What on Earth? Photography’s Alien Landscapes
Aperture magazine 211, Summer 2013, 2014
What on Earth?
David Campany
What happens when we look at a photograph but cannot figure out what it is of? Never mind what it means, just what it is of? Most images aim to be easy, so this is not something we face often. But those moments when our basic recognition is challenged may tell us a lot about the ways in which habits of seeing shape the pleasure and knowledge offered by photographs
For photography ‘abstraction’ is a fraught term, which tends to be tamed by opposing it to ‘figuration’. But they are inseparable, one haunting the other, and their forced partition has not helped us to understand the medium. It has led to great confusion about everything from the real and realism to form and formalism. What follows is an exploration of these ideas through the two types of image that seem at first to be furthest from abstraction: the landscape photograph and the forensic photograph.
Between 1943 and 1945 Frederick Sommer made several photographs of the Sonoran Desert, near his home in Arizona. They are bone-dry hillsides without horizons, strewn evenly with rocks and dotted with cacti. Shot in black and white on a large-format camera, they oscillate for the eye between flatness and the receding space of incidental detail. There are no traces of human presence and even the vantage point where Sommer placed his camera seems to offer us little mastery. Photography is usually a matter of projecting three dimensions onto two, via an aperture. It is a medium of distances and perspectives. This means that making sense of it is never just a matter of recognizing what is depicted: it also involves knowing from where it has been depicted. An unorthodox vantage point may render abstract even the most optically clear photograph. Likewise an apparently abstract photograph may cohere once we know its point of view. The more one looks at Sommer’s landscapes the more disconcerting they become, both as pictures and as records of the world. With a poet’s economy he spoke of each as a constellation, a word that might suggest something prosaic, like a gathering or assembly. In astronomy a constellation is an arbitrary formation of stars perceived as a figure or design. It’s the seeking of pattern that turns the chaos into order. His photographs are as carefully composed as any, yet they ruffle our composure. We might say they are composed to show the essentially uncomposed, unnervingly brute fact of nature from which we are alienated by our very capacity to contemplate it. These are not landscapes fashioned to reflect back our wishes, our dominion, or even our physical scale. They are alien.
In 1944 two of Sommer’s desert photographs appeared in the American Surrealist journal VVV, spread over two pages. At first glance they seemed to resemble a pair of stereoscopic images, promising the clarity of a third dimension. But each is quite singular; in fact, their pairing only doubles their individual disturbances. In 1962 a similar layout appeared in an issue of Aperture magazine dedicated to Sommer’s work. These were the only landscapes amid the still lifes and collages for which he is best known, but they are just as ambiguous. Surrealist photography tended to explore claustrophobic spaces as metaphors for the darkly malleable space of the unconscious. For Sommer the great outdoors and its blinding light were just as unfathomable, their beauty always a little disturbing.
In 1922 the Parisian journal Littérature published an image attributed to Man Ray with a caption suggesting it was a landscape viewed from an airplane. The new perspectives of aerial intelligence photography had entered the popular imagination in the years following World War I. But Man Ray’s photograph was not a landscape at all. It was a close-range study of dust accumulating on a sheet of glass for what was to become Marcel Duchamp’s La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), also known as the Large Glass (1915–23). The white strip at the top is not a milky sky above a distant horizon but the wall of Duchamp’s Manhattan studio. Only later was the photograph given its familiar title: Élevage de poussière, or Dust Breeding.
While Sommer’s purist landscapes are now regarded as supreme modernist pictures, Man Ray’s splicing of photography with sculpture, process and performance, anticipated the mixing of media that came to dominate art in the second half of the twentieth century. Both artists pushed photography toward abstraction while retaining a forensic interest in detail. Surfaces bearing traces are viewed obliquely: a downward tilt of vision turns incidental marks into signs for interpretation. The camera surveys a plane that appears as a code to be deciphered, or a mystery to be solved. It is extraordinary just how often this image type occurred in the art of the late 1960s and 1970s. Its basic structure lent itself to a range of practices sharing an interest in traces and evidence.
Lewis Baltz’s topographic projects, such as Nevada (1977), for example, pored over details of bulldozed landscapes being converted into suburbs. Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s book Evidence (1977) was a comic humiliation of the functional photograph. They removed scientific images from their archival dossiers and left them adrift on white pages. The enigmatic opening shot shows a floor covered in some kind of dust and footsteps. Similarly perplexing pictures also found their way into the documentation of Land Art and performance art, particularly in the work of Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, and Gordon Matta-Clark. In a period of art that is thought to have broken with any notion of “style,” this essentially forensic image form was pervasive.
While all these interchanges were going on, a remote camera landed on the surface of Mars. The art historian Ernst Gombrich saw its first image beamed back to earth, reproduced in Time magazine. In his essay ‘Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye’ (1980) he suggested:
We cannot really tell the size of the boulders or ridges which are visible on the picture from Mars unless we know their distance, and vice versa, though for proximate objects there may be additional information through such clues as texture or “grain”—assuming that we guess correctly at their composition. An arrested image [Gombrich means an optically derived image] might thus be compared to a single equation with two variables such as n=x/y. We can calculate the size of an object if we know the distance and the distance if we know its size, to know both we would have to have additional information.
(One wonders if Gombrich, ever the analyst of realism, was making a comic reversal of that old question of whether photography is transparent enough to be understood by Martians.) Although they looked uncannily familiar, the Mars images demanded a great deal of specialized knowledge. Similarly, the views offered by aerial photographs of our own planet may require trained professionals to extract the data. This is one aspect of photography’s complicated relation to abstraction. Today, cameraless darkroom prints and other forms of nonfigurative photography are enjoying a revival in art, but such work often misses the unsettling idea that the world itself is essentially abstract. It always demands the imposition of conventions of seeing and the skilled vigilance of interpretation. In the series Per Pulverem Ad Astra, 2007, by the artist Eva Stenram, these two versions of abstraction are wittily compounded. Stenram downloaded from the Internet some of NASA’s 1976 pictures of Mars e and converted them into negatives that were then left to gather dust before being printed. The already uncertain landscapes are now seen through puffs of whiteness that could be cosmic or plain domestic.
In early 1991 Saddam Hussein’s army of Iraqi conscripts was being bombed out of Kuwait. The artist Sophie Ristelhueber saw an aerial photograph of the incident, again in Time magazine, which prompted her to visit the Kuwaiti desert herself. Ristelhueber had been deeply affected by an earlier encounter with Man Ray’s Dust Breeding. In the newspaper Le Monde(27-28 September, 1992) he stated:
By shifting from the air to the ground, I sought to destroy any notion of scale as in Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s Elevage de Poussière. It’s a picture which fascinates me and which I kept in my mind throughout the time I was working [in Kuwait]. The constant shift between the infinitely big and the infinitely small may disorientate the spectator. But it is a good illustration of our relationship to the world: we have at our disposal modern techniques for seeing everything, apprehending everything, yet we see nothing.
Before turning to photography Ristelhueber studied literature, with a keen interest in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s writings. In his careful descriptions of surfaces, objects and places everything is crystal clear yet its precise significance is elusive. Rejecting what he called “the archaic myth of depth” Robbe-Grillet dramatized the tension between fact and meaning. This is from In the Labyrinth (1959):
The fine dust that dulls the shine of the horizontal planes, the varnished tabletop, the polished parquet, the marble of the mantelpiece and that of the chest of drawers, the cracked marble of the chest of drawers, the only dust here comes from the room itself: from the gaps in the parquet possibly, or from the bed, or the curtains, or the ashes in the fireplace. On the varnished tabletop the dust has marked the place occupied for a while—for a few hours, a few days, minutes, weeks—by small objects since removed, the bases of which are clearly outlined for a while longer, a circle, a square, a rectangle, other less simple forms, some of them partly overlapping, already blurred or half-erased as if by the flick of a rag.
Details simply “are.” Their value is a matter of human projection. Ristelhueber saw deep connections with the way a camera records with indifference. Titled Fait (meaning both fact and done) her Kuwait project comprises seventy-two color and black-and-white images. In a further play on the enigma of scale, it is exhibited as a monumental grid but published as a modest little book. A final image, left out of the series, stands alone, titled À cause de l’élevage de poussière: Because of the dust breeding.
This is what we might call the politics of abstraction. Habits of seeing are estranged strategically in the hope of opening up a space to think differently (about warfare, about landscape, about photography, about vision). It is a risky strategy, always provisional and contingent upon the cultural norms that are being challenged. How to discuss abstraction as a principle of modern social, industrial, and political life, while avoiding empty formalism? How to address the systemic rationalizing of the world’s appearance without turning it into mere pattern?
So many contemporary landscape photographers walk this line, from Robert Adams and Richard Misrach to Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky. But it’s not a matter of making politically correct images. The viewer has a responsibility, too, to avoid the easy options of reveling in abstraction for its own sake or denouncing photographers for their lack of engagement. It is a matter of what the musician John Cage, who was deeply affected by Man Ray’s dust image, called “response-ability.”
David Campany