Unpresentable Landscapes (doctoral research)

My first attempts at experimenting with the ‘binary’ model began via a set of photographs I had taken on the outskirts of the post-industrial town of Consett in County Durham. From the mid-nineteenth century, Consett was one of the world’s leading steel manufacturing towns. However, after the British steel industry went into terminal decline in the 1970s – causing massive job losses at similar plants such as the one at Redcar in Teesside – the Consett steelworks were finally closed down in 1980. The town “became one of the worst unemployment blackspots in Britain” (BBC n.d.) and in the following decades developed an alarmingly high suicide rate, which rose to four-times the national average in 2004 (McAteer 2004: n. pag.). I grew up 10 miles from Consett, and as a child often walked with my parents in the Howns Gill valley, which lies just outside the town. That walk takes in the Hownsgill Viaduct, an impressive 175-foot high Victorian railway bridge that is sadly also a notorious suicide spot. The disused railway line that crosses the Viaduct forms part of the Waskerley Way walk, and the valley below the bridge boasts beautiful deciduous woodland. There is also a remarkable complex of caves in its eastern cliff face. I remember, however, that as a child the area had an eerie atmosphere. This was in part, I am sure, due to the suicides, but signs of nearby Consett’s economic disadvantages seem to extend into the valley in other ways too, detracting from its natural beauty. Vandalism, for example, is an ongoing problem: large objects such as shopping trolleys are regularly thrown from the bridge; graffiti covers the cave walls, which are littered with cans and bottles from teenage drinking sessions; and scrambler-bike tracks tear-up the field around the small lake that lies just below the viaduct. It was an attempt to figure the childhood memory of this confusion – between the sense of unease I attributed to the valley’s post-industrial detritus and its natural beauty – that led to my first experiments with ‘binary structures’.

Each piece in the Hownsgill Rip series, which I began in 2008, combines two versions of the same photograph: one ‘true’ photograph in which can be seen some trace of modernity or ‘disruptive’ human activity (e.g. a shopping trolley or scrambler bike tracks) layered with a second ‘imaginary’ version of the same photograph in which that element has been digitally removed in order to present a more idyllic ‘natural’ scene. The area of the photograph in which the presence overlaps the absence is then torn, in order to juxtapose the difference between the two images. The form created by the hole also seems to introduce a third, non- representational element ...

The act of tearing the physical surface of the photographic paper foregrounds each piece’s materiality, disrupting its illusory qualities and asserting its status as representational. Each hole also seems to function as a ‘frame-within-a-frame’, confusing the boundaries of the representation by adding another level to what Derrida refers to as the parergon of each piece. Yet another register of confusion is added here too, in that the collages are themselves re-photographed, meaning that the final piece is in fact a single image in which the tears and protrusions of the rips are themselves flat re-presentations.

I made the decision to tear the photographs (rather than juxtapose the two layers digitally using clean, straight lines echoing the edges of each image) for a number of reasons. Firstly, because of my project’s engagement with the subjective in lens-based media I was interested in exploring ways of combining gestural, painterly techniques with the more passive, mechanical process of photography. Secondly, the act of manually disrupting the surface of the image seemed to echo the real-life, manmade disruptions to the surface of the landscape that the images portrayed. Finally, the theoretical ideas that informed the development of the work seemed to rely on a language evoking such forms. In Camera Lucida for example, Barthes describes the subjective elements of the photograph, what he refers to as its ‘punctum’, with words such as ‘cut’ and ‘little hole’: something that ‘breaks’, ‘punctuates’ or ‘pierces’ (2000: 26-27). He describes the punctum as “this element which rises from the scene” and “this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument” (2000: 26-27). Drawing on Barthes, Mulvey too speaks of how, through disrupting the illusion of reality in a filmic image, the “moment of registration suddenly bursts through its artificial, narrative surface” (Mulvey 2007: 137-138).