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.