Vision, Subject, Place

The Blind Cartographer, 2012

My enquiry is formed by three overlapping questions; one is a question of vision, another the problem of subjectivity, and finally, the notion of place. Vision is commonly associated with knowledge and control, but subjectivity is shaped by the unconscious, desire and the unknown. Encapsulating this dichotomy is the problematic of locating of the subject in space – a crisis of locality and an anxiety over defining where we are (“you are here” signals the typical tourist map, thus marking one out as a stranger – naive to the local terrain). The anxiety formed by the layering of such theoretical problems is perhaps best expressed by the encounter of a landscape that looks back. Landscape as an image, has long been a means of suppressing anxiety, but the ‘look back’ can be considered as the gaze embodied by the Other or neighbour. Such figures displace the subject from the central place of the traditional Cartesian subject.

According to Slavoj Žižek, it is only when one ‘looks awry’, fully invested with desire that one witnesses that which reason, objectivity, and distance had previously prevented one from seeing. Crucial for Žižek is how fantasy and desire impact on lived reality. The depiction of the landscape as a borderless and banal zone, literally offers empty spaces in which some significance is sought. Desire emerges when “something” (object-cause) embodies “nothing”; something gives physical existence to the void.* The empty space that the subject encounters, according to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, situates it within a relationship constituted by fantasy and desire, the eye and the gaze, internal and external.** Space becomes active, and uncanny gaps, glitches and ruptures in visuality testify to the subject's uncertain place within the world.

* Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). p.12.

** Pile, Steven. The Body and the City (London: Routledge, 1996). p. 129.

Failing Orbit 8 - Repeating the same mistakes

Sold, 2012

I make some journeys more than once. Sometimes I find myself returning to the same spot repeatedly. This is often unconscious; some uncanny drift, drawing the hostage body towards a space in which one finds some familiarity in the very strangeness of the location itself. Sometimes, however, this return is deliberate. I may return to ‘re-shoot’. Perhaps some blur had occurred the first time, an unintentional movement in the frame, or even technical fault. In these cases, I return to correct the mistakes of the past; to both repeat and perfect history, by recreating an image that will inevitably be haunted by its own past failure. 

With such idealising of the past, one creates a false memory of success in the wake of error. Yet, one is always dogged by the changes that have taken place in one’s own absence; foliage grows, cars move, building-work continues, even lamp-posts get relocated. Minor details that are otherwise missed, remind oneself that repetition is always impossible. One can never step into the same river twice, as it were. Each mistake is always a new mistake.

Failing Orbit 7 – Blind Cartography 2

RAF No. 5, 2012

If I consult a map at all, I am usually drawn to the blank spaces – the bits deemed unnecessary, or undesirable, to plot. These are often alluded to; perimeters may be drawn in, or arrows may point off the edge of the map. Blank spaces on a map can mean a number of things.* Firstly, an absence of knowledge; that the map-maker did not know what was there. This is different however, from the unknowable, that was once marked on early maps in the form of dragons, sea-serpents, mermaids, etc. - these signified some unearthly region that was abysmally terrifying and unmappable. Secondly, the cartographer might have very-well known what was there, but either considered it too unimportant to bother noting, or conversely, too crucial a piece of information to share publicly – military bases, sensitive scientific facilities, etc. Thirdly, the blank may imply that which the cartographer desired to not be present in the first place; perhaps by leaving out that which spoils the view, one might encourage others not to see it either. A kind of wish-fulfillment; by wishing places out of existence, the map can be seen here as an ideological fantasy space - just as early colonialists wished for an empty map of blank territories that could be filled out in the name of the empire. 

Maps are as much about omitting information as they are about rendering detail. In the name of legibility, unnecessary information is often left out in order that the reader understands exactly where/what they are being directed to go/do. In fact, most forms of realism are rested upon the omission of detail - this is why, in the interests of the smooth flow of the narrative, many characters from film and television never lock their cars, nor need to go to the toilet. Off-screen actions and non-diegetic elements are often crucial to the realism of narrative cinema. 

Like cinema, maps also provide narrative spaces that are partial. A map’s function is not to depict every aspect of reality, rather it must omit enough information to make reality bearable. Some un-mapped zones then, must remain off-the-map, if they are to keep the rest of the illusory landscape functioning as a coherent whole – if we are to be able to point and say “we are here”. 

* Turchi, Peter. ‘A Wide Landscape of Snows’. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004). pp. 27-71.

Failing Orbit 6 – Blind Cartography 1

RAF No. 1, 2012

The cartographer has the unenviable job of acting as both explorer and guide simultaneously.* They chart the strange and unfamiliar, recording it as definitive, for the reference of those who follow after. As the explorer beats back the thicket, they must present whatever is revealed as if they knew all along what was hidden there. Such is the rhetoric of mapping; objective and scientific, the cartographer thinly conceals the gap between information and (lack of) meaning. The map presents new knowledge in a legible and reassuring way. One maps the unknown, and the map’s function is to relieve the anxiety of not knowing. This becomes shockingly evident, for instance, when the calm and authoritative voice of the sat-nav leads one off-course; one cannot help but become frustrated by the impossibility of reasoning with such automated devises.

Exploration as practice (e.g. unconscious ramblings, scribbled notes, drafts, walks with a camera, etc), embraces the potential of failure to reveal something ‘more’ than careful planning could ever achieve. On turning left instead of right, one might discover (or miss) something new and previously unknown. Such rich possibilities are, of course, always accompanied by a palpable sense of anxiety.

Nevertheless, the documents created from such exploration, eventually become messages to others, delivered in clear tones, and intended to influence, convince and to beguile the Other. One achieves this, as all map-makers do, by removing oneself from the field, suppressing the very view-point that brought the world into being – a kind of miraculous conception, that omits all of the messy back-story. One adopts a fraudulent position of neutrality and authority. Thus, all human subjects are cartographers in a way; each day one present oneself as a coherent being, with social roles and responsibilities, only vaguely masking the anxiety that one is, in fact, a complete fraud, blindly feeling one’s way through the world.

* For an illuminating account on writing and mapping, read: Turchi, Peter. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004). pp. 11-25.

What we already know

Broken Tree, 2011

In What we already know, I was interested in how the disorganisation of vision resulted in an uncanny space imbued with anxiety; the empty spaces became fictionalised but ‘loaded’ at the same time. Fiction and spatial disorientation became key components of the image’s derealisation. Although this strategy was perhaps rather overt, I now hope to find a more oblique methodology of rendering space via practice. Anthony Vidler states, following Hubert Damisch, that the distortion of perspectival space in both architecture and visual representation, is a form of reflexively marking out a process of thinking of space, and a discursive meditation on the place of the subject and the other in space.* A study of vision is thus perhaps a study of the political and ideological implications of urban spaces, and therefore, ultimately a question for practice. Whether it is the arbitrary, fragmented glance or straight but disembodied gaze, the photographic frame is analogous to the fantasy frame that positions subject and other in spatial terms. However, rather than simply controlling the scene, the static, fix(at)ed gaze of the camera perhaps also holds within it the power to turn on the subject and reveal a desire lost within the co-ordinates of visual space.

* Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Mass: MIT Press, 2000). p. 9.

Failing Orbit 5 – Empty Spaces

Wisteria, 2010

Documentary realism, Slavoj Žižek claims, is for those who cannot bear fiction – the excess of fantasy operative in everyday narrative fiction.* What then is this ‘excess of fantasy’ when we look at the empty and fictional spaces of contemporary documentary practice? The familiar spaces of documentary landscape (such as peripheral zones of trade, military training grounds, urban and suburban dwellings, etc.) all raise questions, in equal measure, for both the cultural realities they depict and the unconscious fantasies of the subjective witness. 

Both geography and identity are bound up in reflexive processes of documentary and history. A fragmentary view of the landscape, pitted by trauma and desire, has displaced the traditional sweeping panorama’s rhetoric of discovery, unity and completeness. Contemporary photography now transcribes a more uncertain experience of being in the world; vernacular and banal non-spaces, imagined territories and fictional places, present a topography that is impossible to know. A world of illusion, duplication, control and power, generates an ambiguity in the position of the viewer and a tension between space and subject. 

The use of photography to map spatial co-ordinates, in turn reinvents the world as commodity. Such documents offer fantasies of emptiness, but themselves becoming objects of reduction, reproduction, redistribution and reinvestigation. There is an uncanny emptiness hidden within the reflexive act of transcribing ‘place’ into ‘document’ – there is always something that gets lost in translation. It is perhaps this ‘gap’ that haunts the spaces of the 21st century; an echo of the ghost at the heart of subjectivity that refuses to reconcile itself with its own geography.

* Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View (Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). p. 350.

Failing Orbit 4 – Documentary

Lunch Box, 2011

The obvious effects of the economic climate are now readily visible. However, I have become fascinated by how such effects are transcribed photographically; what does the surface tell us about that which lies beyond it? This has long been a problem for photography; it is adept at capturing everyday detail, but the photographic image presents the surface of the world that, ultimately, keeps complexity at a distance. The large-format camera is complicit in this; its control over the field, focus, perspective, etc; mounted on its tripod, it stands above and apart, from the space it surveys.

Documentary has traditionally presented the symbolic, ravaged fabric of economic crisis; derelict buildings, the homeless figure, etc; the effects that belie the true causes of such victimisation. There is an inability (or unwillingness) of the visual to penetrate the symbolic violence of late capitalism. Rather, it dwells in front of the spectacle, supports and promotes such ideologies; does not every image of the homeless call for that sad figure to be fully reintegrated back into a system that cast him/her as a victim in the first place? 

Walking around this landscape, one finds an irrationality more akin to a dream than a physical reality. Thus, here the stage is set for a disorder of a different register; marginalised spaces that are as much a part of the psychological terrain as the geographical or economic. This work does not present the logic of the traditional photo-story. Rather, a narrative that is fractured and fictional - at once a documentary of an economic landscape, and a meditation on the anxieties over occupation and vision. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Scratching at a Solid Surface 2

Empty Flats, 2010

The photographer, rather than entering a particular space, is faced with a non-porous surface. Just as docile bodies can drift through space, so too the gaze glides across its surface; one regularly traverses it without either pausing or looking. Space and photography perhaps share common properties; indeed, both generate anxiety in order that we might move on more quickly – continuously postponing, yet reproducing the co-ordinates of, desire itself. Of course, many photographs are certainly designed not to be looked-at for prolonged periods (e.g. the billboards that pervade public spaces); rather they drift into the milieu of the mass media. So too public spaces also discourage prolonged contemplation, and even outlaw occupation. Both activities, looking at photographs and occupying space, are now seen as perverse and suspicious activities as soon as they become prolonged.

Here then, is the paradox of the act of photography in this instance (the protracted activities of setting up tripods, operating the large format camera, the use of sheet film over continuous shooting, etc.); one not only looks at the framed space for a perverse amount of time, one also draws attention to oneself – and is seen by others. The photographer occupies a place, but this place never appears in the image (the view is always ‘over there’), rather it is located only within the Other’s field-of-vision; one becomes a spectre – one’s own presence as intruder is made clear when one’s look becomes visible or exposed.

Scratching at a Solid Surface 1

Happy Birthday, 2011

Curiously, photographers always remain alien to the site of the shot. Even if they happen to be familiar with the place… the act of taking the photograph turns them into visitors, or even tourists on their own premises. No matter how close a photograph comes to the space it records, the interaction between the photographer and the space always resembles the act of scratching on a solid surface. 

Jan Verwoert, ‘Research and Display: of Transformations of Documentary Practice in Recent Art.’ in Neuerer, G. (ed). Untitled (Experience of Place). (London: Koenig Books, 2003). p. 18. 

One never quite encounters the world, and photography inevitably establishes a peculiar remoteness from it, only ever documenting or transcribing a certain distance. On the rare occasion one comes in close proximity to a place, the experience is inevitably a traumatic one; exposure, claustrophobic or vertiginous spatial disorders aside, contesting histories repeatedly encircle place and twist it into territory. Locality is always something for others; always negotiated on their terms; it is set out before we arrive and continues after we have left. The photographer particularly, a gangly alien landed from outer-space, is only ever an intruder upon private interactions that take place in public. So place is something that one continually orbits, never belonging at its heart – always a piece of the puzzle, but lost somewhere in space.