I find that I do not have much, if anything, to say on this subject from a photographic point of view. The treatment of this subject in the course material is fairly perfunctory and even Alexander (2015) lends little more than two pages to it (page 124 & 125) with just two examples of photographs by Suzanna Davison, of whom I had not come across before.

I have at least though done some reading of my own on the subject. I was in a way surprised that none of the books on psychogeography that I have read recently touch upon the subject at all. Perhaps the elements of danger, trespass, and the fact that there seems to be a lot of activity that goes on underground, really take urban exploration out of the realm of the flâneur. Breaking into a derelict building or infiltrating a sewage system are not exactly strolls.

The most interesting book that I have read that touches on the topic is in fact the first one in which I ever came across the topic, Manaugh (2009), which I first read more than ten years ago. (To be a bit more accurate perhaps the first time I encountered the phenomenon was when I saw Luc Besson’s film Subway back in the late 1980s.) The whole of the second chapter is devoted to “urban covers” who explore the networks of tunnels beneath out cities. This does at least have some striking and impressive examples of subterranean photography.

Otherwise, and coincidentally, the only other book that I have read recently that touches on this is Robert McFarlane’s recent book (2019). Most of this is not about urban exploration, but there is one chapter , Invisible Cities, (page 127 ff.) in which he goes underground in Paris.

One particularly interesting point that MacFarlane makes is in the drawing of a comparison between the activities of these French urban covers and Walter Benjamin’s monumental, but never completed, work The Arcades Project, which perhaps give the lie to my point about psychogeography and flâneury above. This was a multifaceted and kaleidoscopic exploration of the topography, history, mythology, all that you might ever want to know, of Paris. In a way it would have been the ultimate testament of a flâneur, though something that required a great deal more effort than just strolling. The work of the Paris spelunkers is doing a similar sort of thing to the city’s multiple under storeys, and indeed, to coin a phrase, ‘under stories’.

I am quite claustrophobic and would not want to go anywhere like this; even just reading his account of crawling through unbelievably narrower spaces filled me with fear, particularly when MacFarlane admits to his own sense of dread. I therefore have no interest in this sort of urban exploration. Nor do I really have any interest in the activity even when safely above ground. Although I am sure it would be interesting I am concerned about the possible illegality, and threats to personal safety. As a kid I might have been more interested (I have already mentioned the air-raid shelters and bunkers at the factory near where I lived as a child) but not now at my age.

Alexander, J.A.P, (2015).  Perspectives on Place.  London:  Bloomsbury

Macfarlane, R, (2019).  Underland.  London:  Hamish Hamilton

Manaugh, G, (2009).  The BLDG/BLOG Book.  San Francisco:  Chronicle Books

James Morris

Apart from noting a reference to him in Alexander (2015, at page 124) I did not really know much bout the work of James Morris before now. Indeed my first reaction was to confuse him with the writer of the same name who lives in north Wales!. Now that I have looked at some of his Welsh images I find a comparison with John Davies to be quite illuminating.

Leaving aside the obvious difference that Davies has worked primarily in monochrome where as Morris works predominantly (exclusively?) in colour, I am initially struck by the similarities in some of their work: subject matter (obviously), point of view, framing, format. The big difference is that Davies has done a lot of before-and-after shots whereas Morris concentrated on single images. His pictures though often manage to encapsulate elements of both before and after. Many of the landscapes he focuses upon have not really change after the demise of the industries that formed them. His work is therefore political but in a slightly different way: he highlights how the industrial landscapes of Wales, and presumably the communities that remain in them, have effectively been abandoned, or at least overlooked in the sense that there has been no post-industrial amelioration, restoration, or gentrification. In a way this makes his work more shocking to me than Davies’s.

For example, an old slate quarry that remains just at it must have looked when work stopped for the last time:

What they also share is a sense of the Sublime, as this example exemplifies. I do think though that Morris does sometimes come closer to the Picturesque, as in the case of this image from Port Meirion, famously the setting for The Prisoner, for those old enough to remember the television show:

However, the feeling that I get is that he is not just looking for a “pretty picture” and rather that there is again a political point being made. This time it is about a different form of exploitation, not for natural resources and industry, but this time cultural: when not industrial or post industrial, the Welsh landscape is presented as picturesque, something to the delight and amusement of people from outside. I suppose this is exemplified by his image of the car park in the Llanberis Pass at the foot of Snowdon, a magnet for hiking boot clad tourists. (I plead guilty here having trudged up to the summit as part of the Three Peaks Challenge almost sixteen years ago. Mea culpa.)

Patrick Shanahan

It would similarly have been interesting to draw comparisons with Shanahan’s Eden Project work. Unfortunately though the link in the course material no longer works, and I cannot otherwise find anything on the ffotogallery website. There is a website for a photographer of the same name but it has nothing within it about this particular project, so I cannot even be sure it relates to the same person. Similarly nothing seems to show up on, for example, Bing Images. I am afraid therefore that I am a bit in the dark here.

I wonder though, are there parallels here with the work of Ilkka Halso, mentioned in the previous section of the course material (and also considered by Alexander), whom I have not yet addressed? Halo’s images deal with the imminent extinction of natural habitats and a fictionalised, constructed, account of their preservation by effectively turning them into a theme park.

Can the Eden Project, which I confess I have not visited, be said to be doing something similar? Does this make it, to an extent, just another form of physical exploitation of the landscape, and cultural exploitation of the people who visit it? I do not want to be judgmental about it but there is something here that troubles me.

Coincidentally, Halso’s work has been used to illustrate a chapter on Landscape Futures, dealing both with their possible future fate and their value as commodities in a book that I will mention further in the next post on urban exploration: Manaugh (2009), chapter five (page 186, ff.). I first read this a decade ago but at the time Halso’s work did not really make an impact on me. Now I can see it in a different light.

Alexander, J.A.P, (2015).  Perspectives on Place.  London:  Bloomsbury

Manaugh, G, (2009).  The BLDG/BLOG Book.  San Francisco:  Chronicle Books

https://www.jamesmorris.info

I am going to start this section by looking just at the work of John Davies and to think about the observation made by Liz Wells (2011, at pp 170-1) quoted in the course material. In particular what I want to think about is whether or not I agree with Wells’s assessment. Does he teeter on the brink of the Picturesque at the expense of his political message?

Looking back at my earlier reflections on the Picturesque (https://markrobinsonocalandscape.photo.blog/2020/01/16/exercise-3-1-reflecting-on-the-picturesque/) I have to say that I am not at all sure that Davies applies picturesque modes as Wells puts it. I still to a large extent associate notions of picturesque with a sense of an ideal, more imagined than real and attempts to portray a landscape as complying with those notions. I really do not get this from Davies at all. As with Fay Godwin, I do think that some of his work might be described as Romantic, but again with a no-nonsense, hard, realistic and political edge and intent. Certainly there is a sense of pictorialism, in particular with what Wells describes as his Turneresque skies. I am though not convinced that the application of a pictorial aesthetic necessarily makes the images picturesque. Another artist who comes to mind who has produced some particularly dramatic skies in his landscapes, manipulating his negatives and prints in the darkroom, is Don McCullin. (I have to say I sometimes think he went a bit too far.) What I do not think you could seriously say of his work is that it is picturesque, and I am very much of that view when it comes to Davies. If anything, as with Turner’s dramatic skies, I think the effect owes more to a sense of the Sublime than anything else.

Looking in particular at his most recent book (2019) I do not feel that the political impact and importance of his images is at all diluted. On the contrary, they demonstrate graphically how the industrial heritage of this country, upon which much of its wealth was based, has been lost, indeed systematically and wilfully destroyed (think of Thatcher and the miners) and replace with something more insubstantial and ephemeral. I do not have the feeling he is looking back with a sense of nostalgia. Let us face it, much of the industrial landscape was grim, at best unattractive, and the lives of those dependent on the old “dirty” industries were hard. HIs juxtapositions of before and after photos do though raise questions about some of the changes, whether they really have, in the long term, always been for the better, whether the economic realities of today better, easier, today – something I very much doubt for significant portions of the population.

I can see that his distinctively pictorial style (I have no problem with that) can mean that his political message is not necessarily trumpeted loud and clear. That though is not to my mind a bad thing. I am happy that he has to an extent left it to the viewer to form her or his own view and judgments. I do not though share the view that this exposes him to the risk of veering into the Picturesque.

My views on his work are very much reinforced by something that I recently came upon quite by chance, a sequence of images that he made in Japan in 2008. (These appear on his website but I found them as part of the book (2008) cited below.) Despite his usual modus operandi, using black and white film, these are mostly in colour, which gives them a very different and particular effect. They are a sequence of images of the heavily urbanised and industrialised area of Fuji City, in the shadow of the iconic volcano Fuji-san. They do not follow the same before and after format but nevertheless there are similar things going on in them, particularly with his use of pictorial conventions. With these pictures he is saying something about the place of “order” in Japanese culture and society. The industrial landscapes he illustrates are therefore very “neat”, indeed ordered, even tidy. I do not think though that they could really be described as picturesque. Ordered but not particularly attractive. (This remains for me one of the puzzles of Japanese culture: a sense of beauty and natural order is so important but huge swathes of the country have been built upon and developed and nature has been organised, channelled, hemmed in.)

The pictorial convention comes in the form of the appearance in the background of the mountain in the background. There was a tradition amongst Japanese printmakers, and I think particularly of Hokusai and his Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku Sanjūrokkei), of depicting a scene with Fuji-san in the distance. Pictorial but not picturesque, as this example demonstrates:

Davies, J, (2019).  Retraced 81/19.  London:  GOST

Kikuta, M, & Kodera, N, (2008).  European Eyes on Japan – Japan Today vol. 10.  Tokyo:  EU-Japan Fest Japan Committee

Wells. L, (2011)  Land Matters:  Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity.  London:  IB Tauris

http://www.johndavies.uk.com

https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artists/123-john-davies/overview/#/artworks/11117