John Beck, ‘Far West/Middle East: The Wormholes of War Photography’
There is a long, partisan history of drawing correspondences between the Far West and Middle East that dates back at least to the nineteenth century. Such correspondences were revivified initially around the time of the first Gulf War, when Richard Misrach’s images of Nevada bomb-sites supplied the visuals for the notably absent on-the-ground photographic record of the conflict. Here, Nevada became a stand-in for Kuwait, a country whose devastation at the hands of US forces would only retrospectively become visible through projects like Sophie Ristelhueber’s Fait. The visual similarities and symbolic cross-references between images of the western US deserts and the landscapes of the Middle East have inevitably become more pronounced and politically incendiary since 2001. As conventional photographic reportage of combat disappears due to the military’s management of the visual field, photography has become more circumspect in its attempts to picture conflict, relying increasingly on spatiotemporal folds and aporia. In other words, rehearsals and substitutions for — and the aftermath of — conflict have become the subject of a war photography that can only report by indirection and allusion. Here, the history of conflating Far West and Middle East has taken on a new valence. While photographs made in the aftermath of battle have given rise to discussions of so-called ‘late’ photography (Campany, Roberts), there is also what might be called an ‘early’ photography of war. Military preparations for Middle Eastern operations often take place in the US desert regions, and here the religious, geophysical, and iconographic convergences and displacements that have codified and braided the visual record of the Western US and the Middle East are reactivated. Looking at recent work by, for example, An-My Lê, Steve Rowell, and Bloomberg and Chanarin alongside 19th and 20th century Western and Middle Eastern photography, this paper examines the complex temporal and spatial manoeuvres involved in picturing the absent battles of the twenty-first century.
Caroline Blinder, ‘Some Thoughts on Walker Evans’ Belongings of a Flood Refugee, Forrest City, Arkansas, Feb. 1937’
In 1937 the Ohio River Flood that swept along Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky claimed close to 400 lives and left roughly one million people homeless across five states. Together with Roy Striker, head of the FSA photographic division and Evans’ employer at the time, Evans went on a trip to photograph the displaced refugees. ‘Belongings of a Flood Refugee’ is in many ways entirely in keeping with Evans other studies of the meager possessions of Depression era Americans, and yet on other levels, it is a curiously impersonal look at the catastrophe of homelessness and displacement.
This paper will look at Evans’ uncanny ability to render the trauma of displacement without the usual props, the gazes and downturned faces of the people affected. Instead, Evans creates through a distillation of classical still life and documentary methods a topography of the interior life of the people affected by the flood. I want to argue that the topography here operates as a landscape enabled by what Evans is documenting – namely the collapse between private interior life and external space, the very thing that the temporary nature of a ‘shelter’ or refuge is representative of.
For Evans, then, there is a political point here, but it hides in the less obvious signifiers, the ways in which material used to package consumables are suddenly re-engaged for other purposes; purposes that seem to stress their inefficiency and paradoxically their beauty as well. As usual, Evans is caught in the double bind of the artsy documentary photographer, in thrall to the potential of photography as a reworking of classical modes of representation, in this case the still life, and weary of the aestheticization of the politically bankrupt situation that has placed those objects at his disposal.
For Evans, the question of what makes an interior an interior and what makes an exterior an exterior, are constituent parts of the American landscape; a landscape constructed through a particular topographic eye that relishes the collapse between the two.
Christopher Clark, ‘Re-Imagining the American Landscape: Jonathan Hyman’s Beyond Ground Zero’
This paper will look at the photography of Jonathan Hyman who has documented what he calls the ‘vernacular’ response to 9/11. By travelling across the U.S., he has assembled a collection that seeks to catalogue the differing responses of the American public to the attacks, and create a memorial to the American landscape. In highlighting the problematic singularity of the collection, or more so, the cultural response to the attacks (which it epitomizes), I hope to highlight the ways in which American culture has continued to develop a national imaginary, often through the American landscape, that continues to exclude the Other.
Sarah Garland, ‘Ed Ruscha’s ThirtyfourParking Lots in Los Angeles’
Ed Ruscha’s photography consistently engages with the matter of American geography, and with journeys through that land, in a way that challenges both the idea of progression and the fixed idea of place. This paper begins with his photobook,Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967), to investigate the centrality of the idea of ‘ground’ to Ruscha’s work. The aerial photography that makes these first images possible foregrounds the markings of LA’s ground to begin to suggest the city as system, whilst the abstracted qualities of the photographs begin to dissolve the conventional figure and ground hierarchy of the work of art. These photos also give us the ground as that which can be mapped from on high, but also that which can be stained with petrol and paint, tying Ruscha’s sense of the American land as marked by history, by the artist and by social systems into Robert Smithson’s land art of the same period. The seriality Ruscha inscribes into these parking lots by arranging them in a book format is also germane — it is seriality, I argue, which turns these flattened photographs into a system, harking to the contemporary concern with art as a flow of information, as well as a retinal image. These images depict LA both as an accretion and a flow of information, using the American urban landscape to light questions of knowledge, form, perspective and agency.
Nicoló Giudice, ‘Paul Graham’s American Night and the Politics of Exposure’
“Anyone who comes to the United States with open eyes cannot fail to be moved by the racial/social inequalities here. It’s the elephant in the room. To make work here, and not take that into account seems to me plainly ridiculous, and it makes you part of the problem.” Paul Graham
How can photography be used to address a state of social blindness? How can it contribute to render the invisibility of ‘the elephant in the room’ visible? This paper will consider how the first body of work that British photographer Paul Graham made in the United States, American Night (Steidl MACK, 2003), tackles this political and aesthetic problem through a combination of topographical and phenomenological approaches. In American Night, Graham creates a synthetic and dialectic map that offers a composite view of the American metropolis and its geography of inequalities.
The viewer is invited to pass through three areas or zones within the American urban landscape; along side roads, freeways, highways and correlated sites, in front of suburban or exurban new houses, and on the sidewalks of a city center. In photographic terms, these three types of site are depicted through different levels of exposure.
Building on Lewis Mumford and Guy Debord, amongst others, this paper will discuss how the structure of Graham’s book is symptomatic of “the explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls ‘formless masses’ of urban debris”; an explosion that contains within itself both concentric and dispersive movements of separation. This paper will thus examine how Graham attempts to expose the states of blindness that reigns over the issue of racial/social inequalities and the people who are exposed to disappear from public and political consciousness. It will be argued that Graham creates a set of images that, in spite of all, generates what Hannah Arendt called “a bit of humanness in a world (that has) become inhuman”.
Christopher Lloyd, ‘Remembering Antietam: Sally Mann and Matthew Brady’s Civil War Landscape Photography’
The Civil War lingers in U.S. cultural memory. Scholars including David Blight and Michael Kreyling call attention to the ways in which the war and its aftermath are continuously made present: through re-enactments, tourism, film and literature. This paper will examine two photographers’ utilization of the southern landscape at Antietam to recollect and remember both the dead and the conflict at large. Intervening in these landscapes—through moving bodies and equipment, in Brady’s case, or using antiquated collodion process, in Mann’s—both photographers remediate and shape memories of the Civil War for aesthetic and cultural purpose.
Stephanie Schwartz, ‘Driving By Shooting: On Martha Rosler’s Secrets from the Street: No Disclosure’
This paper takes as its subject Martha Rosler’s Secrets from the Street: No Disclosure, a 12-minute film the artist shot from her car window as she cruised San Francisco’s Mission District in the late 1970s. Situated, personal, narrative—Rosler speaks to the viewer in her native Brooklyn accent throughout—Secrets from the Street negotiates, from the ground up, contemporary processes of gentrification. It is the situated perspective of Rosler’s drive that I want to explore. Why personalize the survey of social space? Why draw on the car as a ‘vehicle’ for this investigation? I will address these questions through a consideration of contemporary explorations of the organization of California’s landscape, from Lewis Baltz’s flat records of the ‘man-altered’ terrain of Irvine to Ed Ruscha’s L.A. drives.
AMERICAN TOPOGRAPHICS 