions of actual cultural conditions. We
can see this in Alvarez Bravo’s photography that combines a documentary of street
level contingencies with the uncovering of allegorical meanings. In his photograph
from 1966 titled Justo Sueno/Well Earned Rest, a small dog lies sleeping beneath the
black and white diagonals of a broken gate, a fragment of accidental modernism. If
read out of a deeper Mexican competence, the photograph reveals the presence in
the urban world of contemporary Mexico of a creature that in the ancient Mexican
cosmology was associated with the dog-faced deity, Xolotl, that was an intermediary
species which could pass between the world of life and death, between sleeping and
waking, between light and dark. The gate then becomes the opening between two
worlds, two states, two cultural universes perhaps. Alvarez Bravo’s art was strongly
influenced by Surrealism and there’s something in it too of Baudelaire’s allegorising
“premodernism” though free of the French poet’s hatred of modernity. But just as
important in Alvarez Bravo’s way of seeing is a dimension which corresponds to Lot-
man’s religious symbolic order. All the events, objects, signs, pictures, and the chance
juxtapositions and coincidences encountered in the city street are visually celebrated
as parts of the contemporary and its energies. At the same time they are seen as ele-
ments in an ideographic text persisting from pre-conquest Mexico that continues to
inscribe itself onto or under the surface of modernity—the subordinated code—or
persists in the collective dreams of the culture. It is worth noting that the photograph
bears an alternative title, Los Sueños Han de Creerse/Dreams Must Be Believed. Alva-
rez Bravo was engaged in a form of cultural nationalism, trying to reveal or describe a
particular Mexican modernity, a haunted modernity in which histories, evolved out of
the region’s distinctive conditions, are present within and alongside the abstract and
often placeless order of modernity. Alvarez Bravo’s imagery captures a cultural uni-
verse both as it is experienced and as it is imagined. His photography is not so much
a description of a cultural reality as a challenge to the viewer’s limited way of seeing
by means of it.
(6)
[The hybridity of photography:] photography’s own distinctive implosion of nature
and culture (an implosion embodied in the very word “photography”, from the Greek
meaning “light-writing”).
(Batchen 2003 in Green 2003: 22)
Photography is a type of enunciation. The calculated or unconscious complexities,

the hybridity of form, the actual or faux allegories, the co-presences of multiple cos-
mologies and times in the images I have been discussing—all are instances of the
often-denied discontinuities and disturbances set deep in Latin American cultures by
their historical formation. At the same time, they are also strategies, conscious or
not, whereby photographers uncover such discontinuities and disturbances. In doing
so they seek to destabilise the established picturings of Latin American worlds and
selfhoods. As we have seen when Canclini uses the term Cultural Hybridity he means
in part a conscious practice, an act. These photographs set out to break up the false
singularity, the fictional unity that normally prevails in the official order. In Bhabha’s
phrase they, “fracture the time of modernity from within” (Bhabha 1994: 245). They
are Césaire’s miraculous weapons, assaulting the habitual visual order, disclosing what
it is blind to. They are symbolic forms of the violence that Fanon saw as necessary if
the lingering effects of colonialism were to be overcome. And their assaults can also
be directed at their own traditions of radical art practice as shown by Chilean artist
Juan Davila’s pastiche of Frida Kahlo’s work and its commodification; or the Argen-
tinian photographer Marcos Lopez’s Pop Latino (2000), a parodic version of a classic
Alvarez Bravo photograph, La Buena Fama Durmiendo/Good Reputation Sleeping of
1938, in which the surrealist depth of the photographer Father is replaced with the
strategic superficiality of the disenchanted postmodern Son.
Homi Bhabha maintains that the language of a post-colonial space is by definition
a disturbed and disturbing kind of speech which rises from a cultural unconscious
formed from the repressed history of ethnic difference; from the anguish and rage
and confused desire left by that history; from the knowledge that the colonial and
post-colonial order is founded on the displacement and denial—even annihilation—of
the identities and meanings that have made its own existence possible. In short, it is
an unconscious formed through the repression of difference and is itself a symptom
marking the existence and denial of non-identity in the cultural formation; the silenc-
ing of another speech which murmurs from other temporalities than that of estab-
lished modernity; voices that speak from other cultural orders. The discontinuities in
the post-colonial order reveal themselves, he says, “at the level of enunciation”—in
dissonance, in stutterings—in the vulnerability of enunciation itself (Bhabha 1994:
251). I would argue that the works I have been discussing are instances of this.
Coda
Bringing the presence of people and cultures to visibility has been the subject of this
chapter. It is a theme forever shadowed by the anguishing invisibility of the Disap-
peared/Los Desaparecidos. Yet there is another kind of invisibility endured by Latin
Americans, in this instance inside the United States: the unnoticed worker, perhaps
illegally immigrated, exploited and negated at once; and the subject of Allan de Sou-
za’s photograph.
Figure 6.6 Allan de Souza. Los Extranjeros, 2017.

Source: Allan de Souza (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
Notes
* An earlier version of this chapter was published in: Clara A.B. Joseph and Janet Wilson (Eds.)
‘Global Fissures, Post Colonial Fusions’, Rodolphi, Amsterdam/New York 2006.
1 My thanks to Amanda Hopkinson for many of these insights into the work of Gonzalez
Palma.
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7 The Accidental Theorist
Three Views on the Work
of Edgar Martins
The Diminishing Present

A visual image soon generates thought. The photographer produces something seen
and something to be seen. The viewer reflects on what is shown, on how it is pic-
tured—and on the quality of their own seeing. Independent of its maker, the photo-
graph produces a new space for thinking, a space for thinking through, and a depicted
condition to be comprehended: the Photographer—the Accidental Theorist.
Published in 2006, the imagery of Edgar Martins’ The Diminishing Present amounts
to less a set of pictures than to a series of moments in which spaces, mechanisms,
signs, objects and events in the instrumentalist, modified landscape of the contem-
porary order have become independent of causation or function. In a move echoing
Ed Ruscha, Martins portrays an area strictly no further than 1 kilometre from his
studio in Bedford England—working at night or very early in the morning when there
was nobody to be seen. The work resembles a set of location shots for unmade films
from unreturned scenarios. It constitutes a landscape without human figures, recall-
ing the photography of depopulated cities discussed by Max Kozloff (1987) and Ste-
phen Jacobs (2006). It pictures places as though composed in the eye of the security
camera—a seeing without a subject—of a landscape already arranged for surveillance.
It evokes the coda completing Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, with its new residential zones
apparently empty of people yet filled by autonomous machines and alien structures,
or Doug Aitken’s post-human video landscapes. What is revealed here is ‘emic’ space,
space that vomits you out, a space that resists strangers, the landscape of Bauman’s
Light Modernity governed by the “redundancy of interaction” (Vidler 1994; Bauman
2000: 101–105). But it is something more.
This landscape is actual, familiar, always there, and yet imaginary, unseen. It is the
other place, which is always this place, in these things; it is there when our backs are
turned, while we sleep, or as we drive past in the unconsciousness of speed, in the
half-life of routine—it is the landscape that survives our absence. It is there in the
geometry and darkness of empty motorways at night; in street lights illuminating
only themselves; in a sleeping suburban street which the sleepers will never see; in the
encounter with a quietly burning car abandoned among bushes, a rope of black smoke
curling up into a white sky, as if part of some half-forgotten ceremony; in the prospect
of a dark house with blind windows; of a soccer pitch devoid of players; in unvisited
parks with their pearl coloured architectures of mist; in woods of trees from the other
side of the planet.
The Diminishing Present is a photography of poised turbulence; full of stillness
and silence yet haunted by mobility, by a passing that is not registered as speed but
The Accidental Theorist 143
Figure 7.1 Edgar Martins. The Diminishing Present, 2006.

Source: © Edgar Martins 2006 (original in colour) (all photographs reproduced by kind permission of
Edgar Martins).
as intangibility and uncertainty, marked by referents that are forever unreachable,

never arrived at. It passes through a landscape arranged to be passed through. The
imagery is committed to the beauty of contingencies, to the unexplained occurrence,
to small intensities and fortuitous transformations. It offers encounters with a time
suspended before or after events; with crepuscular, in-between places and night spaces
where things are freed from their daytime uses, when, caught out in the car headlights,
functional objects metamorphose momentarily into poetic events. It floats, free of the
need to weight itself with purpose or explanation and in this it displays a quality of
‘lightness’ described by Italo Calvino as the calm identification with the fragility and
transience at the heart of things, with the recognition that the world continues without
us and cannot ultimately be restrained by the meanings we give to it.1
This lightness may be a release from the weight of the world, but it reunites us with
the world in other ways. While its imagery is poised on the edge of abstraction, The
Diminishing Present denotes the presence of something unsettling, a psychological
presence in the work: agoraphobia, vulnerability, the possibility of danger, the actual-
ity of solitude, the uncertainty over what is significant in things; that is, it reveals a
world as seen by a stranger, an outsider—by Edgar Martins, perhaps, or an authorial
position marked as ‘Edgar Martins’, the Portuguese photographer losing himself in

Source: © Edgar Martins 2006 (original in colour).
the English midlands—and for Julia Kristeva, being ‘lost’ is the precondition for poetic
production. Think of the similarity with the work of other recent émigré photogra-
phers of space: Josef Koudelka’s bleak spaces, Humberto Rivas’ abandoned streets and
interiors, the uncanny nightscapes of Rut Blees Luxembourg and Effie Paleologolou.
I use the word “uncanny”. Like Martins, all portray the territory of strangerhood, one
struck by the psychic condition of das Unheimlich the uncanny, as much an interior
domain as an external one: “[T]he uncanny object or narrative inspires dread not
because it forces an encounter with the outside, but rather with the displaced repre-
sentation of the inside. Hence the unhomely (the Unheimlich), and the foreigner are
the self’s own others”.2
There is a floating world quality in Martins’ work, both here and in other of his pro-
jects. It lies not in the style or structure of the image but in the way ‘it’ looks at things.
The delicate strangeness, the way objects and events are seen as if from the point of
view of a subject both there and nowhere, a picturing that recalls certain concepts
behind visual practices in Chinese and Japanese traditions, such as the Japanese notion
of s´unyata, meaning “impermanence”, “blankness” and “nihility” (Calvino 1996).
This quality can, I think, be associated with a form of homelessness that does not
seek to return home—a dissident type of nostalgia that is taken by the creative pleasures

Source: © Edgar Martins 2006 (original in colour).
of the longing, of the uncompleted life and is at home in its own unsettlement. It is
this kind of desire that is expressed in Martins’ photography through the sense of
permanent mobility, the forever distant referent, and the lightness of touch and pres-
ence—finally at home nowhere else than in itself and in the process of its own making.
The Diminishing Present might additionally be regarded as a form of documentation
which purchases on a particular location, an undervalued, overlooked and bypassed
part of England, a blank region between major cities but not deeply rural, and not
exactly suburban and lacking much promotable natural scenery. Yet, criss-crossed
by major highways and 10,000 slip roads, covered with light industry, landscaped
industrial parks, retail distributions hubs, out of town corporate head offices, new
towns and residential estates, out-of-town shopping centres, and scraps of besieged
countryside, it exemplifies the global park many of us increasingly live in: the diffused
city, formed of stretched in-between-spaces, nature entirely modified by states and
corporations, places formed of non-places, terminals rather than centres, interchange-
able with so many other places, where there is geography but no history, where place
seems to attract no memory, no depth of being—at once provincial and transnational.
But, it goes further than some kind of visual cultural geography. The Diminishing
Present reveals the condition these places at once embody and symbolise. It is a pho-
tographic poetics of space. It refuses to condemn its subject matter, escaping the com-
monplace dystopic voice by intensifying our engagement in these new environments,
which as a consequence requires us to notice, to engage aesthetically and, potentially,
morally, in this ‘underimagined’ world with its estranging and contradictory beauty
(Self 1998).
This Is Not a House
In 2011 Edgar Martins published a set of photographs of half-built apartments and
houses left uncompleted and unsold as the financial crisis hit the United States and the
global economy from 2007 onwards. The work began as a commission from the New
York Times Magazine.
Or through the windows we shall see The nakedness and vacancy Of the dark
deserted house.
Tennyson (1994: 44), The Deserted House
(1)
The Greek word Oikonomos (economy) derives in part from Oikos, meaning house.
This is still present in modern Greek which uses spiti for house, as well as related
terms such as oika, katoika and oikiakos.
To begin let’s take just one image. It is a frontal view of part of an American house,
a fragment, the corner of the house’s face brightly illuminated. It is a white house, a
wooden clapboard house, probably in white pine, but it could be spruce, or cedar or
cypress—all are utilised in the United States. The house has two storeys. The window
on the second floor is divided into four wooden sub-frames that are in turn divided
into six small glass panes. On the first or ground floor the window frame rises about
a quarter higher than that on the second and is divided again into four smaller frames
each further divided in this case into nine small glass panes. Some care has been taken
with ratios. The two storeys are divided by a pitched half-roof sealed by grey tiling. It
echoes the main roof glimpsed above. It is probably a goodly sized house compared to
the average European and for millions of American citizens too. The mortgage on such
a property would have been substantial if not astronomical. But the house is not dis-
tinctive. Some rendering of the white clapboard style is pretty well America’s default
domestic architecture. It is classical American. It goes back to the settler beginnings of
Anglo-America. It references an established tradition, that of deep (Euro) American-
ness. It proclaims belonging—to home and nation, and to the affluent middle class.
Figure 7.4 Edgar Martins. This Is Not a House, 2011.

Source: © 2011 Edgar Martins (original in colour) (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
Of course we can see that this home has been undermined. The windowpanes have
been shattered. Jagged glass shards remain as indices of some kind of assault. An
unease in the relative proportions of the building has prepared us for this. Like a wide
collar, the half-roof extends dramatically. It exceeds the extension of the main roof
by an order of three. While it would have afforded increased shelter it unbalances the
overall design, undermines what symmetry is striven for. And on closer inspection it is
clear that the frontage has never been developed. The house is damaged and yet pris-
tine. Perhaps it has never been inhabited, the client withdrawn, the builders departed
before completion—a ruin before it ever became a dwelling.
But this is not a house; it is a photograph; and present in the photographic quali-
ties is an element more disturbing than these signs of incipient destruction. The white
forms of the building stand out against the darkness within, around and beyond it. It is
a blackness both profound and absolutely flat, actual and equally abstract. The house
contains this darkness and is contained by it. Is this just the darkness of night? Or is it
an aesthetic device—the black against which to throw the white forms into dramatic
relief, presenting the uninhabited house as pure design, utility become beauty? Or is it
the mark of an absence that haunts all these houses and of the forces of negation that
produced it—economic, political—even metaphysical?
(2)
A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stabil-
ity . . . Without it, man would be a dispersed being . . . It is body and soul. It is the
human being’s first world.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Ruins remind us of the mute materiality of the world, of the stuff that cares nothing for
our futile projects, that recognises nothing of the order our architectures try to impose
on the world. Yet, ruins are for the most part one of history’s set designs and from out
of them meanings are erected, representations made. Think only of the photography
of American ruins: the burnt buildings of Civil War Atlanta in 1864; Arnold Genthe’s
vistas of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire, or Mark Klett’s photo-
graphic reflections on the same event from the city of 2006; the abandoned sharecrop-
per’s shacks in the FSA photographs; the photography of the ghost town; Clarence
John Laughlin’s deserted and decaying Mississippi plantation mansions shot in the
1940s; the press photos of the torched tenements of Newark and elsewhere during
Black America’s risings of the 1960s; Robert Adam’s provisional-looking tract house
projects in the desert; Joel Sternfeld’s dream house undermined by landslide, or his
sites polluted by atrocity, places of ruined memory; and of course, there is the Ground
Zero imagery of Meyerowitz and countless others. American disasters tend to become
iconic. There are strings of websites devoted to the photography of abandoned motels
and of ghost towns. One of the images from this work has already been appropriated
by one as an example of “the new ghost towns” of “subdivisions and McMansions”
that people can no longer afford (www.inquisitr.com/28369/the-new-ghost-towns/).
The histories and imageries of the ruined shelter or settlement are required to fur-
nish the continuing epic of travelling and moving on that is the United States—or
do we now say, “was”?—an epic of disasters endured and overcome for sure, but
one ever attended by a sense of America’s precariousness, of its own brevity, its own
uncertainty about where and if it belongs. In this regard James Wines’ cracked and
crumbling Houston BEST store built as a ruin, as though already shaken apart by
tremors, is either a snoop cocked at fate or an inoculation against it; or perhaps a
claim to permanence posing as its opposite, that is solidified ideology.
European America, then, is a Settler Nation, and at times an unsettled one. The
house or the shelter has special connotations there that convey the story of established
communities or of the mass triumph of privatised middle-class family life initiated
from the 1890s by Sears and Roebuck catalogues and stores. At the same time, from
the cabin-in-the-clearing, through the circled wagons to the ‘gated communities’, the
house and shelter is stalked by an accompanying history of fears and beleaguerment.
Any disaster concerning the shelter, the settlement, is extended very quickly into a
metaphor for a whole historical process.
America is also the embodiment of that protecting and precarious project Moder-
nity whose systems and practices inflate risk as they extend comfort. Martins’ images
present us with the points at which Modernity’s outcomes have recently collided. As
Norfolk, Ristelhueber and others developed the “Late Photography” of the battle-
fields of the Gulf and Afghanistan, so Martins has done so for the aftermath of the
Financial Crisis and the Credit Crunch (see Campany 2003).
(3)
Photographs, says Vilhém Flusser, “dam up history in order to make it into a tableau”;
in them, the scene replaces the event (Flusser 2002: 128). Some of Martins’ picturings
in this work do evoke the idea of staging. But the effect is more than simply theatrical,
more than a deferment or denial of history, for it is the historical or social reality of
the ‘toxic economy’ that remains dramatised in the images as a condition of seeing,
or rather of the visibility of the object. If the photograph halts the narrative of history
here the effect is relevant, for depicted here is development paralysed, a disabled pro-
ject, that is, stasis, a condition so feared by modernity. The buildings stand before the
viewer like the scenery of a bankrupt theatre, the sets of an abandoned movie project.
Nothing moves in or through them. It would be a mistake to assume, as some appear
to have done, that the visual elegance, the abstraction, the careful rendering of formal
values and the necessary manipulation that exist here as in much of Edgar Martins’
practice are inappropriate qualities when applied to the themes of this present work. It
is true that the crisis and human unhappiness indicated in many of these images is real
enough, whatever the class of those who bear them, and they impose on any photogra-
pher some kind of ethical responsibility. However, Martins has never been a humanist
photographer, nor is he a social documentarist in the familiar sense. There is coolness,
and a distancing throughout his work, and an overriding concern with form. There is
even a case for describing him as a metaphysical photographer. And yet it is precisely
certain of these qualities that seem so effective here. For example, in this work it is the
absence of the human figure that pronounces the landscape human; the human is the
principle that has gone missing, that has left a visual silence. This is a human crisis.
And it is in the transmutation of lived spaces into near-abstract structures that the
wider abstractions of the financial markets, of an uninhabitable economy, are indi-
cated, made present in the deconstructions they have brought about. The departure of
the human figure from these spaces is more than an aesthetic choice. Speaking through
what Jacques Rancière terms, “the silent language of things”, these images depict
more than an immediate actuality; they picture a condition which is social and empiri-
cal, yet which demands an aesthetics which cannot be served adequately by immediate
observation or record alone; they bypass both the dystopian melancholy to be found
in some social documentary and the exclusion of the Social that characterises much of
the art of voided places (Ranciére 2006: 36).
In some instances the work summons up the conventions of landscape painting
and photography, indeed landscape is the theme of much of Martins’ practice. The
representation of landscape is commonly based in the retrospective, distanced and
even nostalgic viewpoint, often displaced from the present. Here its effects intensify
the viewer’s reading of the precise objects/events in the photographs. If one accepts
Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections, landscape art has always depicted emptiness and loss.
He writes,
Landscape begins with a notion, however vague and confused, of distancing and
of a loss of sight, (une perte de vue), for both the physical eye and the eye of the
mind.
(Nancy 2005: 53)
Landscape, he says, comes into being when the human figure loses the foreground
or disappears completely, when the gods have departed and the weight of allegory has
lifted. It arrives as part of a deep transformation in the mentality of its time. “A pres-
ence”, he writes, “is withdrawn”, hence, “The landscape is the space of strangeness or
estrangement” (Nancy 2005: 53 and 60). In Martins’ landscapes it is less the Divine
that has withdrawn than the elements of a secular sacred, that is, individual citizens
and private property, inhabited wealth and, of course, beneath it all, the loss of Capi-
tal value. The frozen constructions and deserted interiors may turn out to be symp-
toms of another crisis to be cured. Alternatively, they may be signifying the relative
decline of American power, even the destabilising of meaning or a system of meaning.
Nancy notes that as the landscape form was ushered in by a loss or a displacement
of meaning, it depicted place, “as the opening onto a taking place of the unknown”
(Nancy 2005: 59). No longer was land depicted as “location” (endroit) but as “dis-
location” (envers), void of presence and giving, he writes, “no access to any elsewhere
that is not itself ‘here’, in the angle opened onto a land occupied only with opening in
itself” (Nancy 2005: 59).
The depth of absence in Martins’ photographs is chilling: the half-made roads
running among non-houses; the construction site fading into the twilight, seemingly
losing all materiality; the golf course which has never seen players; a remoteness seep-
ing into the neighbourhoods that failed to come into being. Perhaps an even greater
absence lies in the loss of our ability to name, to recognise these places. They are no
longer nature as development has overtaken them; but they are not quite material cul-
ture either, the development has halted and gone having invented “Nowhere”, which,
as it happens, is the meaning of More’s word, “Utopia”. These places, unnameable,
suspended between categories, Edgar Martins knows well. It is in the darkness, in the
failing light and the black sky that he brings together the social and the metaphysical
dimensions that inhabit his work, including this. And in the darkness we can detect
the absence of any alternative historical narrative in this moment or at least the inabil-
ity of America to imagine one. It recalls the nothingness that stands beyond the door
Figure 7.5 Edgar Martins. This Is Not a House, 2011.

Source: © 2011 Edgar Martins (original in colour).
in Sartre’s Huis Clos/No Exit; or around Beckett’s ‘places’, signifying that there is no
outside of this and that time or at least progress has halted. I am reminded too of the
reflections of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher on the British TV series, Sapphire
and Steel. As a teenager in the 1980s he was haunted by the last episode when the two
space detectives pull back a curtain in a café to see they were lost surrounded by noth-
ing but depthless black space, without time or dimension. Fisher would later see this
as a token of a gradual fading out of the idea of living in “progressive modernity”, the
slow death of the future (Fisher 2014: 2–9).
For Heidegger, dwelling forms part of the grounds of our Being in the world. Dwell-
ing, he writes, is none other than, “the relationship between man and space” (Hei-
degger 1975: 157). If dwelling has been undermined then, in the darkness converging
on the house we can detect the presence of non-Being. In this, the effect of Martins’ vis-
ualisations is to complete the circle in which the historical and the metaphysical meet.
(4)
Reality/Real Estate/Realtors/the ‘Real Economy’

Some discomfort has been expressed over Martin’s limited digital reshaping of images
in this work as if this will have diminished any claims it may have to authenticity. It
is a curious reaction given the non-Social Documentary nature of his back catalogue.
Furthermore, it appears to reveal a misunderstanding of photography’s present situa-
tion. This work is themed around a crisis and, as we shall see, it is also work formed
by a crisis in its own medium. Now the word crisis is rooted in Greek words meaning
“decision”. The word decision has connotations of “cutting”, of “down cutting”.
This Is Not a House is a photographic intervention into a crisis. Before it is a set
of images, it is a series of decisions, of cuttings into. In a certain sense the work is
a set of fictions. And fiction is a way of cutting into, cutting out and rearranging
the Real. Ranciére states that “the real must be fictionalised in order to be thought”
(Ranciére 2006: 38). So, the Real must be transformed (and translated) in order to be
understood. The word fiction, has connotations of a false move used to produce real
effects (a feint), and at the same time it signifies the idea of something made (fact and
factory share its roots), something actual though manufactured (Kermode 2000: II).
Fictions, like decisions, and crises, are made. However much we continue to accept
photography’s indexical facility, to photograph something is necessarily to fictionalise
it, to select, intensify, to link the abstractions (cut) from the visual continuum into
sequences and so on are all acts of fictionalising. Photographs establish not so much a
reproduction of the Real, as a relationship to that federation of perceptions and reflec-
tions, discourses and simulations that, beyond brute materiality, makes up the Real.
As the producer of consciously ‘aesthetic’ work Martins is not attempting to simply
record actuality. The work plays on the borders between what Ranciére calls, “the
logic of facts and the logic of fictions” (Ranciére 2006: 35); it is itself formed from
that relationship, a product of another crisis in which the categories of Art Photogra-
phy and Documentary Photography have not so much fallen apart as fallen into each
other. Martins’ work is the bearer of the crisis it engages with, a crisis that is only in
part economic. More immediately the manifest theme of This Is Not a House places it
at a point where parallel themes converge, each governed by a fear of the loss of real-
ity: the concern that digitalisation has undermined photographic realism and compro-
mised any truth-telling facility in the medium and beyond; and the fear of Wall Street’s
undermining of what is interestingly referred to as the real economy. Speaking at a
University College London symposium on digital photography, the Philosopher Peter
Osborne has suggested that such anxieties over the epistemological turbulence caused
by the ubiquity of digitalisation are themselves the displaced instances of the more
fundamental unease experienced over the loss of the real in the Snakes and Ladders
practices of finance Capital whose repercussions have spread virally far beyond the
obvious domains of the business quarter. Labyrinthine complexities of ownership, the
speed-of-light transactions, the fictitious financial products, imaginary capital assets,
the hedges and the futures, the inappropriate selling on of subprime mortgages, the
toxic debts, foreclosed mortgages, and bankrupted businesses, are the true causes and
the real effects of a loss of reality, of a world that can barely be thought. Martins’ real
fictions though are foregrounded—in clear sight. The fictions of Wall Street, Paternos-
ter Row, Nihonbashikabutocho and the Bankenviertel fooled almost everybody.
(5)
Martins interferes in a Real that has already been badly interfered with. His inter-
ference is made visible most dramatically through the use of the sequence of images
of often precariously balanced objects forming assemblages or constructions—I’ll call
them sculptures—erected by Martins in the deserted interiors from out of the debris
and bric-a-brac left behind. The images are distributed through the work, acting as
a kind of dissonant counterpoint against the dominant theme of the panoramic or
formalised imagery of buildings and landscapes. The sculptures resemble the near acci-
dental found assemblages photographed by Richard Wentworth in the streets of Berlin
(Berlin 117), or the playful sculptures of Fischli and Weiss and of the New Zealand
artist Paul Cullen. They are like note-taking with objects; a poetic bricolage. In the way
in which their precariousness mimics that of the buildings all round them, they might
be seen as a form of commentary. Maybe they are the expression of Martins’ desire
to make something out of the uselessness around him, a playful gesture of creativity
against the desolation. For sure, there is an attempt here to evolve a ‘form of visibility’
in which the two contrasting sequences of representation and practice focus our atten-
tion onto the overall madeness of the work as a whole; that is, its fictiveness. They are
markers, the indices of Martins’ activity—the photographs of others’ constructions and
those of his own—as, in both sequences, an arrangement of objects, a manipulation.
They record Martins’ own performance, his inclusion in the world represented, his
responsibility for its depiction. They echo here Jeff Wall’s “gestures of reportage and
performance” (Stimson 2005: 109), his “subjectivised witness” (Rosler 2004: 211). In
the light of this, Martins’ utilisation of digital processes is underscored as no more or
less a manipulation than any of the other processes and strategies he has employed.
(6)
The real has become unreal. The deserted buildings suck presence out of the land-
scape. Some interiors with their uncovered structures and scattered components of
heating and ventilating systems, take on the appearance of gallery installations. Like
the abstractions of the economic system that has brought them to this state they have
become pure forms with no content. Some of the buildings resemble doll’s houses or
miniature model villages. It is not photography that has made them strange but the
economy upon which these houses and interiors were founded—an economy as illu-
sory as the interiors in a Thomas Demand picture.
This Is Not a House produces not a singular truth but a process of truthfully “rec-
omplicating reality” to revisit Paul Auster’s phrase, one embodied in the evidence of
its own beauty and founded in the documentation of its own aesthetics.
00:00.00
BMW AktienGesellschaft (AG) at Munich: R & D centre, car assembly plant. Produc-
tion paused. Industrial time suspended.
Edgar Martins 00:00.00: photography, time exposure, tableaux, XL: remote inten-
sity, photographic time extended, the space of time.
Interiors. Sealed. Filled with permanent light. Machine light. A light that cannot
escape. A light that abolishes time. A black box if not a black hole. Realms of produc-
tion lulled by a camera into apparent immobility and silence; yet a graphical perspec-
tive projects lines of light—though not ‘lines of flight’—that speed towards an unseen
vanishing point out on the roads of the world. The laboratory converges with the
workshop. Dispassionate colour. Immaculate engineering. A material machine Plato-
nism aspiring to a condition free of human presence.
Figure 7.6 Edgar Martins. “Production Line BMW Group Plant Munich (Germany)”. From
00.00.00, 2016.
As noted, Factory is cognate with Fiction, feigning and making. Fiction manufac-
tures Metaphor and metaphor is transportation. Martins’ spaces recall the enclosed
imaginary universes of movie spaceships; the assembly lines like launch pads, slipways
designed to propel craft into the encompassing outside. To this layperson they also
recall images of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider—again speed, time, simulation and
the production of matter and energy.
In a more conceptual vein we might think of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s movie theatres
series in which the photograph abolishes both the time and the image of the cinema as
Sugimoto opened his shutter before the screen for the duration of the film, resulting
in a perfectly blank, bleached out rectangle within the proscenium arch. The erasure
of the ostensible subject of the photograph—the film on the screen—shifts the viewer
towards Hiroshi’s actual goal, a meditation on photography’s relationship with time
(see Green in Green and Lowry 2006: 9–11). In Martins’ 00:00.00 the use of time
exposures does more than resist the temporal flow. The images were achieved either
by using breaks in production or arranging for halts to be made. The time, the global
time of production, was adjourned: a momentary interference at the core of modernity.
Using long exposures of up to 45 minutes, the time normally expended in production
is transmuted into one of the photograph’s constituting substances. Industrial time
becomes aesthetic space. Industrial manufacturing becomes aesthetic production: the
making of a single compacted element, that is, a time-dense image of both visual
power and conceptual resonance.
Actualities. Economies. Descriptions. Depictions. Industry and Photography: Dis-
continuous and Interdependent Modes of Production and Knowledge.
00:00.00 is as much the picturing of a condition as it is of spaces, a reviewing of the
“horizon of possibilities”. It intersects with the best work in the tradition of Industrial
Photography and like that 00:00.00 is far more than a study of industrial forms and
structures. This claim can be raised to greater visibility by seeing Martins’ work in
the raked light of the work of some other photographers of industrial structures and
landscapes.
Industrial Photography has been especially strong in countries where engineering is
given its due respect, above all in Germany and the United States. From the early twen-
tieth century attendant aesthetics developed in both countries in which the architec-
tonics of industrial structures and machine-produced objects and tools were visualised
abstracted from their application as things-in-themselves. For the most part they were
also separated from those whose labour produced them. In the United States, it mani-
fested as the “Precisionist Style”, in the work of Charles Sheeler among others. In early
Figure 7.7 Edgar Martins. “Paint Shop BMW Group Plant Munich (Germany)”. From
00:00.00, 2016.
twentieth-century Germany, the comparable tendencies of Neue Sachlichkeit, and Neu
Optik or Ingenieur Ästhetick (engineer aesthetic) appeared and were famously present
in the imageries of Albert Renger-Patzsch and Max Baur. Such perspectives re-appear
post-war in the work and ideas of Adolf Lazi and Otto Steinert. Steinert’s concept of
“subjektive fotografie” is a shaping presence in Peter Keetman’s 1953 photographs
of the Volkswagen Factory at Wolfsburg. Keetman’s hyper-focused celebrations of
finely worked metal and machine parts, of the processing of raw material into precise,
elegant and functional forms, and his visual intensification of the serial patterns and
rhythms of mass produced components and finished vehicles, echo the work of his
predecessors, Renger-Patzsch and Baur.
As F.C. Gundlach has noted, industrial photography typically attempts to resolve
the terms “technology” and “art”, once equally integral to the Greek word techne
but over time split into estranged contraries (Gundlach in Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg
2003: 153–4). Its aim has been to develop an appropriate visual culture for moder-
nity that can encompass both documentation and aesthetic amplification. Industrial
production, primary energy generation and transportation are seen as modernity’s
affiliated bases and core compulsions. Each has been expressed photographically in
equivalent graphic forms, such as the dynamic diagonal, the power-ascribing low
angle, the domination of the frame by the mass, weight and overwhelming dimensions
of industrial structures. One thinks of Charles Sheeler’s 1927 Crossed-Conveyors at
Ford’s River Rouge Plant, the ur factory for automobile production and model for the
Wolfsburg Volkswagenwerk. Another example would be Renger-Patzsch’s Intersect-
ing Braces of a Truss Bridge of 1928. Where such imagery magnifies the sheer mate-
riality of industrial power, others additionally focus on the process of transformation,
a turn especially pronounced in the depiction of automobile production. In 2013 a
Volkswagen publicist referred to Peter Keetman’s depictions of gleaming formations
of new VWs as, “lichtspuren auf metall” (“light trails on metal”) (http://autogramm.
volkswagen.de/07-08_13/panorama/index.html).
This raises the question not so much of how photography shows its object, but more
of how it transforms it and in so doing thinks it, or thinks through it. In such images,
objects—in this instance, cars—have become luminous, radiant, made of light, indicating
some kind of transfiguration, even sacralisation. There is a suggestion here that alchemy
still inhabits industrial production, as if the conversion of inert ore into an automobile
is some modern chrysopoeia, a transmutation of base matter into a form or substance
of a higher, even metaphysical, value. Metal transubstantiates into light, that is, into
luxuriousness, into a material signifier and instrument of plenitude. Through mobility,
through speed, the car overcomes the material weight of its own origins, dematerialises
into a dream of radical autonomy. “The automobile is another bit of freedom”, declared
the President of the German Automotive Industry Association (cited in Urry 2007: 121).
Beyond the optically amazed scrutinisation of machinery and milled surfaces, the
apotheosis of the industrial process, the fetishisation of the product and occlusion of
the relations of production, more recent industrial photography has offered cooler,
perhaps more sceptical visions. There are, of course, the Becher’s remote typologies
of industrial corpses, or the ubiquitous melancholy genre of the industrial ruin. But
many photographers, notably in Germany, continue to engage with the newer indus-
trial conditions and landscapes. The work of Andreas Gursky and Henrik Spohler
reveal the denatured abstractions and unnervingly infinite seriality of mass production
and distribution. There are the tangled complexities of factory components in Timm
Rautert’s work. The austere anonymity or invisibility of command and production
processes feature in the work of Frank Breuer, Jörg Glascher or Martin Richter (see
essays by Gundlach and Broeker, in Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg 2003). In its dispas-
sionate visual clarity, apparent ethical remoteness and lack of human figures, Martins’
work displays affinities with such photographic practice. This is not humanist photog-
raphy, but the human is present, if only as a question of absence. After all, what we see
are human artefacts and apparatuses. I want to develop this a little further by reflect-
ing on the way that Martins presents the factory as a kind of theatre stage viewed from
someway back in an imaginary auditorium or spectatorium.
This theme has appeared in analogous work. Henrik Spohler’s 1993 study of electric-
ity generating plants, “Transformationen”, is sub-titled, “Schauplätze der Energie” or,
“Theatres of Energy”. Candida Höfer, like Gursky a student of the Bechers, produced a
series of large images of empty Renaissance theatre interiors that are visually organised
in ways comparable to Martins’ BMW photographs. Her 2006 show at Seattle’s Frye
Museum was titled, Theatres of Absence. Beyond its primary reference to dramatic
art, yet retaining its dramatic connotations, the term “theatre” can signify specialised
spaces/contexts where activities are presented, displayed, that is, performed to be seen.
We have theatres of operation and operating theatres. Photography is itself often a
kind of dramatic art; its spaces are spaces of performance or display. Barthes regarded
the medium as, a “close to theatre”, with its origins lying in the “panorama” (Barthes
1982: 31). In the Renaissance European humanity staged itself, re-invented itself and
was produced in the theatre. The theatre was a cultural machine for doing so. Where,
in our phase of modernity, is the condition of humanity being produced? Certainly in
great part it comes into being on the stage of industrial production. A Theatrum Mundi
of our time is the factory and, given the centrality of mobility to the contemporary self,
the car factory might be regarded along with the data processing centre, as its most sig-
nificant embodiment. Martins’ performative spaces are stages awaiting the resumption
of their operations. They are the conditions or the arrangements that will determine
what the actors do when they reappear. Perhaps it is the spaces and the mechanisms
that now are the true actors in the theatre of production increasingly independent of
human agency. The global space-time unity of production and distribution that Capi-
tal has installed is momentarily disaggregated by this work so as to open up a place
in order to see, to reflect, and to see again. As in much of Martins’ work a strangeness
is present within the visually dramatic and seemingly immediate rendering of the real.
Deleuze speaks of art moving from the real to the virtual which is “actualised” not
through resemblance but by means of the rules of, “difference, divergence and of crea-
tion”, so as to produce self-conscious viewing (Deleuze 1988: 97).
00:00.00 offers a set of reflections on the powerful industrial presence that is BMW.
At the same time it does so by means of a troubled and troubling aesthetic prac-
tice. It is a practice that, while acknowledging the beauty of the industrial sublime,
resists absorption by the corporate power that it expresses, and reconfirms the place
of autonomous creativity in the production of contemporary humanity.
Notes
1 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Cape, London, 1996.
2 Syed Manzurul Islam, The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka, Manchester UP,
1996.
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8 The Damage
Photography and the Aesthetics
of Fragility
So waste is elevated into beauty. And the scattered dead unite in one consuming vision
of order.
Louise Glück, “Autumnal”, excerpt from The First Four
Books of Poems by Louise Glück ©1968–1995. Reprinted
by Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers
and Carcanet Press Ltd.
Materiality is an hypostasis of meaning into substance.
Georges Didi-Huberman
Pulvis et umbra sumus.
We are but dust and shadow.
Horace Ode VII
All art is concerned with surface. All art engages centrally with the site or substrate
on which it inscribes its marks, symbols, gestures or sounds. This is most obvious in
the visual arts. The surface is always actual and material even when electronic; and
it is also always virtual and conceptual. Some art aims to render the material surface
transparent, offering entry to a virtual or imaginary domain beyond or below it. Other
practices focus their attention on the physicality of the surface or of their practical
actions as they are applied to the surface. Some aim to change what is meant by sur-
face; some set out to attack it, even to destroy it. Some will use such acts to express or
signify themes other than formal ones.
All of these approaches are to be found throughout the varieties of photographic
practices. This chapter offers some reflections on work taken up with the damaged,
degraded or deliberately assaulted surfaces of photographs where the tension between
the materiality of the photographic process and the rendering of immaterial presences,
people, things, events, that is, the image, is at its most intense. It will argue that the
preoccupation with the damaged or distressed image resonates closely or remotely
with conditions and concerns laying beyond the image.
Photography has long been attracted to images, signs and posters, most commonly
encountered in public spaces, that are in various and interesting states of damage, decay
or decline: split, cracked, crazed, peeling, torn, bleached, scrawled over, mildewed or
half-concealed beneath more recent additions. Intended meanings, effects and designs
will have been diminished, distorted or erased by weather, assault or abandonment.
Original communicative functions will have been all but lost. Like leaves in autumn
The Damage 159
Figure 8.1 Venice: photograph damaged by water.

Source: © 1961, Author’s collection.
they persist for a time increasingly indecipherable, left free to be seen, if seen at all, as
the material embodiments of the provisional character of memory and evidence. They
might remind us that oblivion is the fate of all things and that all things are at some
stage of decline. They might also confirm that the world is not only unstable or pre-
carious but also frequently disappointing and visually disheartening, much of it worn
out, impoverished and dispiriting.
At times such prospects can come to indicate wider themes in a culture. Most eras
have been haunted by their own decline, some believing they may be living in the end
time. William E. Connolly has reflected at length on what he calls “the fragility of
things”, a description that covers the perilous uncertainties at large in the cosmos and
the human-made environment as well as the destructive globalising forces of industri-
alised market economies (Connolly 2013).
And yet such objects and signs can be more than the fearful or melancholy instances
of loss, diminishment or threat. Marc Augé argues that oblivion, which is what they
signal, is not only inevitable but necessary and should be embraced. “One must
160 The Damage
know”, he writes, “how to forget in order to taste the full flavour of the present, of
the moment” (Augé 2004: 3). Perhaps true, but valedictory acceptance is not the only
positive response. The disintegration of photographic representation can become the
basis of live statements and effects. It can induce nostalgic reveries in which the deno-
tative is replaced by the elegiac; be regarded as historical clues or metonyms, evoca-
tory relics from which inferences might be made about the past (Goldthorpe 2000:
30). The latter was a principle guiding Benjamin’s Arcades project. Like tools that are
no longer useful, or the coins of a just-abandoned currency, having been freed from
instrumentality or from exchange, these damaged or declining things can have their
existences as signs and presences extended above all into the realm of the aesthetic.
Eduardo Paolozzi once described one of his working methods as the “metamorphosis
of rubbish” and the Ukranian/Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, expressed the idea that
poetry is made from rubbish. The allure of torn posters and signs on the city walls
invariably stems from their resemblance to artworks. Often they exude the charm and
sometimes the shock of accidental poetry, unintended collage, décollage or automatic
writing. They appear frequently in the work of Surrealist influenced photographers
such as the early Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï. It is the case that their resemblance to
artworks has been determined by the aesthetics of the early twentieth century that
absorbed such elements into its repertoires manifesting the preoccupation with the rise
of mass visual and media cultures one finds from Dada to Benjamin and beyond. And
yet, they also appear to be entities with a life of their own, as though evolving through
their own secret ministries, improvising new textual and visual effects, governed by an
authorship of contingency, that on occasion produces revelatory results.
In this chapter, with such themes and considerations in mind, I want to offer some
reflections on how and why the close engagement with damaged or distressed images
has a significant, almost a commonplace presence in contemporary or near-contem-
porary photographic work. I will discuss how such work engages, not only with both
the edges or limits of the medium, but also how it sometimes produces new kinds of
photographic statements. Additionally I will consider the proposition that the preoc-
cupation with what is after all representation in a state of collapse, extends beyond
aesthetic concerns and resonates with wider social, cultural and philosophical themes.
I will be considering damaged photographs that are both found and those consciously
damaged or despoiled by the photographer.
The first thing to say about these objects is that they are a type of ruin. All ruins,
whether buildings, fragmented documents or weathered posters, represent the loss
of meaning but also its survival, if incomplete. In this sense they are temporal phe-
nomena, slags of time (Lichtenstein 2009, in Tronzo 2009: 115). As fragments, the
remaining parts and tantalising relics and indices of some vanished whole, ruins are
particularly crucial for a modern culture preoccupied with origins, with the deep or
remote foundations of species, language and culture (Rampley 2000, in Coles 2000:
140). Seen in this way, ruins are fractured or distorting mirrors reflecting our own
fragmented and unresolved features.
Ruins attract meaning as they represent its loss. Allegories grow on ruins faster than
weeds. A pile of monastic rubble becomes an abiding Romantic emblem representing
the lingering presence of an original authentic condition of being and at the same
time confirming it as irrecoverable, as lying in a past, writes Andreas Huyssen, “that
can be grasped only in its decay” and which only serves to reveal, he continues, “the
ruinous state of the present” (Huyssen 2011, in Dillon 2011: 52, 53). An abandoned
The Damage 161
car factory, a derelict futuristic housing project, redundant military complexes soon
become the much-photographed Mise-en-Scène of post-industrial mourning and sym-
bol of perceived national decline or failed modernities (Apel 2015; Govia 2014; Lam
2013; Marchand 2010; Moore 2011; Romany 2010). Huyssen sees the ruin invoking
modernity’s darkest fears, articulating, he says, “the nightmare of the Enlightenment
that all history might ultimately be overwhelmed by nature” (Huyssen 2011, in Dil-
lon 2011: 54). The figure of the ruin is present too when Huyssen identifies another
theme when he speaks of a bereaved postmodernism whose only remaining option is,
he says, to “write the ruins”, that is, to offer melancholy descriptions of the collapse
of late twentieth-century thought (Huyssen 2011, in Dillon 2011: 52).
Ruins, then, as Lévi-Strauss once said of food, are good to think with, and like his
conceptual nutriments, the ruin, once named as ruin, morphs from an object into a
sign, from an architectural to a semiotic category, from weather tattered text to poetic
object (Lévi-Strauss 1988).
Jacques Derrida has offered a number of meditations on the logic of the ruin that
might be of some use in our discussion of the damaged or degraded, that is, ruined,
photograph. “In the beginning”, he writes, “there is ruin” (Derrida 1993: 68). This
assertion re-iterates a familiar theme in Derrida’s work that pictures language and
other representations as deferring the objects of their signification, generating a frag-
mented, dispersed and discontinuous field strewn with possible meanings, a plurality
of interpretations something akin to an archaeological site. Any supposed single, uni-
fied and source of originary authenticity and meaning, any Real present anterior to
and independent of signification, is not only unreachable but is in effect the invention
of the signs that aim to capture it. As Rae Armantrout words it in her poem on the
electron, Scale,
Like thought it creates the ground it covers.

(Armantrout 2016: 187)
In the same way that, in Derrida, writing logically precedes speech, the signifying
ruin anticipates the un-demolished original of which it is both remnant and sign. In
the same vein, the image too is a type of ruin, a relic of a past that it too precedes.
Thus self-portraits, he maintains, enact the logic of the ruin, in that they picture the
face that was and no longer is, the face becomes the signifier of its own future ruin.
He writes,
Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin
is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what
remains or returns as a spectre from the moment one first looks at oneself and a
figuration is eclipsed. The figure, the face, then sees its visibility being eaten away;
it loses its integrity without disintegrating.
(Derrida 1993: 68)
When Andreas Huyssen spoke of “writing the ruins” it is likely that this melan-
choly scepticism inhering in Derrida’s observations is the kind of thing he had in mind
(Huyssen 2011).
If we consider his more direct engagements with photography, there are two ways in
which Derrida conceives of the medium’s implication with the ruin. Firstly, photography
162 The Damage
depicts ruins in advance. This activity of fixing what must in time age, deteriorate, die
or be demolished is characterised by him in discussion with Catherine Malabou as a,
“mourning before a death” (Malabou and Derrida 2004: 107). And death accompa-
nies many of his musings on photography. It is present when in his characterisation of
the medium as essentially “spectral”, one stalked by the persistent dead, by absence
(Derrida 2010: xxxvii). More profoundly, it is likely that central concepts in his work
associated with the undecidability of meaning, supplement, dissemination and diffé-
rance, are, writes Eric L. Santner, citing Charles Bernheimer, the “diacritical avatars
of the death instinct”. Santner adds, that for Derrida, “every speech act is, in a sense,
some such vibration of the void” (Santner 1993: 11). Secondly, Derrida characterises
photography as a maker of ruins. His interlocutor Hubertus von Amelunxen states,
“The photograph fragments and ruins space” (Derrida 2010: 4; see also Malabou
and Derrida 2004: 107–8). There are echoes here of Maurice Blanchot when Blanchot
writes of the image as being, “present behind each thing and in some sense the dissolu-
tion of that thing and its continuance in its dissolution” (Blanchot 1981: 80). Photog-
raphy is an attack on the real. It replaces it with the uncertainty of representation. It
brings it to a halt, forces it back, breaks into it, breaks it into pieces, makes a ruin of it
and thereby imposes on us the task of speculating on its meaning. Drawing on Walter
Benjamin rather than Derrida, Eduardo Cadava endorses the view that photography is
a fragmenting and destructive intervention into things. “Truth,” he writes,
means the making of ashes . . . there can be neither truth nor photography without
ashes . . . like allegory, both take place only in a sate of decay, in a state that moves
away from itself in order to be what it is.
Cadava continues: “[P]hotography’s truth is a ‘site’ wherein photography is both,

destroyed and conserved”, the photograph is itself a ruin, an “image of a petrified
forest”, like allegory it, “signifies precisely the non-being of what it presents” (Cadava
1997: 22–23).
While photography enacts some kind of symbolic violence on the real—something
akin to an act of negation that Sartre’s phenomenology’s maintains makes it possible
to imagine and reflect on the real—it is a bruiser with a glass jaw, essentially fragile.
It can hold down an image of most fleeting phenomena yet its material and technical
processes are inherently and incessantly flawed, prone to mishaps and breakdowns.
A photograph is a material image—that, in Sartre’s words, “serves as analogue of
the manifestation of the imagined object” (Sartre 2001: 94). As a material form it
is vulnerable: chemicals decompose, mechanisms and lenses malfunction. Sunlight,
moisture and opportunistic organisms cause prints to disintegrate. Overuse exhausts
negatives. Even digital files can spring a glitch, their codes scramble. The failure to
sustain visual traces permanently has been as much part of the content of photogra-
phy’s history, and perhaps of its ontology, as has its prowess in succeeding to do so.
The medium’s early history is thronged with stories of the tenuousness of the first
photographic presences. Fading rather than fixing was the norm. Much of the delicate
beauty celebrated in the Daguerreotype was seen to lie in its frangibility, its tragic
impermanence (Gernsheim and Gernsheim 1956; McDonald 2015). If the photograph
is a sign, it is a very mortal one.
When a photograph is damaged or corroding, signification begins to fall away, back
into its own material foundation, into silent granularity. And yet, almost to the end,
The Damage 163
as though becoming its own real, the deteriorating photograph will remain a repre-
sentation—if only of its own dereliction. More positive possibilities exist if such an
image is regarded as transformed rather than extinguished. Brian Dillon argues that
while a ruin might be viewed as a site, “of melancholy or mourning” it can be seen
alternatively as one of
radical potential—its fragmentary unfinished nature is an invitation to fulfill the

as yet unexplored temporality that it contains.
(Dillon 2011: 18)
The photograph as ruin can be utilised to bring about notable insights, if not always
welcome ones, which deepen our comprehension of the medium and its possibilities
and act as a compelling analogue of concerns and actualities in the world beyond the
image. Disintegrating photographs re-awaken us to the medium’s “utopian promises”
in the moment they are about to become undeliverable: the confirmation of the real;
the founding of truth. Like the surge of light energy released in the last moments of
a collapsing star, on the verge of the complete loss of all signification, the moribund
photograph seems to discharge new meanings. James Elkins observes that it is in its
state of decay that the medium most fully reveals its brute reality of silicon and rock
(Elkins 2011: 14, 19, 48). This process of materialised oblivion invokes more funda-
mental fears concerning the disintegration of sense extending, perhaps, to anxieties
associated with the breaching of the sheltering symbolic system we inhabit. “Fear
surrounds language”, writes Rae Armantrout in her poem, Context, meaning, I think,
that flickering around all signs and statements is a presentiment that all descriptions
and interpretations are provisional and unstable. Mircea Eliade sees religious practices
as responses to the terror of chaotic otherness, of the nothingness of an undescribable
and inexplicable cosmos which has become, he writes, “ruin, disintegration, death”,
leaving the subject bereft of what he calls, “ontic substance” (Eliade 1987: 49, 64).
Engaging with a sign on the verge of dereliction represents the possible encounter with
just that, with what Georges Bataille calls “radical alterity” which resides somehow
both within the self and in the objective surrounding world. In a culture that for the
most part no longer seeks to propitiate gods through rituals such as sacrifice, art rep-
resents a means of engaging with such fears. The utilisation of an assaulted or ruined
image can be seen as a form of sacrifice, as the surrendering of one kind of representa-
tion along with its illusory certainties in exchange for the possibility of new clarities
and forms being brought about. Besides, even hostile assaults on photographs invari-
ably fail to destroy significance. Some set out to damage them consciously: trying to
destroy evidence of guilt, or scratching out a hated face, or cutting out a betraying
spouse. A haunting example of the latter would be an image from the Shehrazade/
Hashem el Madani Studio in the Lebanon of the 1950s. It is a probably self-directed
studio portrait of a Lebanese woman made discreetly, away from potentially hostile
social or familial inspection. In the image that has come down to us, her features
and her body are violently scored and lacerated by, we learn, the furious husband on
discovering the image. Distressingly, the near destruction of the woman’s image antici-
pates the eventual destruction of the woman herself (Le Feuvre and Zaatari 2004).
This continuity between the obliteration of the image and the destruction of the
actual human subject has its political iteration in the Soviet Union during the Great
Terror of the 1930s. The Soviet photographer Alexander Rodechenko was required
164 The Damage
to do this, blotting out with black ink the features of those from his Uzbekistan pic-
tures who’d been designated as “non-persons” and then liquidated (that is, murdered)
by the NKVD under the infamous Order 00447 (King 1997; Dillon 2006). Unless
the image is utterly destroyed such actions simply re-complicate the representation,
amplify its connotations and deepen our desire to retrieve some knowledge of the
abolished person. The repressed return as the traces of symbolic acts of power. The
black ink that buried the identities of the victims now becomes the darkness of the
regime that obliterated them. In this way an anti-archive comes into being.
Photographs are sometimes damaged as acts of endearment. Lovers forced to sepa-
rate have been known to divide each other’s image in two, each keeping one half until
the day that they and the image might be re-united. We learn that illegal migrant
workers crossing borders and mountain ranges used to leave half of their picture
behind with families and on successfully getting through would mail their half back to
show they were still alive (Berger and Mohr 1975).
Photographs are often not so much damaged as cancelled when they are injured by
officialdom’s stamping, clipping or cutting and their value as testament of civic exist-
ence bleeds out. In “Identity Photograph”, one of Hervé Guibert’s lapidary accounts
that make up his Ghost Image, Guibert relates his having photographs made for a new
identity card. He ponders how profoundly he has changed in the 10 years since his old
ID card was issued, a change condensed in the differences between the self in the old
picture and the one in its replacement. In issuing the new card the clerk informs him
that he cannot have the old picture back as it was to be filed attached to a record card.
The disappointed Guibert then observes how the clerk has stapled the old picture right
through the face as if assaulting his selfhood. “And there it was”, he writes, “like a
sign”. The photograph has been re-written. The staple is an administrative device, a
weapon in Guibert’s eyes, and the signifier of an act. The injury both abolishes the
old self and at the same time conserves it but now fettered in an archival cell of the
bureaucracy. There is a broad connotation here, that of the legitimated violence of
the state, its power to name and un-name that recalls Allan Sekula’s contention that
“Every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police”
(Sekula1992, in Bolton 1992: 346). It also brings to mind the preoccupation of Michel
Foucault, a close friend of Guibert’s, with the conflict between the bureaucratic polic-
ing of identity and the free subject’s desire to inhabit a more protean selfhood. Yet,
where Foucault resists the discursive practices of subjectification, Guibert sees identity
as an anguished, fragile and frequently imprecise process of becoming. Think of the
blurry self-portrait, place and date completely forgotten; or the “Cancerous Photo-
graph” whose decomposition mirrors or anticipates, if not Guibert’s own descent into
terminal illness, then certainly his own fear of it. This then is magical thinking—the
performance of an ancient ritual whereby illness or sin might be transferred onto
something or someone else—or a whimsical iteration of the Dorian Grey tale. Of
course there is no sense that Guibert believed in either of these.
It is photographs themselves that are eliminated in Bill McDowell’s Killed, a project
which disinters a number of photographs from the FSA archive that the director Roy
Streicher had rejected and with that other weapon of the office, a paper punch, cut a
hole through which memory would drain out. McDowell shows how any archive is
in part founded on some kind of systematic and necessary forgetting. The question
always remains as to who has the authority to administer the forgetting, and what
is the criteria for selecting the excisions. There is always the possibility of another
archive constructed under different principles. Killed is one of them.
The Damage 165
In the mid- to late-twentieth century, as Modernism ceased to go unchallenged, the
visual arts became replete with examples of artists damaging or erasing artworks,
including their own—Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucio Fontana, Jean Tinguely,
Edward Paolozzi all easily come to mind. And Bill Morrison’s entire 2003 film, Deca-
sia—the State of Decay, to take one non-photographic example, is an orchestration
of part-ruined film footage in which events and people become rhythmically engulfed
by avalanches of corroded emulsion resembling nothing less than blooms of magnified
microbiol cultures.
Aaron Siskind’s compositions utilised damaged or marked surfaces that existed
in the material world he photographed. Although his work differs from that which
involves action directly onto or about the photographic surface his aesthetic was
hugely influential. Siskind was an associate of American Abstract Expressionism one
of the last turns of a presiding Modernism. Its is in the decades that followed its domi-
nance, when contemporary art fragmented and multiplied and developed new anxie-
ties about the purpose and effectiveness of art, that we encounter the stressed—to use
Nigel Henderson’s term—or damaged photograph as a frequent theme (Walsh 2001:
28–37). It was a frequency for the most part anticipated in the work of significant
groups of artists in the 1950s and 1960s whose work represented a direct attack on
the picture plane and indeed on the difference between the art object and the world
beyond. Groups such as the Nouveaux Réalistes in France, the Gutai movement in
Japan and Arte Povera movement in Italy, variously featured the injuring, ruptur-
ing even the burning of the artwork’s surface (Cullinan 2012; Handa-Gagnard 2012;
Schimmel 2012b; Spoeri 1997). Paul Schimmel describes their practice as, “a language
for the unsettled world”. He establishes a link between the chosen themes of deterio-
ration and of violence-displaced-into-art and the postwar context of memories scarred
by conflict and occupation, by the experience of past and abiding dictatorship and by
social disintegration and estrangement (Schimmel 2012b: 193).
Reflecting themes and issues in both the work of these artists and in the photo-
graphic material we will be considering, Gianni Vattimo uncovers three motifs pre-
sent in much of contemporary art practice, themes historically already apparent but
increasing in intensity in the last half century or so. The damaged and stressed image
can be seen as their embodiment. Firstly, Vattimo identifies a deepening of the uncer-
tainty of the artist’s position in the world, expressed in the foregrounding of aesthetic
processes, materials and materiality at the expense of subject matter; the question-
ing of authorship through a surrendering to material processes or chance. Secondly,
and reflecting the first theme, Vattimo maintains that it is the relationship between
the artist and her or his “means of expression” that dominates modern art. Thirdly,
he argues that the poetics of the twentieth century, impelled by a “polemic against
tradition”, has come to be dominated by a will to negation and destruction, a poet-
ics characterised by the par destruens rather than the par construens (Vattimo 2008:
35). Nicholas Cullinan cites Georges Bataille’s contention that modern art began with
Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia, a work that he thought negated the mythical Olym-
pus the title invokes. Bataille writes, “the picture obliterates the text, and the meaning
of the picture is not in the text but in the obliteration of the text” (Bataille 1983: 62,
66, and quoted in Cullinan 2012: 232).
While photography is as shaped by artistic currents as painting and sculpture, when
discussing the use of the damaged photograph we need to be clear about what is
affected that is specific to the medium. In most instances still, photography is based
on some kind of reference to an object, figure or scene that appeared before or in the
166 The Damage
camera, even if the work is questioning the possibility or plausibility of photographic
reference itself. Patrick Maynard identifies two what he calls “cognitive applications”
on which photography’s association with realism is based: the “depictive”, or repre-
sentational function, with its claim to having transparent access to its object; and the
“manifestation” function based on contact with its object (Maynard 2000: 120, 129,
247). When a photograph is damaged the “depictive” function is potentially rendered
derelict whereas if such an image is, as it were, re-inserted into the system of visual
culture, especially as a primarily aesthetic statement, the “manifestation” function is
likely to be enhanced though displaced onto the photograph itself as the object. In
the damaged photograph the clouds of dispersed dyes and chemicals announce the
material nature of the surface. Rips, stains, scratches and smears are marks of work,
of direct manual actions on the body of the photograph. For the viewer their presence
renders the photograph palpable. The seeing of the original object is undermined, the
contact with the object also. However, a contact with the process and practice of the
activity of photography is magnified and can demand of the viewer a more conscious
reflection on the construction of the image. The effect can be utilised in works that
combine this kind of reflexivity with a commitment to themes in the world beyond
image, book or gallery.
A recent example can be found in work by the Swedish artist, Jenny Nordquist, in
which the undermining of representation becomes the basis of a new representation.
In her 2014 series, Leaving No Shadow in the Mirror, Nordquist features a number
of landscape photographs which are afflicted by some kind of corrosion, a canker
perhaps brought on by damp.
Composition and decomposition coincide. And yet, while mould and disintegration
disrupt one kind of representation—the prospect of a distant lake and mountain—
another representation comes into being. Nordquist’s work frames two conditions:
one is the illusional effect of a photographic image of nature in the process of being
overtaken by the apparently unsignifying materiality of its own substrate. The other is
the documentation of actual photographic damage that becomes recomposed into an
artwork, a meditation on itself, by virtue of being exhibited in the aesthetic space/insti-
tution of the gallery. The material truth of photography, normally concealed beneath
the image, emerges as does the material reality of the photograph’s referent, that is,
the perilous force of the wintry, mountainous landscape that irrupts with immediacy
into the contemplative and distancing picturesque image in the form of the destruc-
tive effects of water and weathering. There is an equivalence thus established between
image and damage bringing about a work that combines the elegiac with the reflexive.
Utilising a damaged photograph, whether found or made, is to surrender the pho-
tograph to the effects of what it depicts. The British photographer, Stephen Gill, pho-
tographed sites and objects in and around a delimited area in North East London. He
then buried the resulting Chromogenic prints in the same area. After some time they
were exhumed and shown and published in book form (Gill 2006).
All were radically transformed, reshaped by rain, soil, organisms and general deli-
quescence: the paper coming apart, the chemical compounds separating, the colours
spilling out, various forms morphing curiously. They had become the simulations of
flawed or injured eyesight, eyes afflicted by fragments, or disease, of vision being
washed away. At the same time the waves and sludge that almost engulf the image
have the quality of some irresistible, transformative energy. It would appear that the
photographer has surrendered authorship to another kind of creativity. The resulting
The Damage 167
Figure 8.2 Jenny Nordquist. “Untitled”. From Leaving No Shadow in the Mirror, 2014.
Source: © Jenny Nordquist 2014 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
images are in one sense damaged, injured, ruined. In another sense, some organic
metamorphosis has taken place as if by planting them in the soil new photographs
have germinated. Gill speaks of being interested in bringing in the physical effects of
the environment he is photographing. In another improvisational work, Outside In,
he introduced into the camera itself odds and ends from the areas in Brighton where
he was working—damaging a number of cameras in the process. The objects included
ice, insects, scraps of netting, leaves and other detritus.
All these examples are demonstrations of how engagements with the damaged or
assaulted photograph can bring about a range of insights and effects: re-working
authorship by sacrificing some of its controlling power to chance and nature; fore-
grounding the material nature of photography as a way of anatomising the medium,
of separating image and process, thereby initiating critical insights into the practice,
168 The Damage
Figure 8.3 Stephen Gill. From Buried, 2006.

Source: © Stephen Gill 2006 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
permitting new significations and pleasures to be made possible. Such practices bring
out the precariousness of all representation and then reveal its eternal return—for the
loss of representation is not the loss of photography but the production of a repre-
sentation that looks on itself. We can recall here Derrida’s conviction that aesthetic
experience requires the opening up of “the medium to its own alterity” its “non
The Damage 169
self-identity and internal self-differentiation” (Richter 2010: xxi). The photograph
contains what it is not and that recognition represents either the theme or the formal
device of significant work featuring the damaged artefact.
It might be argued that utilising the damaged photograph is before anything else a
display of anxiety about the demise of photographic realism itself—as a kind of aes-
thetic self-harming. Or it could be seen as an act of mourning for a possibly unachiev-
able indexicality in a digitalised culture that has naturalised manipulation (see Roberts
2008: 163). Seen in this way the ruined photograph may be taken as a relic, the part
object of a vanished truth telling. But it seems to me that the anxieties playing out in
this kind of practice can be shown to be ways of working through such uncertain-
ties in order to engage in new ways with themes in the social world. Paul Schimmel
speaks of the Nouveaux Réalistes making representations on the lip of the “void”
where lay darkness and silence, as expressing something more than some modish sub-
Existentialism in that their work was motivated and shaped by the real concerns and
perilous actualities that dominated the post-war period (Schimmel 2012b: 187–190).
But, as Schimmel is at pains to emphasise, the preoccupation with the void was not an
expression of despair and nihilism as, he argues, the void was also “a space of poten-
tiality” (Schimmel 2012b: 188). We can look at more contemporary work in the same
way. By the very process of engaging with the limits of representation, by surpassing
worn out forms, more recent work has developed approaches capable of looking more
effectively into the face of an often destructive social reality by means of an imagery
that has been damaged by its often disfiguring subject matter.
Common throughout such work is the theme of the loss of readability: of the image
and of the social world itself. Readability and recognition are strong themes in the
work of the Hong Kong photographer So Hing Keung. In 1997, after almost 160 years
of being both an invention and a colony of the British Empire, Hong Kong returned to
Chinese sovereignty as a semi-autonomous region. However, for many in Hong Kong,
mainland China was and remains both familiar and strange—and even unwelcome.
Part of the legacy of British rule is the inheritance of many cultural, political and
practical elements that distinguish Hong Kong from the rest of the Peoples’ Republic.
Democracy is certainly a vexed question there. Some in Hong Kong speak of being
de-colonised in 1997, then instantly re-colonised by Beijing. Even after 20 years many
there still feel stranded in an in-between space, exiled within two forms of alienation.
From this perspective of an unrealised post-colonial subject, Hong Kong is experienced
as both vivid in its headlong commercial modernity and yet, somehow insubstantial,
hard to see or understand. Hong Kong, some say, is in a state of slow disappearance.
So’s series of worked-over photographs, This Mortal Coil: Alienated Urban Land-
scape, is a response to this. Drawing on experiments he made with Polaroid film, his
depictions of Hong Kong’s high-rise buildings, monuments, squares and work-driven
crowds are overlaid with violent scorings and with what appear to be acid stains and
chemical searings resembling cellular smears. The edges of the prints break up or fade
off. Hong Kong’s modernity looks as if it is decaying, diseased. And beneath a screed
of yellow/brown toning the city becomes spectral, appearing to recede, dreamlike into
another time, a scarred and fading memory. It is a series that recalls the phantom
crowds motif in Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows, a depiction of early post-Soviet
Saint Petersburg with its sense of a near-complete loss of reality. If Tintarenko’s pho-
tography is haunted, So’s is anguished, even furious. In a monograph on So, Oscar Ho
reports that the photographer sought to register a comparable unreality stealing over
Hong Kong and, in So’s words, “to express my agony towards this city” (Ho 2008: 3).*
170 The Damage
Much of the work of the Colombian photographer, Fernell Franco, is a lamentation
for the loss of his city, Cali, where, from the 1970s onwards, beloved buildings and
popular neighbourhoods were being demolished, to be replaced with office blocks and
expensive apartments. Franco’s work expresses an intense regret at the disappearance of
valued and idiosyncratic architectures and at the indifference to any diversity of beauty
in the city it signaled. Perhaps more dismaying for him was the attendant abolition of
those unplanned, local and often marginal places of assembly, such as the billiard halls,
cheap food and drink stalls and cafés, even street corners and bordellos where different
classes gathered, where subcultures, proletarians, criminals and artists might rub shoul-
ders. Doubtless, there is a bohemian and somewhat masculine romanticism expressed
in aspects of this vision, but such spaces offered to some autonomous modes of being
in the city. These are the sort of places that constitute the domain the political scientist,
Benjamin Arditi, has as noted earlier, called “the Social”, places, spatial practices and
ways of living that refuse absorption by the master plan. The “Social” is a domain that
exceeds the categories and control of the official, organised and integrated modernity
he termed, “Society” (Arditi 1987). In this respect Fernell’s Cali can be compared to the
spaces in Sergio Larrain’s Valparaiso, or Pablo Ortiz Monasterio’s Mexico City (Larrain
2017; Monasterio 1995). As the result of a wave of a certain kind of modernisation, and
out of the desire among the better off for security in violent times, Cali was becoming
zoned, gated and more systematically separated by class, income and function.
The series, Demoliciones from the 1980s, is a sad photography of walls invaded by
mould, broken barrios whose streets are thronged with departures, and once grand
mansions now gutted and inhabited by shadows. As though seeking some kind of con-
solation in creativity, Franco encounters in the dereliction a poetry of remnants—lyrical
Figure 8.4 Fernell Franco. From Demoliciones, 1995.

Source: © 1995 Fernell Franco (Snr. Franco’s work is reproduced by kind permission of Vanessa Franco/
Fundación Fernell Franco).
The Damage 171
geometries, a tree sketched on a ruined inside wall; some script-like markings, prob-
ably accidental; faded calculations on what may have been a notice board—all traces
of recently lost cultures and interiors still transmitting messages. But they are already
indecipherable. Old Cali soon becomes archaeology. Franco’s intense identification
with the tearing up of his city is mirrored in his practice of ripping up his prints and
reassembling them with the tears showing (Retratos de Ciudad). It finds its most literal
equivalence in his fractured self-portraits made by capturing his reflection in the dirty
glass of broken windows and decorations.
One pictures him in a print that has been roughly scored, perhaps torn, along reg-
ular grid lines. The re-assembled image appears made of tiles, referencing building
materials or the reticulated layout of the Roman castrum, the model of many Latin
American city plans. Two principles collide in this image: on the one hand the imposi-
tion of a rigid kind of organisation, and on the other the suggestion of a consequential
disorder—for the tiles look as if they are coming loose, about to fall. The image, the
self and the city are disintegrating. Existential Space is rupturing.
In Walid Raad’s 2002 series, We decided to let them say, “we are convinced”, the
trauma of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 is not only documented by a set
of photographs, it occupies the images themselves. Badly stored for 20 years Raad
reports retrieving the overexposed, scratched and maculated images to form part of
Figure 8.5 Fernell Franco. c1985 “Autorretrato”, 1985.

Source: © Fernell Franco.
172 The Damage
Figure 8.6 © 1990 Fernell Franco. Autorretrato De Los Ochenta.

Source: © 1990 Fernell Franco.
the Atlas Group’s factual-fictional archive. As Alan Gilbert observes, the viewer is
asked not only, “to observe this trauma but also to participate in its effects”, which
includes the near ruin of the representations, and to, “undergo the same disturbances
and breaches in communication that trauma instigates” (Gilbert 2007: in Braun 2007:
123). In short the damaged photograph is both evidence and symptom (Gilbert 2007:
in Braun 2007: 121). However this divides our response to the work between the
forensic and the pathological as well as the aesthetic, and potentially debilitates any
coherent political response.
Violent forces and events visit injury and loss on peoples’ ordinary lives. This is
powerfully, if obliquely, visualised in Patrick McCoy’s ALBUM, a collection of badly
damaged or degraded domestic photographs recording, in most cases, family or group
events and weddings found discarded on Belfast streets. In some photographs the
human subjects are barely present: shadows fading among chemical dissolution. In
some a few figures survive, remain visible, whereas others have been lost, buried in the
erosion overtaking the same print. These are familiar instances of the impermanence
The Damage 173
of both life and its images one encounters in this kind of work. There is too the rec-
ognisable but still affecting beauty, the strange pleasure found in the way the repre-
sentative modulates towards abstraction, in how social reference is abandoned for
the aesthetic with its mineral colours, its accidental mimicking of a painterly surface,
the palpability the markings bring to that surface. There are comparable qualities
in David Maisel’s celebrated Library of Dust, which depicts a series of metal tins
whose oxidised surfaces have become decorated in a range of intense colours. When
informed that inside each tin are the ashes of a one-time patient of an Oregon psy-
chiatric hospital, an individual possibly long forgotten and abandoned to anonymity
in a remote store cupboard, visual pleasure seems inappropriate, almost offensive
and yet remains irresistible. There is in McCoy’s Album something of the same ten-
sion between such pleasures of looking and the possibly unhappy, or even violent
circumstances that brought about the discarding or damage of the photographs and
the meanings that might be assigned to their degraded condition. One image shows a
young woman on her wedding day, barely smiling, nervous perhaps. She holds flow-
ers. Everything is secure, in order. Everything has most likely followed the ritual’s
required conventions. And yet, the surface of the photograph is covered with striae
and deep scorings as if the print has been dragged along the ground. They resemble
the marks of a side collision along the flanks of a car. There is an immediate sense of
violence having been applied to the image, and a sense of something unjust having
occurred. Paul Tebbs describes this assault as a kind of defilement; though in this case
a defilement, he writes, “accrued contingently. The pattern of marks . . . has occurred
without an intentional purpose or design” (Tebbs 2000: 14). This is probable and yet
once a decision is made to retrieve the image from oblivion all of its elements includ-
ing the lacerations become intentional. When re-circulated, displaced from whatever
situation wherein it originally functioned, it becomes the focus of different readings,
including speculations on the cause or meaning of the injuries. One reading might
regard the assaulted image as representing a more determined actuality, that is the
political and sectarian violence that would have surrounded and perhaps engulfed the
lives of people like her. That is to say the terms of the condition in which these photo-
graphs were made were set by the conflict still underway until the late 1990s. Thus, to
read these images in purely formal or phenomenological terms would be to disavow
this actuality. McCoy is not merely reproducing damaged photographs nor is he sim-
ply rescuing them. His project amounts to an act of re-signification, of transformation.
Being anonymous the subjects have become translated from the grammar of private
events into the language of an extensive social condition. At the same time, the images
retain their connection with the intensive particular: that person, in one moment in
time, in that place. McCoy, then, gives visibility to the being of people subjected to the
turbulence of history, revealing how the mutilating violence of Northern Ireland’s civil
war once inscribed itself deeply into the everyday worlds and rituals of its citizens. The
damage is not on these peoples’ photographs but within their lives.
Like Lévi-Strauss’s mythologies domestic albums are also, “instruments for the
obliteration of time” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 16). They assemble and preserve the memory
of what must one day be scattered. They are elegiac and also tentative celebrations
of immortality. They impose on the randomness and discontinuity of life the neces-
sity and order of narrative, calendar and ritual. In the album, everyday lived time,
chronos, becomes the mythic time of the family’s grand narrative, kairos, in which
the individual life and all its fleeting moments and appearances become indispensable
174 The Damage
constituents of an unspecified teleological course that transcends them. Consequently,
the destruction or dumping of a domestic album is catastrophic in that primary mean-
ing of the sudden end of a drama. The family may have fallen out, grown careless
about itself or ceased to reproduce. It may, though, have been extinguished or rav-
aged by external events. In his photographs of the Rwanda genocide Gilles Peress
included among the bones and bodies of the victims is a page from a photo album
belonging, presumably, to one of the countless murdered families, an album which has
been trashed and probably buried. In Peress’s book, located between scenes of terrible
atrocities, this page acts as a sort of interval, a momentary pause in the onslaught of
unnerving imagery. But it offers no respite. Instead it shifts the viewer’s engagement
with the subject from that of something akin to shock towards a response that lies
closer to sorrow. The album appears to have contained the customary repertoire of
friends and family portraits, domestic events and celebrations. Its destruction com-
pletes the genocidal massacre with symbolic murder: the erasure of all traces of the
dead, the eradication of an everyday cosmos, the denial of the salvation of remem-
brance. Given that such albums are more like shrines than archives, performances of
goodness, testaments to a belief in a modest paradise, their destruction is an act of
desecration. The surrounding hecatombs strewn with skulls and desiccated corpses
risk inducing in the viewer a distancing repulsion as much as outrage. The dead are
objects, the ultimate otherness, an abjection hard to identify with. This photograph
of the ruined album, with its torn and sullied figures, their “ceremonies of innocence”
stamped on, presents us with the faces, lives and hopes of living individuals before
their impending fate, people who are identifiable and identifiable with. If we are taken
by the album’s poignancy, it is a response that soon turns into an outrage reconfirmed
and deepened.
In 2011 the eastern coast of Japan was subjected to a powerful earthquake which
caused a tsunami. In some places the ocean surged inland for 6 miles, killing upwards
of 20,000 people, mostly through drowning, and all but bringing about a nuclear
cataclysm at the Fukushima power station. The town of Otsuchi lost around 8,000
people, maybe half its population.
In his photographic essay on the after effects of the disaster, Otsuchi Future Memo-
ries, the Argentinean photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg memorialises the missing
of the town, giving over much of the book to his images of the photographs and
photographic albums of local people that had been retrieved from the mountainous
debris left when the waters receded. All show people individually or in groups in a
range of contexts and activities, from domestic scenes and proto-selfies, through to
public and official portraits, picturings of holidays, sports and religious events. The
selection indicates a whole society from infants to the elderly—but the people are lost.
For the photographs are badly damaged, sodden and corroded by salt water. Areas of
the emulsion have been washed away, or transformed into polychromatic soups. In
some photographs faces have almost vanished. In others, the figures are surrounded
by clouds and undulations of obliterating materiality. These images and albums most
likely belonged to the drowned. The injured bodies of the representations become the
analogies of their subjects’ fates. By reproducing the dereliction of the photographs
Chaskielberg has pictured the victims in the condition of their disappearance, of their
destruction—of whom they became in the moments they ceased to be. They look back
at us like dead souls, ghosts not quite departed, from another time beyond the time
and situation they had imagined was being documented. They exist now in between
The Damage 175
Figure 8.7 Alejandro Chaskielberg. Otsuchi Future Memories, 2015. (Original in colour.)
Source: © Alejandro Chaskielberg 2015 (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
the two temporalities implied in Chaskielberg’s title: in the already memorialised

past and in all future recallings of that past. These are not the photographs they had
intended. They are the photographs they will never see. For the viewer, they do more
than reproduce the likenesses of these people. The disfigurements of the photographs
are the physical inscriptions of the event that destroyed those depicted. It is therefore
a kind of narration. Chaskielberg’s photographs confirm that the vanished citizens of
Otsuchi will always be remembered and defined as having died in the “2011 Tohoku
Earthquake”. As viewers we survive their fate so as to reflect on it. Like the novel in
Benjamin’s evaluation, these images are significant not merely because they present to
us the fate’s of others but, “ because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which
consumes it, yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate” (Benja-
min 1970: 101).
All photography is concerned in some fashion with memory—is a form of memory.
Barthes maintains that’s its nature is, “not to represent but to memorialise” (Barthes
2002: 194).
A set of images titled The Lost Pictures by the California-based artist Allan de
Souza illustrates both the centrality and the impermanence of memory and therefore
the arguably shifting character of identity. The De Souza family’s history was shaped
176 The Damage
Figure 8.8 Allan de Souza. “Arbor”. From series The Lost Pictures, 1962–2005. Digital print.
Source: © Allan de Souza. Courtesy of the artist and Talwar Gallery, NY.
by colonial and post-colonial determinations. Of Goan heritage, the family migrated

to Kenya shortly before the country ceased to be a British colony. De Souza spent his
early childhood there in the milieu of the Asian professional classes. Later the family
moved to England, and much later De Souza himself relocated to California. He cre-
ated the images in this work by leaving family photographs taken during the Kenya
years in his kitchen, shower and bathroom to be soiled, blemished or drenched in
abrasives by the functions and mishaps of everyday activities. The resulting flaking
and fading images were scanned and printed as we see them. Instead of reproduc-
ing the idealised appearance of the family as a perfectly recalled permanence, free of
time and history, de Souza’s images picture a materialised duration in which the past
is present and yet forever receding as experienced time continuously dissolves and
resolves towards a future, as if the photographs now display the traces of consecutive
temporalities. The past is persistent yet less and less recognizable as the impairments
brought about by distance, displacement and diminishing recall are inscribed onto
the original photographs in the form of the material degradations. The bleaching, for
example, is physical but, as with “semantic bleaching”, the photographs’ semiotic
intensity—their resemblance and access to the past-real—is compromised, in this case
so as to shift focus onto the question of transformation and loss rather than on a fixed
documentation. While the work operates at the level of personal and familial history,
the wider themes of migration and re-settlement also inhabit it. The Lost Pictures is
a photography of diasporic chronotypes, of fluid time-spaces shaped by the currents
of history and their destructive and transformative consequences. At the core of the
work there is a collision between two sets of moments: the moments of the making of
The Damage 177
the photographs in 1960s Kenya, and the historically, spatially and temporally distinct
moments of engagement with the images decades later. Migration, mobility, relocation
and re-settlement have produced an estranged and dense visibility. On one hand, it is
like the clouded seeing of a cataracted eye, and on the other the visual deprivation pro-
duces an insight that discloses the past as increasingly incommensurate with a present
that is left to reflect on the deepening complexity and absence of its own origins. (See
also the comparable work of Odette England.)
The loss of visibility or rather of recognition features centrally in Sam Ivin’s series,
Lingering Ghosts. It comprises a number of head portraits of asylum seekers, sus-
pended, as the title suggests, in the liminal spaces of detention centres at the edges
of airports and cities awaiting the outcome of entry applications. The photographs
resemble passport pictures and the book’s cover mimics the design of a British pass-
port. These are not then portraits abstracted from their context. They are of people
subject to the impenetrable and frequently damaging procedures and categories gov-
erning the management of immigration.
Figure 8.9 Sam Ivin/Fabrica. “Nigeria 2015. Time waiting for asylum 10 years”. From Linger-
ing Ghosts, 2016.
Source: © 2016 Sam Ivin/Fabrica (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer).
178 The Damage
Much of each subject’s face has been disfigured by Ivin, sliced away with a Stanley
knife (box-cutter) or abraded using sandpaper. The damage has rendered some faces
insubstantial, shrouded in a sort of white fog. Conversely, in other instances, rather
than lessening the corporeal presence of the face, the violence applied manually to
the image surface, intensifies it. Ivin has combined the visual with the haptic, the
photographic with a palpable gesture—a performance originating from outside of the
image. This is important, as it dramatises in aesthetic terms what occurs in the actual
bureaucratic or social worlds where the asylum seeker risks facing loss or injury:
either the near-abolition of identity, that is invisibility, or actual physical assault. In
almost every image the eyes are obliterated symbolising the destruction of the point
through which two interiorities might flow, the point of contact, conversation and
possible recognition between self and other. It is also an act that carries an archaic
horror associated with brutal authority. The blindness inflicted onto the faces from
outside the photograph derives from an unseeing that originates in the social and
institutional space of the viewer. By interrupting photography’s power to represent,
Ivin reconfirms its implication in the social world beyond the image by signifying
the refusal of power to represent, a refusal to make visible and thereby recognise the
humanity of those seeking refuge.
The motif of vulnerability is present in all the work under discussion. As we have
seen, it applies to the photograph’s materiality, to its unstable signification and to the
precarious human condition that certain photographers attempt to mimic as well as
document. It achieves its most intensive expression in relation to the human body. In a
discussion of Sartre’s theory of the body, Anthony Vidler shows how it is pictured by
Sartre as being lived “in danger” for the reason that the body only comes into recog-
nizable being through its extension into the world, its immersion in and utilisation of
what Sartre calls “instrumental-things”: spaces (“destructive”) instruments, devices,
tools, all of which can also threaten it (Vidler 2011: 65). Wolfgang Tillmans has spo-
ken of the photograph as analogous to the human body—a physical object among
others, an image and an act, extended into the world and open to it and therefore sub-
ject to its risks as well as to its own frailties and impermanence (Tillmans in Godfrey
2017: 14). These themes appear frequently in Tillmans’ work which Mark Godfrey
has described as an imagery of “skins and surfaces” (Godfrey 2017: 16). Another
body of work touches on such themes, that of Francesca Woodman in which the
frailty of the embodied self and its location in physical and culturally arranged spaces
is given its troubled photographic representation. Rossella Caruso’s key descriptors
of her work are, “mutilated” and “evanescent”—the body-self is in danger of being
dismembered or disappeared (Rossella in Pierni 2010: 149). In Untitled 1976, the fig-
ure (Woodman) holds a sheet of glass against her naked body. Its sharp corner presses
onto her left breast. The image carries much of her work’s broader complexities in
which Bachelard’s “locales of our inner life” are either broken or harmful (Bachelard
2014: 27). What is presented above all as the conflict between an impulse to express
the self through visualisation and the awareness that the same process brings the risk
of injury or loss of the self. Like photography’s optical system, the glass is transparent,
it permits us to see through it to her body. At the same time, like photography, it is a
barrier, a distancing film. It is also a hazard, a perilous device. It threatens to cut and
dismember the body as do photographic representations. In Space2 1977, the body-
self is either coming into being by breaking out of the house-interior, exploding the
traditional restraining domestic space allotted for the performance of female identity,
or is a fragmented self fusing with this space, disappearing into its fragments.
The Damage 179
The ‘battleground’ of the female body—to borrow Barbara Kruger’s description—is
a force active at the core of the work of two photographers, Birgit Kahle and Laura
Nadakate. Their concerns stand in comparison with Woodman’s. Their methodology,
though, includes the deliberate damaging or despoiling of images. One of Kahle’s pho-
tographic works, Untitled 1983, is quadriptych picturing stages in the scouring and
flaking and eventual destruction of an image of a naked woman. Once again, decaying
photography is presented as homologous to a human form, here like a diseased body
gradually overwhelmed by necrosis.
In producing her series, Lucky Tiger, with its allusion to a well-known range of
American skin and hair products aimed at male consumers, Laurel Nakadate invited
men to handle photographs of her in alluring poses. Their fingers being coated with
ink they inevitably left their dabs all over the images like evidence of some rough
handling and possession of her body. The maculated surfaces were then re-appropri-
ated by Nakadate for the finished project. The work recalls the Austrian artist Valie
Export’s 1968–1972 action-art piece, Touch Cinema, in which Export, wearing a box
over her front with a curtained opening, invited people in the street to reach in and
fondle her breasts.
In reviews and discussions of Lucky Tiger the word “intimacy” recurs with some
frequency. A number of intimacies are certainly revealed by it—above all fantasies of
erotic intimacy mediated by photography. They emerge from the work’s concentration
on the relationship between seeing and touching, in which the visual and the haptic
converge and all but coincide. “Gestures”, writes Margaret Olin, “turn photographs
into presences” (Olin 2012: 14). Through the gestures of touching and manipulat-
ing the remote woman-image, the fetishistic magic of photography is invoked and
Figure 8.10 Laurel Nakadate. “Lucky Tiger 142”. From Lucky Tiger, 2009.
Source: © 2009 Laurel Nakadate (reproduced by kind permission of the photographer and Leslie Tonkonow
Artworks and Projects, New York).
180 The Damage
eroticised, producing a force by which the distant imagined female body that inhabits
the body of the photograph can be drawn into the presence and possession of the desir-
ing viewer. But it has failed. Neither a rapport sexuel nor a formal-cognitive synthesis
of touching and seeing has been achieved. The anonymous hands have despoiled the
picture, left smuts and smudges bringing with them their etymologies of abjection and
obscenity. The woman remains unmoved. And the fingerprints also resemble forensic
evidence. Like the Peeping Tom figure in Sartre’s illustration in Being and Nothingness
who suddenly finds himself become the shameful object of another’s look when he and
his voyeurism are discovered by a third party—the voyeur voyeured, as it were—the
voyeurs in Lucky Tiger or rather, the voyeurism, has been caught blue-handed (Sartre
2003: 321ff). This is all a fiction of course, one devised by Nakadate in order to tell a
truth and prompt thoughtful viewing. Lucky Tiger demonstrates how damage, rather
than diminishing a work’s influence, can extend its significations into both its interior
processes and into the ways in which it establishes its relationship with the world it
engages in.
In this instance the damage was planned, strategic. In other cases it exceeds control
to the image maker. For example many of E.J. Bellocq’s portraits of New Orleans
prostitutes have their faces scratched out by unknown hands. Whether these erasures
were carried out to ensure privacy on the part of the subject or for some other more
disturbing reason is unclear. Susan Sontag, who took a rather sympathetic view of the
collection as a whole, noted that it is only the assaulted images that felt pornographic,
as if they were the manifestations of a physical engrossment fueled, perhaps, by a sad-
ism seeking possession of a body without a person, a subject without a returning look,
all autonomy rubbed out (Sontag 1996).
Damaged visions and possibly damaged desire pervade the work of the Czech pho-
tographer, Miroslav Tischy who died in 2011. Given that it has been celebrated as
inseparable from Tischy himself, an Outsider, Vagabond-like figure with his battered
looking homemade equipment, it is difficult to engage with the work in solely visual
terms. Hirsute, shabby, withdrawn and reputedly strange Tischy would emerge every-
day from his elective social exile brandishing a camera he’d constructed out of, among
other things, tubes, boxes, cotton reels, string, elastic and ancient camera bodies, to
photograph women, or rather parts of female bodies. Womens’ legs, thighs, bottoms
and breasts are most favoured. Faces are not common. The resulting prints are usu-
ally over-exposed, blurred, scratched, flecked with dust-produced light spots or with
the wormy trails left by hairs. The images are often ghostly and insubstantial, like
dream wreckage—appropriate qualities for work produced by a stalker who haunted
the places were women gather day after day but who will remain forever beyond his
reach. Tischy does not portray the kind of sexually transported body liquefied by pas-
sion one finds in the male erotics of such Surrealist photographers as Raoul Ubac and
Jacques-André Boiffard. Tischy’s work is not exactly pornography either. As said, the
women are often spectral. They are glimpsed as they pass or remain involved in their
own activities, taken up with themselves and their lives more than taken by Tischy’s
camera. That is, rather than serving some fantasy of controlling possession, Tischy’s
imagery pictures the unavailability of women. He is in control of the image and yet
powerless over its subjects. The imperfect photographic technique seems to corre-
spond to an imperfect sexuality or to one served by, even completed in, an imagery
of non-consummation, of deferment. Whether or not the damaged or degraded qual-
ity of Tischy’s photography is analogous to shame or repression—he regards it as
The Damage 181
the work’s poetic dimension; or if the compulsively recursive practice symptomises
trauma; or if the amassed imagery was an aid to masturbation, are all questions that
can receive only speculative responses (Tischy in Lenot 2008: 154). Taking Tischy at
his word, it would seem that the photographs were merely one element in an activ-
ity combining antithetical modes of practice. We are told that he put aside the prints
when completed and more or less forget them. On one hand his approach required the
submission to a pre-established routine with its daily production target and concentra-
tion, he claims, on formal abstractions. Here Tischy paints himself as the impersonal
cataloguer of female forms, a mere archivist (Lenot 2008: 150–155). On the other
hand, his insistence that eroticism plays no role in his selection of subject matter is
accompanied not only by the surely contradicting evidence of the images themselves
but also by his own descriptions of being the tool of driving impulses. This speaks of
intense obsession as much as temperate practice, and one impelled by something more
libidinous. If negation or disavowal are at work in Tischy’s account of his methodol-
ogy, then perhaps they are also present in the work itself, in the form of damage as
a variety of the aesthetics of failure. Derrida notes that “the principle of the series
is inscribed in the photographic act” and the compulsive seriality shaping Tischy’s
project is also damaged and must fail (Derrida 2010: 35). As with all collecting, the
collector’s utopian goal is to acquire the whole set, the whole series—in this case, all
women. Which is meaningless as well as impossible. The seriality is sterility. By aim-
ing to catalogue all women Tischy does not even possess one. The images present the
fleeting instant when an erotic fragment is glimpsed in the street by the male walker, a
momentary encounter that fades but captures the memory. It is a theme that reaches
back at least to Baudelaire’s À Une Passant in which the same shock of desire expe-
rienced in a random encounter on the city street—the “Fugitive beauté”—is soon
followed by sentimental dreams of love followed in turn by melancholy thoughts of
loss and mortality: “Un éclair . . . puis la nuit!”. However, any art that is successful
represents an attempt to escape its determinations and to reduce Tischy’s work to the
status of the mere symptom of an unresolved neurosis would be to miss its particu-
larity. His work foregrounds the essentially spectral nature of the medium as well as
uncovering its fragility. These photographic qualities then become, I would argue, the
poetic documentation of an intermittent and even fractured heterosexual male appre-
hension of nameless women. More than this his work is as much about loneliness,
or social alienation as it is about the female form or sexual yearning. Tischy was a
marginal and at times persecuted figure. The insubstantial, wraith-like figures and the
flawed surfaces that carry in the same instant a dream of desire becoming united with
its object and the impossibility of this ever being realised, represent, in my view, the
intensive instance of a more extensive estrangement from the social itself.
This chapter began with the claim that all art is concerned with surfaces. I would
like to end it by reference to Joris Jansen’s Kosmos from 2011 in which the Dutch pho-
tographer made high-magnification images of the surfaces of his own work. Rather
than encountering them as barriers the microphotography seems to break through the
surfaces into another dimension, one resembling interstellar space, where matter or
particles become waves and forces. To enter far enough into matter is to encounter
a quantum zone where the close and the miniscule and the remote and the infinite
co-exist, where such differences cease to have meaning, where light is both force and
substance. Photons were present in the early moments of the universe. Some debate
the possibility that they might escape its ending and possibly form the beginning of the
182 The Damage
next one. Nothing, it would appear, comes to an end. Nothing is really damaged—just
transformed.
Note
* My thanks to Michael Kai Chun Chan for introducing me to Ho’s work and for his enlighten-
ing discussions about the realities of Hong Kong.
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Index
Page numbers in italics indicate figures on the corresponding pages.
Abramovic, Marina 97 Autorretrato De Los Ochenta 172

Adams, Robert 38, 147 Autorretratos/Self Portraits 104 – 105
Adorno, Theodor 47, 111
aesthetics of fragility see damage Bachelard, Gaston 147, 178
Agamben, Giorgio 30 Baer, Ulrich 67
Agee, James 32 Baker, George 6, 7, 28
Airports 50 – 51, 51 Baker, Simon 48, 49
air travel 50 – 53, 51 Baldessari, John 33, 37, 39 – 40
Aitken, Doug 9, 43 – 47, 44 – 46 Ballard, J. G. 52
Akhmatova, Anna 160 Barthes, Roland 7 – 8, 11 – 13, 28, 42, 85, 88,
ALBUM 172 – 173 95, 175
allegory 100, 137 – 138, 160 Basketball Arena 1 71
Allingham, Helen 73 Bassit, José 79
All Saints are Dead 134 Bastide, Roger 126
Alvarez Bravo, Manuel 123 – 125, 124, 130, Bataille, Georges 80, 102 – 104, 165
138, 139 Batchen, Geoffrey 6, 138
Amelunxen, Hubertus V. 2 Baudelaire, Charles 3, 181
American roads 31 – 34 Baudrillard, Jean 34, 38, 53
Americans, The 32 – 33 Baur, Max 155
Anima Mundi 97 Bayley, Steven 43
Another Country 47, 49 – 50 Bazin, André 85
anti-foundational epistemologies 95 – 96 Beaumont, Matthew 108
Antonioni, Michelangelo 68 – 69 Beckman, Karen 6
Appadurai, Arjun 59 Being and Nothingness 180
Arditi, Benjamin 72, 170 Bellocq, E. J. 180
Aristotle 11 Belting, Hans 81 – 82, 88, 90
Armantrout, Rae 161, 163 Bender, Barbara 74
Arnatt, Keith 67 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio 91
Arte Poética 1 Benjamin, Walter 18, 21, 27, 112, 162;
Arthurs, Jane 42 on religious photography 81, 95; on
Ascherson, Neil 49 shock in industrial modernity 41 – 42;
Ashworth, Chris 56 – 57 on technological reproducibility 14 – 15
Asturias, Miguel Angel 126 Bergson, Henri 13, 28, 48
asyndeton 48 Berman, Nina 58, 58, 58 – 59
Athletics Warm Up Track 71 Bernheimer, Charles 162
Atkinson, Conrad 67 Berry, Maeve 112, 112
At the Fishouses 1 Bertens, Hans 106
augenblick 12 Besançon, Alain 83, 103, 111
À Une Passant 181 Beverley, John 125
Auster, Paul 9 Bewick, Thomas 73
Autorretrato 171 Bhabha, Homi 128, 130, 132, 139
Index 187
Bhimji, Zarina 74 – 75 Christological imagery see sacred,
Bishop, Elizabeth 1, 97 – 98 photography of the
Blanchot, Maurice 79, 86 – 88, 95 – 96, 106, chrysopoeia 155
114 – 116, 162 City of Shadows 169
Bloch, Ernst 47 – 48 Cleaning the Garden 74 – 75
Blow Up 68 – 69 Coatlicue 133, 135 – 136
BMW AktienGesellschaft (AG) at Munich Codices 135, 136
152 – 156, 153 – 154 Coley, Nathan 31
Bober, Lars 70 colonialism 129 – 134
Bolter, J. David 7 Concept of Non-Photography, The 1
Bonami, Francesco 111 Connolly, William E. 159 – 160
Boulevard du Temple 15, 15 contemporary culture, photography as
Bourriaud, Nicholas 70 effective representational form constituting
Boyce, George Price 73 1–3
Brambilla, Marco 52 Context 163
Brassaï 124, 160 Conversation with Jeanne, A 5
Brassiliat, Maureen 79 Cosgrove, Denis 67 – 68
Brecht, Bertold 6 Costello, Diarmuid 33
Breuer, Frank 156 Country & the City, The 66
Brewster, David 84 Court, John E. 79
bricolage 152 “Courtyard of a House in Delft, The” 83
Brodie, Mike 33 Crary, Jonathan 30
Brown, Capability 74, 75 cremation 112, 112
Buchloh, Benjamin 38 Creswell, Tim 52
Buci-Glucksman, Christine 134, 137 – 138 Crookes, William 84
Buendía, José Arcadio 122 – 123 Cross, Andrew 38
Buendía, Usula 123 Crossed-Conveyors 155
Bullitt 44 Cubitt, Sean 55
Burgin, Victor 8, 77 Cullen, Paul 152
Buried 168 Cullinan, Nicholas 165
cultural hybridity 139
Cadava, Eduardo 97, 102 – 104, 111 – 112, cultural identity, Latin American: anxiety in
162 125 – 129; post-colonial 129 – 134, 139
Cahana, Kitra 33 – 34 culture of generalised communication 3 – 4
Calvino, Italo 143 Cyanotypes 100
Camera Lucida 28, 85, 88, 95
Campany, David 32 – 33 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 15, 15
Canclini, Nestor Garcia 42, 129 – 130, Daguerreotype photography: Benjamin on
132 – 134, 139 fear of 18; fragility of 113, 162; in Latin
Carboncini, Anna 121 America 122 – 123; Shanks and 113 – 114
car crashes 41 – 47, 60 damage 159; to female bodies 179 – 181;
Carpentier, Alejo 126, 137 loss of readability and recognition with
car production, BMW AktienGesellschaft 169 – 172, 177, 177 – 178; memory
(AG) at Munich assembly plant 152 – 156, and 175 – 176; microphotography and
153 – 154 181 – 182; modern art and 165 – 166;
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 11 – 12, 160 motif of vulnerability and 178 – 179;
Caruso, Rossella 178 natural disasters and 174 – 175, 175; to
Castoriadis, Cornelius 3, 5 photographs 162 – 169; photography
catastrophe 49 attraction to images of 158 – 160; at ruins
Catholicism 97 – 98 160 – 162; violence and 172 – 174
Central Station/Central do Brasil 121 “Dando” 128
Césaire, Aimé 129 – 130 Daniels, Stephen 67 – 68
Chadwick, Helen 76 – 77 Dark Gaze, The 79
Chaskielberg, Alejandro 174 – 175, 175 Davies, John 67
Chatwin, Bruce 37 Davila, Juan 139
“China” 34 death: car crashes and 41 – 47, 60; cremation
Christenberry, William 34 after 112, 112; facial casts of 114; night
188 Index
as image of 108; photographs of people Eliade, Mircea 5, 17, 80, 163
before and after 18 – 20, 19; the sacred and Eliot, T. S. 87
97, 102 – 104, 111 – 112 Elkins, James 6, 96, 106, 163
Death Drive 43 – 44 Ellison, Joshua 53
death-drive 70 Empire Chair, The 75
Debray, Régis 27, 84 English landscape photography see landscape
Decasia-the State of Decay 165 photography, English
De Certeau, Michel 48, 52 Escenarios Rituales 136
de Duve, Thierry 8, 28 – 29, 35, 43 Ethno-Surrealism 127 – 128
de Hooch, Pieter 83 Evans, Walter 32 – 33
Deleuze, Gilles 11, 22, 28, 41, 49 Every Building on Sunset Strip 33
Demand, Thomas 110 – 111, 152 Every Page from the Holy Qu’aran 108 – 110
dematerialised travelling 57 – 60
Demoliciones 170, 170 – 171 facial casts 114, 115
Denkbild 21 Fairholt, F. W. 73
de Ribera, José 104 Farewell to Photography 47, 49
Derrida, Jacques 1, 50, 168 – 169; anti- Fellig, Arthur 42
foundational epistemologies 95 – 96; female body 179 – 181
approach to photography 21; on cultural Fencing Hall 1 71
phantoms 114; on kenosis 102; on logic Fernández, Fernando Ortiz 126
of the ruin 161 – 162; on obscured vision Fiedler, Leslie 104
117; on photography of non-material film technology 10 – 11
forms 88 – 89; on principle of the series in First Four Books of Poems, The 158
photographic act 181; rejection of pristine Fischli, Peter 50 – 51, 152
performance as all performances 39; on the Fisher, Mark 150
word Icon 100 Flick, Robert 37
Desaparecidos/the Disappeared 122 Flusser, Vilém 48, 71, 148
Deserted House, The 146 Fontana, Lucio 165
de Souza, Allan 136, 175 – 177, 176 For a Language to Come 47, 49
Deus Absconditus 81 Forsman, Chuck 34 – 37, 35, 36
Didi-Huberman, Georges 158 Foster, Hal 42, 127
Didion, Joan 36 – 37 Foucault, Michel 4
digitalisation of photography 6 Fox-Talbot 88
Dillon, Brian 163 fragility, aesthetics of see damage
Diminishing Present, The 142 – 145, 143 – 145 fragmentary nature of the world 47 – 57
Dine, Jim 165 Franco, Fernell 170, 170, 170 – 171, 170 – 172
Dirac, Paul 68 Franco, Jean 126
dissonant counterpoint 152 Freud, Sigmund 13
distribution of the sensible 4 Fried, Michael 8
Doane, Mary Anne 28 – 29 Friedlander, Lee 35 – 37, 40
doubling 85, 87 Friedrich, Hugo 111
driver’s point of view 34 – 41 Frobenius, Leo 130
drones 59, 59 – 60 Fuchun, Wang 31
Druckery, Tim 6
Dubois, Marcel 82 Garnett, William 38
Duchamp, Marcel 37 Garrido, Nelson 104, 134
Dugdale, John 98, 100, 101 Gefter, Philip 33
Durkheim, Émile 80, 116 Genthe, Arnold 147
Düttmann, Alexander Garcia 107 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 96
Dyer, Geoff 5 Ghost Image 164
Ghost Riders Travels with America’s Nomads 31
Eagleton, Terry 30, 77 Ghosts in the Mirror 113, 113 – 114
Eastlake, Elizabeth 20 – 21 Gilbert, Alan 172
Eco, Umberto 74 – 75 Gill, Stephen 70 – 71, 166 – 167, 168
ecstasy 87 Gilpin, William 66
“Ectoplasm” 6 Gilroy, Paul 126
Edwards, Steve 11 Glascher, Jörg 156
Eggelston, William 33 globalisation 73
Index 189
Glück, Louise 1, 158 Ikko, Narahara 43
God see sacred, photography of the Imagens Fieis 79
Godfrey, Mark 178 imperialism 74
Godwin, Fay 67 Incandescence 112, 112
Goodman, Nelson 32, 81 injured and afflicted bodies in photography
Goto, John 69 102 – 106, 113, 113 – 114; battleground of
Grant, Iain 42 the female body and 179 – 180; facial casts
Grant, Richard 31 and 114, 115
Greeley, Andrew M. 97 In Our Time 81
Green, David 43, 138 Inside Information 16
Grosz, Elizabeth 76 Interference 53 – 57, 54, 54 – 56
Groys, Boris 89 – 90 International Broadcast Center 71
Grundberg, Andy 125 Intersecting Braces of a Truss Bridge 155
Grusin, Richard 7 In the Place of the Public-Observations of a
Guattari, Félix 22, 41, 49, 88 Frequent Flyer 52
Guibert, Hervé 164 Into the Deep Street 1
Gundlach, F. C. 155 “Intruders near Roundup, Montana” 36
Gursky, Andreas 155, 156 Islam 108 – 110
Gypsy Encampment 73 Islam, Said Manzurul 30, 50
Ivins, Sam 177, 177 – 178
Habermas, Jurgen 129
Harley, Joanna 84 Jacir, Emily 4
Harley, Ralph 84 Jacobs, Stephen 142
Hart, Kevin 79, 96, 106, 113 Jakobson, Roman 7
Hedge 58, 58, 58 – 59 Jameson, Frederick 53, 137
Heidegger, Martin 11, 12, 13, 150 Jansen, Joris 181
Herschel, John 100 Jennings, Elizabeth 66
High Summer 69 Joyce, James 97 – 98, 116
Ho, Oscar 169
Hockey 1 71 Kahle, Birgit 179
Hoete, Anthony 30 Kahlo, Frida 139
Höfer, Candida 156 Kane, Joanna 114, 115
Holden, John 53 – 57, 54, 54 – 56 Kasarda, John 51
Holderlin, Friedrich 21 Keetman, Peter 155
Holding 98, 99 Keiller, Patrick 103
Holdsworth, Dan 73 Kelsey, Robin 6, 7
Holland-Day, Fred 97 kenosis 88, 102
Holocaust, the 67, 83 Kerouac, Jack 32 – 33
Holub, Miroslav 10 Khan, Idris 108 – 110
homeless persons 33 – 34 Kierkegaard, Søren 12, 83
Homer 29 Killed 164
Horace 158 Kilpatrick, Mell 42
Huidobro, Vincente 1 Kittler, Friedrich 10 – 11, 114
Huis Clos/No Exit 150 Kittredge, William 35 – 36
human conflict and suffering in photography Klett, Mark 147
116 Kosmos 181
Hunt, John Dixon 73 Koudelka, Josef 144
Hunt, Leigh 9 Kozloff, Max 142
Huyssen, Andreas 161 Kracauer, Siegfried 85
Hybrid Cultures, Strategies for Entering and Krauss, Rosalind 8, 33, 37
Leaving Modernity 132 Kriebel, Sabine 84
hybrid of science and perception, Kristeva, Julia 97, 117, 144
photography as 8 Kruger, Barbara 179
Kuipers, Dean 44 – 46, 44 – 47
I Am a Bullet-Scenes from an Accelerating
Culture 44, 44 – 46, 44 – 47 La Buena Fama Durmiendo/Good
idea-in-image 8 Reputation Sleeping 139
“Identity Photograph” 164 Lacan, Jacques 60, 70
190 Index
Laclau, Ernesto 81 Lowry, Joanna 43
La Lotería 131, 131 – 132 Lucky Tiger 179, 179 – 180
Lam, Wilfredo 126 Luftmensch 34
Landscape 70 Luhman, Niklas 81 – 82, 85, 87, 91, 102, 116
landscape photography, Edgar Martins’ Lutz, Deborah 89
149 – 150 Luxemburg, Rut Blees 106 – 108, 107, 109,
landscape photography, English: culture and 144
political economy and 74 – 76; globalisation Lyons, Danny 33
and 73; indeterminacy in 77; issue of Lyotard, Jean-François 77, 106
visibility in 71 – 73; landscapes as material
territories and social processes and 70 – 71; Ma, Jean 6
shifts in culture and 68 – 70; significance MacCannell, Dean 32, 69 – 70
of the picturesque in 66 – 68; unspecified Maisel, David 173
locations in 76 – 77 Malabou, Catherine 27, 50, 162
Landscape & Power 66 Manet, Edouard 165
Langford, Andrew 73 Manovich, Lev 7
Larrain, Sergio 122, 170 Marcuse, Herbert 117
Lartigue, Jacques Henri 43 “Maria Hai-Anh Cao; Died 15th February” 19
Laruelle, Francois 1, 8 – 9, 85, 90 – 91 “Maria Hai-Anh Cao; Portrait 5th
Las Menimas 98 december 2003” 19
Latin American photography 121–122; allegory Marin, Louis 106
in 137–138; anxiety of cultural identity Mark, Mary Ellen 33
in 125–129; early 122–125; hybridity in Marker 70
visual culture in 134–138; postcolonialism Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 122 – 123
in 129–134; uncovering discontinuities and Martins, Edgar 50 – 51, 51, 73; Diminishing
disturbances 138–139 Present by 142 – 145, 143 – 145; This Is
Latour, Bruno 85 – 86 Not a House by 146, 146 – 152, 150;
Laughlin, John 147 00:00.00 (BMW AktienGesellschaft (AG)
Lazarus, Brother of Martha and John 100 at Munich) 152 – 156, 153 – 154
Lazi, Adolf 155 Martyrdom of the Saint Philip, The 104
Lea Valley 70 – 71 Marx, Karl 70
Leaving No Shadow in the Mirror 166, 167 Masks 69 – 70
L’Eclisse 142 Mathews, Chloe Dewe 15 – 16, 17 – 18
Ledrut, Raymond 68 Matless, David 67
Leed, Eric 30, 36 – 37 Maynard, Patrick 81, 166
Lefebvre, Henri 29 McCluhan, Marshall 10
Leiter, Sole 28 McCoy, Patrick 172 – 173
Leng-Tch’e 103 McDowell, Bill 164
Les Larmes d’Eros/The Tears of Eros 103 McQuire, Scott 29 – 30, 41
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 32 – 33 Meadowlands 1
Levenson, Randall 33 mediacy 38
Levin, Mikael 16 mediatized culture 4
Lévinas, Emmanuel 113, 116 memorialising apparatus, photography as
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 161, 173 – 174 12 – 13
Library of Dust 173 memory, impermanence of 175 – 176
Liebeslied (Lovesong) 106 – 107, 107 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 29, 31, 76
Life Before Death 18 – 20, 19 Metinides, Enrique 42
Light in the Dark 95 Meyer, Pedro 132, 134
L’Imaginaire 85 microphotography 181 – 182
Lindsay, Greg 51 Millar, Jeremy 30
Lingering Ghosts 177, 177 – 178 Milosz, Czeslaw 5
Lipper, Susan 34 Minima Moralia-Reflections from a
“Little History of Photography, A” 14, 18 Damaged Life 47
Lopez, Marcos 139 Missing Him 79
Los Extranjeros 136 Mitchell, William J. T. 6, 66, 67, 74
Los Pictures, The 175 – 177, 176 mobilities see photographic mobilities
Lotar, Eli 103 Modernism 165
Lotman, Juri M. 132, 135 moment of complexity 12
Index 191
Monasterio, Pablo Ortiz 170 Paolozzi, Eduardo 160, 165
moral geographies 67 Parábola Optica/Optica Moderna 123 – 124,
Morell, Abelardo 21 123 – 125, 124
Morgan, David 87, 90 parasacred, the 96,106
Moriyama, Daido 47 – 50, 57 Pastoral Interludes 74
Morland, George 73 Patmos 21
Morrison, Bill 165 Paz, Octavio 13
Muldoon, Paul 34 Peckham, Morse 49
murder victims 163 – 164 pensive photography 7 – 8, 21
Perelman, Bob 34
Nach Innen/In Deeper 109 Peress, Gilles 116, 174
Nadakate, Laura 179, 179 Peters, John Durham 17
Nadeem, Henna 74, 75 – 76 photographic mobilities 27 – 29;
Nakahira, Takuma 47 – 50, 57 dematerialised travelling and 57 – 60;
Nancy, Jean-Luc 2, 8, 13 – 14, 149 fragmentary nature of the world and
Nash, Paul 67 47 – 57; travel and mobility in human
Nausea 86 history and 29 – 31; travel as social or
Nebreda, David 102, 104 – 106 shared experience and 31 – 47
New York Times 146 photography: aesthetic of fragility and (see
night, images of 107, 107 – 108, 109 damage); Daguerreotype (see Daguerreotype
Nordquist, Jenny 166, 167 photography); definable in multiple ways
Norfolk, Simon 67 5–6; digitalisation of 6–7, 88–89; of Edgar
Nouveaux Réalistes 169 Martins (see Martins, Edgar); as hybrid
Now (Blue Mirror) 9 of science and perception 8; landscape
“Now: Descriptive of a Cold Day, The” 9 (see landscape photography, English);
Noys, Benjamin 30 Latin American (see Latin American
Nussbaum, Martha 116 photography); as less effective than cinema
28–29; as memorialising apparatus 12–13;
objective illusion 20 mobilities of (see photographic mobilities);
O’Brien, Flann 27 as multiply located practice 6–7; as
Occupied Territories 100 objective illusion 20; as ontological medium
Ode VII 158 8; as optical philosophy 20; pensive 7–8,
O’Driscoll, Dennis 79 21; presence in 9–17; as representational
Odyssey, The 29 form constituting contemporary culture
Oikonomos 146 1–3, 7, 28, 68; of the sacred (see sacred,
Olin, Margaret 179 photography of the); social imaginary
Olympia 165 represented through 3–4; stating the
One Hundred Years of Solitude 122 obvious 3, 5; technological reproducibility
On the Road 32 – 33 through 14; thought representation through
On This Site: Landscape in Memorium 16 8–9; visual régime and 4–5
ontological dualism 82 Pickering, Sarah 67
ontological medium 8 Picture Book of Britain, A 75 – 76
opacité 106 – 107 picturesque, the 66 – 68
Open Road, The 32 Pietri, Arturo Uslar 122
Open Sky 57 Pinney, Christopher 125
optical philosophy, photography as 20 Pirenne, Raphaël 7
O’Reilly, John 98 – 100, 99 Plato 10
Ortlieb, Gilles 1 pleasure-principle 70
Orwell, George 53 Poetics of Space, The 147
Osborne, Peter 7, 20, 88 – 89, 151 political economy and culture 74 – 76
Other, the 116 – 117 Pollard, Ingrid 74
Otsuchi Future Memories 174 – 175, 175 Pop Latino 139
Otto, Rudloph 80 postcolonialism 129 – 134
postmodernism 129
Paglen, Trevor 59, 59 – 60 Poulet, Georges 79
Paleolongolou, Effie 144 Prelude, The 12
Palma, Luis Gonzalez 102, 130, 131, presence: concept of the present and
131 – 132 9 – 10; Dekbild and 21; examples of
192 Index
photographic 15 – 17; giving meaning Sá, Bauer 127 – 128, 127 – 129
to spaces and topographies and 17 – 18; sacred, photography of the: anti-foundational
landscapes as marks and witnessing epistemologies and 95–96; axioms of
of 68; in life and death 18 – 20, 19; reality and 81–82; Catholicism and 97–98;
linked to proximity 11 – 12; moment of concepts in Protestant art and 83–85;
complexity and 12; perception and 12; in contemporary art 85–86; Cyanotype
photography as memorialising apparatus 100; death in 97, 102–104, 111–112;
and 12 – 13; photography producing digitisation of 88–89; facial casts and 114,
the appearance of 11; in religious 115; fear and 111–112; human conflict and
photography 90 – 91; in Solarphotography suffering in 116; injured and afflicted bodies
20, 20; suspension of disbelief and 18; in 102–106, 113, 113–114; intensification
technological reproducibility of 14 – 15; as in 87–88; kenosis and 88, 102; in Latin
unrepresentable 13 – 14 America 134, 135–137; materialism in
Presence—The Inherence of the Prototype 85–87; opacité in 106–107; the parasacred
within Images and Other Objects 79 and 106; in postmodern existence 96;
Preziosi, Donald 82, 84 – 85 power of 79–81; predicament of the Other
primary aesthetics 4 in 116–117; presence in 90–91; Qu’aranic
Prosser, Jay 95 text in 108–110; strangeness in 110–111;
Protestantism see sacred, photography of the struggle with religion and 98–100, 99;
Psalm 42 Morton Street NYC 100, 101 theatricality of religion and 96–97;
Puta de la Regeneración 105 – 106 unsettling and sad images in 113, 113–114;
Putnam, Hilary 89 violence in 103–105
sacred spaces 17 – 18, 95 – 96, 101 – 102
Qu’aranic text 108 – 110 sacred time 5, 96
“Question Concerning Technology, The” 21 Said, Edward 111, 126
Quinn, Mark 20 Salles, Walter 121
Santana, Tiago 79, 80
Raad, Walid 171 – 172 Santner, Eric L. 162
Rancière, Jacques 4 – 5, 9, 57, 121, 149, 151 Sapphire and Steel 150
Rauschenberg, Robert 165 Sarkowski, John 85
Rautert, Timm 155 – 156 Sartre, Jean-Paul 11–12, 85, 86, 150, 162, 180
Raymond, Marcel 79 Scale 161
reality-doubling 85, 87 Schama, Simon 46
reality/real estate/realtors/the ‘Real Economy’ Schels, Walter 18, 114
150 – 151 Schimmel, Paul 165, 169
Reinartz, Dirk 16 Schopenhauer, Arthur 87
Relph, Edward 70, 108 Schott, John 38
remediation 7 Schwarz, Michiel 30
Renger-Patzsch, Albert 155 Seawright, Paul 16
representational form, photography as Seghalen, Victor 129
effective 1 – 3, 7 Semprún, Jorge 83
Richard, Nelly 96 – 97, 126 serial forms of images 38
Richter, Gerhard 21, 67 Sertao 79, 80
Richter, Martin 156 Settlements 72, 72 – 73
Rights of Passage 52 Shanks, Michael 113, 113 – 114
Ritchin, Fred 6 Shapiro, Gary 4 – 5
ritual of self-othering 127 – 128 Sheeler, Charles 155
Roberts, John 6 Shimizu, Minoru 49
Rodechenko, Alexander 163 – 164 Shore, Stephen 33, 67, 71
Romanticism 77, 83 Shot at Dawn 15 – 17, 16
Romer, Stephen 1 Sight 69 – 70
Roquentin, Antoine 86 Silence, The 116
Rosler, Martha 37, 52 – 53, 56 Silverman, Kaja 14, 20 – 21
Ruggles, D. Fairchild 76 Simmel, Georg 48
ruins 160 – 162; photographs as 162 – 164 Siskind, Aaron 165
Rulfo, Juan 126 Sloterdijk, Peter 30
Ruscha, Ed 33, 37 – 38, 39 – 40 Smith, Terry 3, 6, 11, 13 – 14
Index 193
Smythe, S. E. B. 73 Tischy, Miroslav 180 – 181
social history, travel as 31 – 47 Titarenko, Alexey 169
social imaginary 3 – 4 Todorov, Tvetan 115
So Hing Keung 169 Tóibín, Colm 97 – 98
Solargraphy 20, 20 Tomitei Expressway: the Road that Drives
Some of These Days 86 People 47
Somnambulists Photographic Portraits from Tomlinson, John 5, 30
before Photography, The 114 Tomter, Jorn 73
Sontag, Susan 3, 27, 180 Touch Cinema 179
Southern, Jem 67 Tracy, David 97
Soviet Union, the 163 – 164 transcendental automat 8
Space2 178 Transit 52
space of the photographic 106 travel and mobility: dematerialised 57 – 60;
Spencer, Stanley 67 fragmentary nature of the world and
Spero, David 71 – 73, 72 47 – 57; in human history 29 – 31; as social,
Spohler, Henrik 155, 156 shared history 31 – 47
S/SGT Killed Over Germany 99 Twenty Six Gas Stations 33
staging in photography 148 “Two Imaginaries, The” 87 – 88
Station to Station 47
Stavans, Ilan 53 Ubac, Raoul 18
Steiner, George 22 Ulysses 116
Steinert, Otto 43, 155 Untitled (Caruso) 178
Sternfeld, Joel 16, 34, 147 Untitled 1983 (Kahle) 179
Stevens, Wallace 95 Urban/Wild 31
Stezaker, John 69 – 70 Urry, John 30
Stimson, Blake 6, 7 Us for Example 127 – 128, 127 – 129
strangeness 110 – 111
Streicher, Roy 164 Vanderlans, Rudy 38 – 39, 39
Streitberger, Alexander 7 “Vanishing Point, Morenci, Arizona” 35
Suleiman, Susan 126 Van Lier, Henri 7, 8
Supermarket 38 – 39, 39 Vattimo, Gianni 31, 49, 165
Surrealism 95, 138, 106 Vaughan, Dai 6
Surrealism 95 Vazan, Bill 37
Suter, Gerardo 133, 135, 136 – 137 Venice 159
Verger, Pierre 80
Taylor, Charles 3 Vidal, Hernan 125
Taylor, Mark C. 12 Views from Transport 40 – 41, 40 – 41
Taylor, Victor E. 95 – 96, 106 Vinegar, Aron 38
Tebbs, Paul 173 violence: damage and 172 – 174; murder
technological reproducibility 14 victims and 163 – 164; in sacred
Teniers, David, II 72 photography 103 – 105
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 146 Viral Landscapes 76 – 77
Terranova, Charissa N. 39 – 40, 46 Virilio, Paul 30, 42, 53, 57
Theatres of Absence 156 visibility 71 – 73
theatricality of religion 96 – 97 Visible World 1986 – 2001 50
Third Policeman, The 27 visual ideology 67
This Is Not a House 146, 146 – 152, 150 visual régime 4 – 5
This Mortal Coil: Alienated Urban von Amelunxen, Hubertus 162
Landscape 169 Vos Pellicules Déposées ici 2
Thom, René 49 voyeurism 180
thought representation through photography
8–9 Walker, Naglaa 40, 40 – 41
Thousand Plateaus, A 41 Wall, Jeff 38, 152
Tillmans, Wolfgang 178 Ward, Koral 12
time 10; religious photography and 88 – 89; Warhol, Andy 42
sacred 5, 96 We decided to let them say, “we are
Tinguely, Jean 165 convinced” 171 – 172
194 Index
Weiss, David 50 – 51, 152 With Felipe Próspero 98, 99
Wentworth, Richard 152 Witkin, Joel-Peter 102, 104, 132
Western Rider, Views from a Car Window 34–37 Wollen, Peter 8
Where We Come From (If I Could Do Wollheim, Richard 100, 129
Something for You in Palestine What Wood, Christopher 77
Would It Be?) 4 Wüerfel, Gesche 70 – 71
White, Hayden 11 Wylie, Andrew 70
“White Shoe” 127, 127 – 128 Wyschograd, Edith 116
Wiese-Meadow 67
Willemen, Paul 6 Yates, Peter 44
Williams, Gilda 75
Williams, Raymond 30, 66, 116, 136 – 137 Zachmann, Patrick 35 – 36
Willis, Anne-Marie 6 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 134 – 135
Wills, David 46 00:00.00 152 – 156, 153 – 154
Wines, James 148 Zizek, Slavoj 13, 83

Photography and The Contemporary Cultural Condition Commemorating The Present by Peter D. Osborne

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Photography and The Contemporary Cultural Condition Commemorating The Present by Peter D. Osborne

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Photography and the

1 Commemorating the Present: Introductory Thoughts 1

2 The Accelerating Eye: Photographic Mobilities 27

3 Relocated Visions: Some Themes in the Photography of

4 The Unapproachable Light: Photography and the

5 “Life’s Redemption”: Photography and the Sacred, Part 2 95

6 anredoM acitpO or Aztec Cameras: Cultural Hybridity and

7 The Accidental Theorist: Three Views on the Work of

8 The Damage: Photography and the Aesthetics of Fragility 158

1.1 Vos Pellicules Déposées ici. Dieppe, 2015. 2

Cuanto miren los ojos creado sea

Photography does not belong to history as one

. . . forever, flowing and drawn, and since

. . . does what we have available to us now

le réel, éternal vainqueur aux points [reality always wins on points].

Figure 1.1 Vos Pellicules Déposées ici. Dieppe, 2015.

of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is delimi-

Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now In things of this

we simply happen in segments and intervals, we are composed of frames flickering

Plato’s Timaeus describes time as “a moving image of eternity”, a picturing of time as

Conceptions of presence are commonly linked to proximity. Kittler invokes Aristotle

Ward observes a sympathetic resonance between the conceptual preoccupations of

propelled by a mysterious kind of intentionality toward a particular look—one

Figure 1.2 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, Paris 1838.

Figure 1.6 Solargraphy project, Helsinki/Peter D. Osborne. “Solarphotograph, from a window

Derrida’s interrogation of photography works to open the medium to its own

To understand, in more practical terms, the folding in of, photography’s philosophi-

Travel is a strategy for accumulating photographs.

All human history is a history of becoming through movement, through travelling. It

The camera, as documenter, re-establishes the unique particularity of an object or sign

[A]s with montage . . . in rapid transit we see sequences, juxtapositions, connec-

depth of field is limitless. At others the windscreen is blinded by snow, or dust. In

Figure 2.3 Rudy Vanderlans. From Supermarket, 2001.

The effect is to suggest Vanderlans’ photographs, perhaps all photographs, are

a subjective economy which, through aesthetic intervention, hotwires the shocks

In photography’s engagement with the motorised urban world Walter Benjamin

Figure 2.6 Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers. I Am a Bullet, 2000.

Aitken and Dean Kuipers’ 2001 book, I Am a Bullet—Scenes From an Accelerating

Figure 2.7 Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers. I Am a Bullet, 2000.

reveals a global condition dominated by endless shiftings, fragmentations, collisions

Figure 2.8 Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers. I Am a Bullet, 2000.

VIOLENCE LATENT IN THE ROLLING AUTOMOBILE __________ A DEATH

Here the repeating antinomies of travel as expressing or even producing subjectivity

[T]he suppression of linking words such as conjunctions and adverbs, either

As important, through a non-linear, aleatory sequencing and the abandonment of

no originary sedentariness pre-exists it. No more than writing is derived from

Figure 2.9 Edgar Martins. From Airports, 2008.

or viewpoints—ever present but whose cultural energy is mostly dissipated. No out-

Figure 2.11 John Holden. From Interference, 1994.

Figure 2.12 John Holden. From Interference, 1994.

Figure 2.13 Nina Berman. From Hedge, 2010.

Figure 2.14 Trevor Paglen. Untitled (Sentinel Drone), 2014.

Difficult not to see significance

The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation.

Miss Him when the sunset makes

There is a powerful photography of religious practices. The subject preoccupies much

The work of the French-born Brazilian photographer-cum-anthropologist, Pierre

as long as a mystery can be objectified in a perceivable state, it can be presupposed

This effect of religion is described by Luhman as “reality doubling” in which, some

In a strange reversal by means of the very representation of earthly things, an

It is an observation that will bring us to a more focused consideration of the relation-

Some utilise a religious or religioid vocabulary casually or figuratively when discuss-

Sartre’s materialist metaphysics permits an understanding of consciousness, and the