Not for the first time I am a bit out of sequence, addressing this exercise before looking at the earlier, wider, topic of “Photography, memory and place”. However I want to get my thoughts on Bate’s article down first while they are fresh in my mind, and from what I have already looked at for the wider topic I am not sure that going out of sequence affects my views from either perspective. It has to be accepted from the outset though that these are initial thoughts and reactions to the article. They are not polished, not necessarily fully considered, nor do they necessarily amount to a coherent whole.

Although the article is indeed quite densely argued I nevertheless think that it can be distilled down to a small number of points. The first, primary point, taking Freud and his Mystic Writing-pad, as a starting point, is that the photograph (along with the gramophone record, or whatever contemporary incarnation of it one might like to choose) has become a memory device, an aid to recall of memory, indeed an artificial memory in its own right.

(The first of two asides on Freud in this context: whilst I agree with the heart of Freud’s argument, the way it is set out, or at least quoted in Bate’s article, is a little confused and confusing in the sense that he he dealing with two distinct phenomena, without the distinction necessarily being drawn very clearly, at least by Bate. In dealing with “auxiliary apparatus” he does not really draw a distinction between those that ‘augment’ the natural sense – spectacles that aid eyesight, ear-trumpets that aid hearing – and those that act a memory devices – writing, photographs, recordings.)

The next point, drawing on Derrida (note the difference in the clarity of Freud’s and Derrida’s writing – I sometimes have the feeling that, in common with a number of cultural theorists, he is almost deliberately obscurantist, or at least addressing a particular audience of cognoscenti), suggests that the technology of memory support is itself changing the way we remember, even whether we remember. I do not feel this is a controversial point at all. As Bate argues throughout his essay, the advent of various technologies has had an impact on the way we remember. Before the advent of widespread literacy, indeed before the invention of writing itself, things were ‘remembered’, learned by heart and retransmitted orally. Writing made that largely unnecessary. It is though interesting that Bate withholds judgment on Derrida’s argument, simply describing it as “an interesting thesis”, neither agreeing nor disagreeing (page 245). Yet he does seem to approve of the similar point made by Walter Benjamin (presumably a reference to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) and Kracauer (with whom I am afraid I am not at all familiar.

In support of the general idea of thinking about photography as a form of memory there is very clear historical evidence of and precedence for “memory devices”, “instruments of collective cultural memory”, going right back to the earliest examples of cultural production, arguably right back to the very earliest pre-historic cave paintings.

In the next section on Collective Memory, bearing the point above in mind, I have a problem Le Goff’s analysis. Photography, “which revolutionises memory”, (a bold and I cannot but help think a somewhat hyperbolic assertion) is certainly new. But the “erection of public monuments” most certainly is not new. What about the monuments raised by the Babylonians and Assyrians, for example? They were all about creating a collective, officially created and manipulated, memory of the exploits of their kings: the people were being instructed in exactly what to “remember”.

This is though the point in the essay at which I start to get really interested: “We may certainly be sceptical here about the ‘truth’ of such archives…”, that is the nature of the ‘memory’ that is being recorded.

This is something that I looked at in I&P in particular when considering Marianne Hirsch’s book (2012). (https://markrobinsonocablog3ip.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/part-4-project-2-memories-and-speech-and-a-glance-back-to-assignment-3/) (https://markrobinsonocablog3ip.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/family-frames-book/) The message that I got very strongly from considering that book is precisely the unreliability, in the absence of corroboration and reliable context, is about the unreliability of the photograph. Hirsch particularly explores the difference, and the distance, between reality and an idealised notion of “family” as recorded in family albums and archives.

From a personal point of view, by coincidence I have recently rediscovered my grandfather’s papers that I mentioned in the first of those two posts. Of all places I found them in the filing cabinet in which I keep all my important papers and discovered them when looking for something else and came across a folder that was not labelled! I have no memory of putting them there. What is particularly interesting looking at them again is how faulty my memory of them is, and indeed the collective, family memory, that was passed on after his death. The story that they tell is very different from what turns out to have been constructed, and somewhat half-baked, “official” family story. What is all the more intriguing is how I can now see that my grandfather was to an extent himself complicit in the creation of this false memory while he was still alive, at least as a result of his own taciturnity and unwillingness to open up. Quite where I am going to go with these papers yet remains to be seen but I am at least glad I have found them again.

After that little digression, the next principal point relates to the various uses of archives, and therefore of memory, and how, not necessarily just in the hands of officialdom, control of memory is an excerise of power, particularly as they relate not just to the past but also to the future. This is something touched on by Alan Moore in his Blake article (2019) in the sentence following the quotation I cited in my post on the book:

“Might it be, however, that some places have not only an embedded past, but an embedded future also? Could some work of art be already contained within their state of origin, immanent and waiting for discovery, for realisation?”

In more political terms I think of what George Orwell wrote in “1984” about whoever controls the past controls the future.

Bate takes the point a little further so far as photography is concerned and argues that it goes beyond what other forms of archive are capable of, in so far as it has the capacity to store and reproduce other things, objects, in visual form. He describes photography as a “meta-archive” and gives as an example the work of Fox-Talbot.

This leads on to what I see as the final principal point, and in a way, one of the most important when considering photography, as a medium in its own right, and as a form of archive, a tool of memory, and that is how it might affect the working of memory itself. The key point here is that it can act as a trigger for other memories, that are not necessarily otherwise contained within or directly associated with the particular image. At some length he discusses Frued’s concept of the “screen memory” and his explanation of how memory can be distorted or modified, how they can ultimately e fluid and unreliable.

This brings me to my second aside on Freud. Years ago, I read quite a lot of Freud simply out of interest, He is such an important figure in the development psychoanalytic thought that he is unavoidable. However, it quickly became apparent, as I learned more, is that Freud’s theories are not necessarily always correct, or are at least open to challenge and question, that they need to be taken on board with a degree of critical thought. What strikes me about Bate’s argument is that he seems to accept Freud’s ideas wholly uncritically. I do not know enough about the psychology of the development and operation of memory functions to be able to form a view of my own. Freud might be right. He might not. Whilst I do not necessarily disagree with the general thrust of his, and therefore also of Bate’s argument, I do not necessarily take it as a given, as something that is not open to further critical enquiry. It therefore troubles me somewhat to see such an uncritical, unquestioning approach.

Leaving that aside, I am in general agreement with Bate’s analysis and I think his final paragraph (pages 255-6) is perhaps the most useful, not to mention succinct, summary of his central thesis, and worth quoting in full:

“With photographs, memory is both fixed and fluid: social and personal. There is nothing neutral here. As sites of memory, photographic images (whether digital or analogue) offer not a view on history but, as mnemonic devices, are perceptual phenomena upon which a historical interpretation may be constructed. Social memory is interfered with by photography precisely because of it affective and subjective status. So in the demand for an intellectual response to pictures or for the priority of their subjective affect, the concept of “screen memories” offers an alternative framework. As composite formations, photographs, like childhood memories, have a sharpness and innocence that belie meanings that have far more potential significance than is often attributed to the,, which means that in terms of history and memory, photographs demand analysis rather than hypnotic reverie.”

The photograph is an unreliable thing, something that should not, and cannot safely, be taken at face value.

Bate, D, (2010). The Memory of Photography, Photographies, 3:2, 243-257

Hirsch, M. (2012) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Myrone, M, & Concannon, A, (2019).  William Blake.  London:  Tate Publishing

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17540763.2010.499609#.U_3kzcVdXTp

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

This is not an exercise that has helped me with settling on a subject for Assignment 3 as I had already decided what I want to explore in that project, and have indeed already started shooting (I got another couple of shots today while out working on this week’s images for Assignment 6). It is though something that is relevant to some of my thinking about post-industrial landscapes and how, over time, such places can revert to something approaching a natural state, and how the knowledge of the industrial past can be lost.

What I am particularly interested in here is the local history of lead mining and smelting. Most of the lead mined in the North East was worked in the North Pennines, in particular in Upper Weardale at places such as Kilhope and Rookhope. Kilhope is of course the home of the national lead mining museum. Unfortunately though, as I have discovered while carrying out my research, it does not appear to be home to an archive resource. There are though a few places in the Tyne Valleywhere lead was mined on a much smaller scale and it is one such site, less than a mile from my house, that I am interested in.

Local lore has it, and I have been aware since moving here more than fourteen years ago, that lead has been mined on the ridge just south of here, probably since Roman times, and carried down the hill to the river, just north of here, whence it was then carried on barges downstream to Newcastle (Pons Aelius). What I have wanted to do with my research is put some flesh on the bare bones.

I must say from the outset that it is clear that this task will require a lot more time than the suggested half day. I have also run into some frustration as although I have been able to identify a number of resources, in particular scholarly articles on the industry in this area, I have not yet been able to gain access to them. We are blessed here with a very fine old scholarly institution in Newcastle, The Northern Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, incorporated in 1876 and housed in an impressive Victorian building in the centre of town (coincidentally next door to the Literary and Philosophical Society of which I have been a member for more than thirty years and visit on a monthly basis). The archives that they hold are extensive and nearly all of the documents that I know exist relating to my local lead mine are housed there. Unfortunately the building is undergoing extensive renovation work which means it will be closed until the autumn this year, and their library is now in storage, and as a result difficult to access. I might be able to get the librarian to retrieve some of the documents that I would like to consult but it is likely to be a time-consuming process.

Subject to that major handicap, I have at least been able to confirm the existence of a mine and smelting site. It is possible that to a large extent the documents still to be consulted will do little more than add further confirmation without necessarily providing much more detailed information. It would seem this was quite a small undertaking and its origins and early life, particularly if it goes back as far as the Romans, will not have been well documented, if at all.

Apart from the local lore (I once met a man who was dowsing, with metal rods, in search of sites related to transport of lead down to the river!) there are clues in local place names. Two in particular are directly relevant. Part of the ridge is known as Bale Hill. At least since Medieval times, a Bale, or Bail, was a smelting site. Here is a diagram of one from the Northern Mining Research Society (to whom I will return below):

These were used to separate the metallic lead from the ore and were often placed on the upper slopes of hills in order to take advantage of winds and natural air-flow to raise the temperature of the ore. This explains something that had otherwise long puzzled me, why there is more than one Bale Hill within just a few miles of here. There is another one at Healey, a village a couple of miles to the west of here, part of the same ridge, that appears to have been a more important site and one that has been better documented. My Bale Hill is where our local golf course is and no traces remain of the site’s history.

This map is from the NMRS and shows the location of the mine in relation to the river. Her is another in a bit more detail:

This shows the second geographical hint: the road that runs past the site, and runs down the hill towards the river, is still known as “Lead Road”. In fact, taking a closer look at it an the latest OS map, it can be seen that the road still has this name for much of its length and that it runs along the ridge to the west and links to nearly all the other known lead mining sites in this part of the Tyne valley.

Another snippet of information comes from the environmental search that was carried out when I bought my current house. Unfortunately I do not still have a copy of it (there will though be one in my lawyers’ file relating to the purchase) but I recall it indicated the presence of historical lead working quite close to the house, just below the escarpment on which we are located, in the valley of the Stocksfield Burn that flows north into the Tyne, and next to the lane that links the Lead Road to the river at Bywell. Again there are no physical traces left and it is not clear what exactly might have been done at the site. Local lore though suggests that it might have been a small (one man and his mule!) temporary smelting site.

Although I have not been able to consult any of the NMRS publications at the Mining Institute, I have at least been able to identify a couple of documents that might be relevant. One in particular is issue number 50 of their publication British Mining (at pages 95 to 97) that deals with lead mining, smelting, and iron ore smelting at a number of local sites, including my Bale Hill site. This reference suggests that latterly at least this site might have been used more for iron smelting.

I have also consulted my local library but unfortunately they do not have much on this topic. They do have a copy of another NMRS publication, British Mining 65, Allendale, Tynedale and Derwent Lead Mines by RA Fairbairn but when I checked last Thursday it was not available. However, from the sample pages available on the website (link below) it does not appear that there is much, if anything, in it that relates to my chosen site. At most I expect that these sources will do little more than confirm the existence of the site. The other thing that is apparent from this, and a number of other, otherwise unrelated NMRS publications that I have been able to sample, is that they probably concentrate mostly on the 19th and 20th centuries. What I am more interested in is the much earlier history of the site and I fear that this is not going to be easily available, if at all.

This is not going to form Assignment 3. Nevertheless I have given some thought to how it might be photographed. It is a bit difficult as there are no physical remains and so little information is available to cast any clear light on the activities over time at the site and along the Lead Road down to the river. What might work though would be a series of images simply of the countryside and the route down into the valley as it appears and exists now, if only to show how this post-industrial landscape has not exactly reverted to a previous natural state but has changed with other non-industrial usage.

https://mininginstitute.org.uk

https://www.nmrs.org.uk

http://www.nmrs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/bm65lookinside.pdf

Rather than immediately produce a set of images for this exercise, what I am going to do for now is simply outline and describe some ideas, suggesting what they might contain and depict. Predictably, given the ideological views I expressed in the last post on the first part of this exercise, I am going to have another go at the fossil fuel industry, about which I am feeling all the more strongly as time goes on.

What I have in mind is a satire on an imagined brochure for an ecological theme park, another bit of greenwashing by a “green” non-renewable energy company. Not subtle, I am afraid, and very much aimed at highlighting the mythical company’s hypocrisy. In each case, for now, I am just going to identify the theme of a given part of the park and suggest a paradoxical photograph to accompany it:

The Arboretum – clear-felled tropical rain forest and fire ravaged woodland, as in Australia of late.

The Aquarium – a lake choked with algae and dead fish.

The Aviary – at best, glass cases filled with stuffed birds, otherwise oil-slicked seabirds, birds killed by pesticides and other chemicals in arable farm fields.

The Moorland – heather burning, grouse shooting, poisoned birds of prey.

The Wild Uplands – mountains of rubbish, piles of junked cars.

The Eco-Farm – batteries of chickens, penned pigs, piles of dead cows being burned for foot and mouth, BSE, Bovine TB, and any other avoidable animal diseases you can imagine.

Wild Nature – culled badgers, foxes and mountain hares hunted to death.

The Cafeteria – Mc Donalds.

Everywhere – “Keep Out” signs!

I could go on with more examples but frankly it would just get too depressing. More than just a but polemical I accept but this reflects some of how I feel at the moment. Certainly, as the brief for the exercise requires, I have taken an ideological standpoint.

I am going to start with two images that I heartily disapprove of. Both are from BP adverts and are, in my view, little more than ‘greenwashing’

This is the first, a post-Gulf of Mexico disaster ad. The image itself strikes me as strangely bland showing some blue sea, a strip of beach, and a smattering of what I assume are holiday apartments and hotels. That part of the image is overpowered by the big BP ‘sun’ logo, which is the most visually dominant part of the whole confection. That logo itself is offensive enough in its own right, a mix of sun and sun-flower – naturally available power in the form of the sun and a widely recognised ecological movement symbol in the form of the flower. Yet BP is inseparable from finite and polluting fossil fuels.

The text is all the more offensive. On the one hand the message is everything will be ok because we, BP, are pouring so much money back in. That in itself will not, can never, fully ameliorate or reinstate what has been lost. And anyway, where is the money coming from? The continued exploitation of fossil fuels that are at the heart of the problem to start with, and us the public who still to a considerable extent need to rely on their products. Also, note how they use the word “tragedy” rather than the “disaster” it really was. This is a sly way of saying, “it was not really our fault”.

The other is come back to the Gulf so that we can do good together. Again the burden is to an extent being pushed onto us. There are not that many people visible in the photograph. Presumably what BP wants is for us to see more, and that this would indicate a recovery in the environment. This is of course rubbish. Although an increase in tourism would benefit the local economy it is not the answer. More visitors mean more development – imagine a more densely developed skyline – and significantly more pollution.

The second is also a product of the hapless BP. A clever ploy, teaming up with national treasure (though somewhat ailing) M&S, with the message that although you are away from home you can nevertheless eat as if you were at home (lots of people depend on M&S for their food shopping), while you fill up with BP fuel to get you home to the real thing. (As an aside, have you noticed how on motorways in particular and other major routes BP are more often than not the most expensive petrol stations with prices significantly higher than they would be elsewhere? “Were are being nice to you by joining ups with M&S but we are still going to rip you off!”)

“Green lights all the way”? AS if you are not going to suffer any hold-ups if you use BP feel? More greenwashing! And note how, and I think this is seriously misjudged, the ‘green lights’, presumably intended to eco cars’ lights, actually in this case run across country rather than sticking to the road. “Not only are we ripping you off but we are also riding rough-shod over the environment.”

My third example is one that I have referred to and written about before but is one that I keep coming back to and still has resonance for me, Fay Godwin’s The Duke of Westminster’s Estate, Forrest of Bowland, 1989:

This is all about how land ownership is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people and that it is used in an exclusionary way. Unfortunately the text is not clear in they particular specimens but the sign simply says “Private”. The message is clear and very simple, “this is my land, keep off it”, and her portrayal of it is far from approving.. Godwin did a lot of work based on this theme as a form of protest and resistance. I had not realised until I looked at the videos about Godwin while working on the Picturesque exercise that she had been president of the Ramblers Association and so was doing more than just taking photographs to illustrate and publicise the problem but also taking direct action, putting boots on the ground. My admiration for her and her work has only grown!

Before moving on to the next exercise, 3.4, I thought it might be useful (for me at least) if I was to record some responses to the work discussed in this part of the course material. I do not intend to pick any of it apart in detail but just to record some thoughts, not least because I have already spent some time looking at some of this work, particularly Mitch Epstein and Dana Lixenberg.

Starting with Constable and Kennard, I have a slightly different response to the Cruise missiles than Wells (2011) suggests because I take as my starting point the social, agricultural, background described by Andrews (1999). What Constable painted was an imagined, constructed, “remembered” ideal of a mixture of rural past and present that never really existed. I see Kennard’s work as being less a comment on the threat of the physical destruction of an “ideal” England, rather than Britain, (what about the other hapless countries that form part of this benighted Union that might also have been bombed to bits?) than the threat to an “idea” of England, an England that is more fiction than fact.

What I also get is that the threat is not necessarily from the former Soviet Union but from a so-called ally. By the 1980s the “threat” from the East was arguably more illusory than real and the bigger danger was presented by the paranoid bellicosity of the Americans. The Eastern Bloc was already under considerable strain and that decade of course saw its ultimate failure. What made the possibility of military action more possible (if not necessarily actually very likely) was the aggressive posture of the Americans in particular in positioning Cruise missiles in this country and 108 Pershing II missiles in West Germany. We now know that it was the Warsaw Pact countries that were afraid that they were about to be attacked by NATO rather than the other way round! I do though of course fully accept that this view has benefited from the hindsight offered by the last thirty years or so.

What I get from the picture in this context now is a comment on not just the perceived threat of physical annihilation by nuclear war, which was a very real fear at the time, but the threat to a wider sense of “English” (I deliberately use the word instead of British) identity and independence, an imagined sense of Englishness being subsumed by an increasingly American dominated Western culture, (not to mention power-politics). The point is, I suppose, that I see the threat coming from a completely different angle!

Which I suppose leads nicely on to Mitch Epstein. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I first became aware of his work back in 2009 in an article in Granta. Subsequently, my I&P tutor suggested him as a further research source right at the end of that course. I have subsequently bought a copy of his book (2011) and I thought I had already written specifically about it but it appears that I have not. I must come back to him properly in due course. For now though I just want to comment on his work in the context of my thoughts on Constable’s painting.

Going back through the book, and rereading the afterword it struck me there is a parallel between how I see Kennard’s work and how Epstein sees the US: as he puts it (last page), “while America teeters between collapse and transformation. The siting of Cruise missiles here was in some ways an act of paranoia and a surrender of national sovereignty to an “ally” and its huge military-industrial complex (how ironic that it was Eisenhower, general and latter day politician, who coined the phrase). What Epstein’s work shows is not just environmental peril, and perhaps perceived or imagined military threats, but a pervading sense of hubris. The country has driven itself to the brink with the idea of Manifest Destiny, which drove so much of the expansion into the west, with its concomitant, quasi-religious “right” to exploit the earth’s resources. But I feel it goes further than that. It is not just those environmental and other threats that are at work but internal, home-grown, fears and paranoia: look at the old lady with the security cameras and her gun, the repeated interventions and harassment of Epstein by corporate security and their neighbourhood proxies, the forces of local “law” (for which read, the most powerful corporate rather than constitutional) enforcement. Both sets of work, in this context, seem to me to be as much, if not more, about the destruction of landscape, a sense of belonging, a sense of nationhood, being driven from within society, the nation, itself and not just being the result of malign external forces.

Lastly for now I will just touch on Edward Burtynsky. I am not familiar with his work to any great extent and am going to need to get to know it, and him, better. Unfortunately the link in the course material to the interview about China is no longer available on the LenCulture site and I have not otherwise been able to find anything on Soundcloud that might replicate it. I am therefore going to need to do some more digging to get a proper handle on his work. For now though it is illuminating to look at the quotation on the home page of his own website: “[we] come from nature.…There is an importance to [having] a certain reverence for what nature is because we are connected to it… If we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.” Here again we have, though this time on a global scale, danger and destruction coming from within, and not some real, or more likely imaged, enemy without.

Otherwise I would just comment from a purely aesthetic point of view that, although his images have considerable impact, not least because of their scale, they do not greatly appeal to me. I have a similar problem with, for example, and without wishing to be unfair by singling him out now, Andreas Gursky. The problem I have is that it al seems that bit too remote, too disengaged. In this sense I feel that Epstein’s work is, although some of it quite panoramic, much more closely engaged physically with his subjects. He was certainly more closely engaged so far as the harassment he encountered is concerned.

I am going to come back to Dana Lixenberg separately in a later post. I feel her environmental work is worth a separate look in its own right and I want to familiarise myself more with The Last Days of Shishmaref before commenting on it. (The link in the course material no longer works. Indeed it appears she no longer maintains a personal website and relies instead on that of the Grimm Gallery, which unfortunately does not have much to say about that particular project. I have therefore been tracking down a copy of the book itself and do not have it yet!)

Epstein, M, (2011).  American Power.  Göttingen: Steidl

Freeman, J, (ed), (2009).  Granta Issue 107.  London:  Granta Publications

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

https://www.edwardburtynsky.com

The subject of late photography is one that loomed fairly large in C&N and as such is something that I spent some time looking at then. I have gone back to that earlier work and again looked at Paul Seawright and Sarah Pickering, and read John Stathatos’s article. I find that having done so I do not really have much, if anything, to add for the time being. I think the important points are the ones to be made in response to Exercise 3.3. I do not propose therefore to write anything fresh here but simply refer back to a couple of my C&N posts, on which my views have not changed significantly in the interim.

Otherwise, I would mention that the link to the Library of Congress website appears to be bad and as no indication is given of what the content the subject of that link was supposed to be it is not really possible to find whatever the intended material is from within the website itself.

https://markrobinsonocablog2cn.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/project-4-public-order/

https://markrobinsonocablog2cn.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/project-4-the-gallery-wall-documentary-as-art/

https://markrobinsonocablog2cn.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/safety-in-numbness/

https://www.stathatos.net/sites/default/files/texts/61.hiding-open-paul-seawrights-afghanistan.stathatos.net.23047438.pdf

https://www.stathatos.net/texts/writings-photography-and-art/hiding-open-paul-seawrights-afghanistan