Open Land

'Open Land (Terra Nullius)' is a research project that aims to examine the relationship between landscape photography and catastrophe through the development of a practice-based doctorate. Extrapolating the classical pictorial notion of ‘blank canvas’ into a contemporary model of global politics, this investigation looks into how natural disasters have become an opportunity for global corporations and local politicians to impose international, economical and political structures to appropriate and control, for their own benefit, the affected territories at the expense of local communities. This Tumblr aspires to become a digital archive for this project.

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Editorial Concreta: Sobre creación y teoría de la imagen

http://www.editorialconcreta.org/

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Urs Fischer

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Katherine Wolkoff on New Orleans.

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"Photojournalism is neither photography or journalism. It has its function but it's not where I see myself: the press is for me just a means for photographing, for material – not for telling the truth."

Luc Delahaye

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The photographer Robert Polidori describes his experience depicting the loss and pathos of a civilization in chaos in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

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Alec Soth on Katrina-related bodies of work such as Polidori's After the flood, Chris Jordan's In Katrina's Wake and Wolkoff's New Orleans and the need of human presence.

Comments are equally valuable. Keep reading.

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My work has often been criticised as somehow lacking integrity because I transgress ethical principles by rendering tragic or violent situations as artificially "beautiful". This "aestheticising" is considered to be conceptually disturbing since, some argue, it brings a viewer to an experience by which realities and their causes are ultimately trivialised and misrepresented. I certainly didn't feel any shame while photographing these sites. I simply attempted to portray things as they appeared to me. I never once attempted to execute any embellishments. For this reason I felt surprised and puzzled when criticisms arose. How could I answer the challenges? If I had made these images intentionally ugly would my critics have looked at them more carefully or generously? Likely not. And besides, since when was pathos morally inadmissible in the photographic arts? I feel nothing when I make these types of photographs. I feel before and after, but while executing them it is my belief that there is only time to accurately act and react. In the few short moments of pause when self-reflection becomes possible, I think of myself as performing some sort of photographic rite of Extreme Unction by commemorating the life trajectories of habitats that were permanently interrupted by cataclysm.

Robert Polidori

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This film by Guy E. Debord is based on his 1967 book of the same title both of which convey ideas about the consumer capitalism's mode of production and the effects on everyday life. Though both sources use a different means of communication they both powerfully convey the ideas of the situationists. The structure of the film itself is a series of shots from Hollywood films to soviet 'collective hero' film experiments to soft-core porn (nothing past topless) to archival footage of historical events (e.g. May 68 revolt in France) and representations of everyday life. The way in which the scenes are manipulated work well with the voice over commentary reinforcing the ideas while hitting emotional notes. The Music also contributes well to the emotional sentiment which the director wants to be associated with different ideas and issues. The technique used reminds me of Wagner, how he used the structure of music to convey hopelessness and the philosophy of Schopenhauer in "The Ring" covering over the once socialists allegory for the contradiction of modernity. Debord and the situationists used their music to convey of the feeling of hope and the spirit negation (the negation of capitalism and the creation of a new 'totality' of 'situations'). Debord during this film highlights the influences of the 'situationits' in the agitation for May 68 (the largest general strike in history). Henri Lefebvre criticized Debord on this point expressing the view that the situationists greatly exaggerate their influence on events. Other then the self-pampering which is small fraction of the film it is a well done piece of radical documentary both in form and content (style and ideas, though this dichotomy is to come degree false) which is quite interesting just for those uninterested or hostile towards Revolutionary Anti-Capitalism.

www.imdb.com

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Un pesquero fantasma, arrastrado hace más de un año de las costas de Japón por el tsunami, ha sido visto frente a las costas de Canadá, según las autoridades locales. "Parece bastante entero y tiene herrumbre de haber estado un año ahí fuera", declaró a la CNN Marc Proulx, coordinador marítimo del Centro de Coordinación y Rescate de Victoria.

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This list of disaster and doomsday films represents over half a century of films within the genre. Disaster films are motion pictures which depict an impending or ongoing disaster. The films typically feature large casts and multiple storylines and focus on the protagonists' attempts to avert, escape, or cope with the disaster presented.

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3:34 Terremoto en Chile, 2011

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All alone in the night.

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750,000 lost photos were found after the disaster. Volunteers have taken on the task of returning the lost pictures to their owner. They call it the Memory Salvage Project.

Click on the title to check the video!

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"The indignity of speaking for others".

Michel Foucault

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25 October, 2011 Professor Emerita Abigail Solomon-Godeau, University of California, Santa Barbara Professor Abigail Solomon-Godeau discussed the issues that arise when contemporary artists and photographers take as their subject the topic of catastrophe. Taking as examples the work of Walid Raad, Sophie Ristelheuber, Alfredo Jaar, and the 2006 exhibition “Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain,” Professor Solomon-Godeau considered some of the ethical and political complexities that attend the making of art – especially that which employs photography within it – from catastrophic historical events. Insofar as such practices appear to have become more frequent, there is reason to examine the complex problems they may raise. Such considerations require an awareness of the distinctions between the “need” to represent, and the “right” to represent.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau is Professor Emerita in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her fields of research include photography, feminist theory and criticism, contemporary art and 19th-Century French visual culture. Her articles on these subjects have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogues. She is the author of the books Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (1991), Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (1997), Birgit Jurgenssen (co-authored with Gabriele Schor) (2010) and the forthcoming The Face of Difference: Gender,Race and the Politics of Self-Representation.

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Refrigerator on Franklin Avenue, New Orleans

"In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster" 2005 by Chris Jordan

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On Frank Golhke's "Aftermath"

Terrain.org: You’ve explored both beauty and natural disaster in your photographic and written work, from a tornado-ravaged neighborhood in Wichita Falls to the aftermath of the 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens. 2011 seems a particularly active year for natural disasters across the globe; yet photographers such as Chris Jordan are also using the medium to showcase the beauty and horror of long-developing manmade disasters, such as the impact of ocean-borne plastics on albatross populations in the Midway Atoll. No doubt photography is an essential and imperative tool for bringing these perils to the foreground of the global conversation on such issues as climate change and urbanization. What role does photography play in giving you hope in this age of natural and manmade environmental disasters—or does it? Do landscape photographers have a particular responsibility to use their art to help create better, more livable places? In effect, does art equal activism? Should it?

Frank Gohlke: Photography has great potential for creating the conditions that lead to change; photography by itself changes nothing. I doubt very much if showing Lewis Hines’s compelling photographs of child workers to the owners of the mines and mills would compel them to change the conditions the pictures documented. What the photographs could do is to inform those whose consciences were open to being provoked into action to do so and to strengthen the resolve of those who were already committed to the struggle. The same considerations apply today.

Art can be both a choice and a compulsion; activism can be both a choice and a compulsion. Sometimes they coincide, sometimes they don’t. I don’t believe activism is an obligation for anyone, but being an engaged citizen is just good sense based on self-interest. I applaud and admire those who use their art to foster awareness and change; but a sense of responsibility to make a certain kind of work that explicitly addresses particular issues is not a charge I would lay on anyone, and I certainly don’t want it laid on me.

There are many ways to meet the demands of one’s conscience; being an artist does not obligate anyone to turn their work in that direction. I had more than enough in the late 1970s and 80s of self-righteous adherents of one or another theoretical persuasion telling everyone else what they ought to be doing. It was entirely too reminiscent of the methods of my Calvinist upbringing; guilt is an injury to conscience, not a spur.