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.