Marking Time: David Farrell in Conversation (Part 2)

 

Innocent Landscapes Revisited, Wilkinstown, February 2010

 

Innocent Landscapes Revisited, Wilkinstown, September 2009

The story never really ended either, although the searches did – for a time at least, because perhaps no amount of searching could ever be enough. “There was a picture from Wicklow that was made on the last day of the search in 2000, of the bog cut away and I said to myself at the time – how much further do you go? Six inches? Six feet? How far do you go and when do you stop? Anyway, that was supposed to be it. There was a couple of small searches in the intervening years, and except for an accidental recovery nothing was found. I had noticed, again in 2000, that nature was reclaiming these places very quickly, making even the evidence of the searches disappear and I thought that in itself was an interesting metaphor about what the killers had intended, using nature to cover their traces, but it was also about healing and the passage of time.” The landscape itself becomes a surface on to which these larger questions can be projected. “Thinking about it on a fundamental level,” he said “I’ve used the landscape like a studio; the way that some people go to the blank wall is how I’ve used the landscape over the last ten years, in this and other projects.”

So periodically he began returning, to take account of every loss and every frustrated possibility, because despite maps we can never be sure where we stand – here all certainties are provisional. “I started then to do these annual re-visits,” he said “because it was such an unresolved issue, just to keep going back to these places seemed important, particularly as I might be the only one to return, but it became increasingly difficult to do so, which also highlights another theme within in this work, the real difficulty of sustaining a memory. Then literally by chance I came across this team of forensic archaeologists about two years ago while they were searching in Wicklow and it reminded me again of what had drawn me to the subject, that I had been right to keep with it because other people hadn’t given up. At the same time their intervention actually ruptured my time-line of a landscape being reclaimed, because in most cases they were going back into the same place and digging it up again, which I suppose is interesting too in that it’s kind of like having a scab and taking it off, in the hope that with time it will heal itself properly. The current landscapes, while they are often the same piece of field or bog, look considerably different, as their approach is so different, the pace is different. With the recent searches I’m seeing something stand still in so many different types of light, where as before you took whatever light was there on the day, because the searches went so quickly the landscape was radically altered between visits. While I’m more or less photographing the same thing from one day to the next, each time something has changed and I’m searching for what I feel is the maximum out of the subject. The sense of their presence (or absence) is much less immediate in the landscape now; the pictures have become more about the searches themselves, though you do remind yourself every so often exactly what you’re dealing with.”

If the searching in his first set of pictures had been a devastatingly accurate metaphor for violence, for the hidden landscapes of memory, and for disappearance itself, meaning the continuity of a place (its lives) irredeemably shattered by something – or rather someone – simply not being there, an absence breaking through the surface of the world, this incredibly sustained approach in how the new searches are being conducted (and images he has made of them) seem more like a way of marking time, as a measure of duration. Perhaps they become instead a way to describe the impossible task of accounting for the loss that they represent, as the observation of some endless of ritual – of not forgetting, and he keeps going back too, trying to refine the logic of this process. “Now you could go in and the first picture you make could be sufficiently strong,” he said “but for me it’s this drive to really get deep into the subject, like I say, you’re “excavating” something. One of the difficulties with photography is that making a picture, the gesture itself, seems so easy that you really have to feel the picture, that it has to be coming through the subject and into you. I’m aware now that certainly the work I’m making with the re-visits is probably slightly more refined in an aesthetic sense, that they have softened a little, though I’m still trying to hold onto that edge of tough beauty.”

Regardless of how persistent the searches are – and have been – it seems as if the ground will keep its final secrets, memory has its unreachable avenues after all, and some wounds might never heal, but it will be a useful comparison if, at some time in the future, these new images are gathered in book form, to see the distance that has been covered during the intervening years. This will undoubtedly be a large body of work and what of it has gradually been appearing seems at once as similar and as different as he says. The “edge” is still there of course, the hint of some presence endlessly just beyond reach, insisting on the unstable nature of memory, on the spectre of loss, and on what cannot be brought to light – even more so now perhaps than before. Constant too is the quality that defines the whole of Farrell’s work on Innocent Landscapes to date, the tangibility of absence that is never satisfied by recollection, never made whole, or even just accounted for – time has changed too much, or has buried too deep whatever we hope to find, but the searches go on, because they have to, because even if no trace of those disappeared remain, we can still cut to the poisonous root of violence that fractures lives and the places we live.


(I'd like to thank David for his patience and for his co-operation in putting this article together. A blog charting the development of his latest work can be found here and his own site is here).

Marking Time: David Farrell in Conversation (Part 1)

 

Innocent Landscapes, Coolgagh, 1999

 

Innocent Landscapes, Wilkinstown, 2000

 

Innocent Landscapes, Balynultagh,1999

David Farrell’s Innocent Landscapes is a monumental work about the search for those who “disappeared” as a result of the political tensions in Northern Ireland, only to be buried anonymously across the border. In 1999, as part of the peace process, the IRA finally admitted the ‘killing and secret burial’ of ten people from a possible list of fifteen missing. At the end of May that year they released a roll call of locations that were said to be the burial places of nine people from the list. Of course the crucial twist in this inventory was that all the locations were in the South of Ireland. These people had been exiled in death, somehow uniting North and South in relation to the conflict – a dark stain lurking under the “peaceful” landscapes of the South. Searches were carried out in 1999 and 2000, with photographs by Farrell published in a volume entitled Innocent Landscapes in 2001 as a result of winning the European Publishers Award for Photography. It is a work he has found difficult to walk away from. I met with him recently to discuss this ongoing investigation.

Perhaps like opening the body of time, opening memory, we find our darkest secrets, our unspoken tragedies, all held in layers furthest from the surface. The photographs themselves manage to accommodate all that, and more, reading collectively as a profound dialogue with absence. I asked David about his first visit to one of these search locations: “It was a beautiful summer’s evening,” he said “and I just remember it was this country lane, with a slight hill at the end of it. You went over that and came into this landscape that looked like some force had roared through it. The visual shock when I got there was of this landscape having been violated, with all the trees uprooted, and that somehow being a metaphor from the violence of what had happened to these people, their disappearance. So it was a really powerful sensation to be there, feeling how the mind projects emotion onto something and this landscape was so torn apart, it looked like the search had been quite desperate really, just the nature of it. I made some pictures that first night, but it was purely that I was there and I should make some pictures, because at the time I wasn’t sure, feeling maybe that it was too powerful, that I wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. But there was something about the pictures I made, something in the quality of the colour that convinced me to continue, so it was a simple act then of deciding just to go and look at the other places, seeing what happened, seeing what was there.”

There is a distinct – at times quite uneasy – pull between the aesthetic richness of the images and the violence implied by the searching, these fractured landscapes, that lends a unique power to the work. “In truth I probably didn’t know what I was doing for the first six months, other than simply going there, responding, obviously with my brain, but also in an emotional way, trying to frame images that had a certain tension to them, something that was working off the beauty – I always feel that those pictures have a sort of tough beauty. It was a case of going out and sometimes not really having – or not wanting to have, too much of a direction, because often if you put a box around it before you start, you’re going to miss something. It’s a crude metaphor maybe, but useful in this context, of excavating a subject, digging and digging and digging, until I felt like I’d reached the point of almost having exhausted it, I had to keep going back, photographing the same thing over and over again. It was a momentum of going to make pictures and then thinking about it as you’re making the pictures, as you're working through it, to see is there anything emerging from the dialogue you're having with what your photographing.”

From the buried layers of our collective memory – and of collective forgetting, the landscape seems to contain all the fraught interdependence of place and memory, the forces that shape a culture (its histories), moving restlessly under a charmed surface, present and yet not. There is also a sophisticated narrative thread that draws you into the haunting complexity of these images, with a structure that moves through the broken landscapes – and through the searches themselves – creating a powerful sense of some incipient, but crucially unrealised, discovery. The cumulative structure of the book, a kind of gravitational pull between the images and across them, brings a forceful clarity from this cutting into the landscape’s hidden core that has both a formal and emotional rigour. There is arguably some lingering influence too from his training as a research chemist on how Farrell has subsequently approached making photographs. “When you work in science you have an idea, you set up an experiment to test this idea, you gather all the data, you take it in, you assess it, you formulate something, and you go and test it later on. So I sort of do the same thing now as I’m making pictures. I actually have to go out and make as many pictures as I feel I’m responding to, take them in and then begin this process of editing. So while I’m looking at – and I almost hate to use the word – the “strength” of an individual image on one level, I’m really interested too in the dialogue it has with the preceding image, the facing image, the one after and the next one again – because I’m always thinking of the book. Narrative is very important to the way I make work, certainly between the pictures, but also within each picture.”

(Part 2 above)

Frank Rodick

 

  

  

A chamber of infinitely distorted reflections, where they multiply and disintegrate, feedback loops of presence suggested, then denied – the image as bodily trauma. Or just exposing its own inherent frailty, what seems so often to be some accident or misfortune, but perhaps is actually a deeper condition, its fundamental disorder. Faces that are masks, anonymous bodies only seen as the conduit for some dreadful extremes of sensation, impossible to name, leaving its trace in the picture, in layers of memory – the terrible, endless regression of all experience, down to the bone and when contained, it almost breaks the photographic material apart. See more of Rodick’s work on his website and read about it here.

The Lost Planet/ Just Delete

The reality of this image is one that would not even exist without the technology used to create it, a composite form relayed across vast distances, impossible stretches of time, made by splicing together discrete fragments to generate a whole world. Perhaps the sort of “memory” proposed by new photographic technology is actually closer to human memory as it is lived – just as treacherous, just as fallible, permanently on the edge of deletion. And what if these images of Pluto were deleted too? It would still exist of course, but how we conceptualise the same reality would be different.

It needn’t be something so distant either – all pictures collapse time. For example we now understand much of our recent past in terms of images, and certain images in particular, so to see photographs from the early 20^th century in colour (because they do exist) is always a bit disorientating. We somehow assume that the past should be monochrome, just like in all the photographs we’ve seen. This is another instance of technology (in this case film technology) defining how we understand a reality, how we make it exist, even in images. Of course you could argue – and perhaps rightly so – that this image is not “photographic” in any sense. It’s a computer generated representation, so we can’t point to it and say “this is a photograph of Pluto” the way we could say “this is a photograph of Archduke Ferdinand” or something like that. But what it does show is the problematic nature of whatever language we use to describe the relationship between a representation and its nominal subject. This image of Pluto and other images like it are just extreme cases of how complicated that link has become.

The explosion of imaging technology in recent years has revealed the dormant plasticity of the medium, its slipperiness. So while it might seem laughably naïve at present to talk about the reality of a photograph when the assumption is that we have irrevocably fractured that bond – if it ever existed in the first place – it is equally difficult to formulate the un-reality we now imagine photography draws from when all forms of representation imply some prior reference. But of course the question then must be what is the precise relationship between this “reference” and the photograph itself?

Mostly we could talk about it in terms of its truth value, but here again the language is far more troubling than it seems, because “truth” is this sense is not just a simple comparative analogy, rather it approaches the conceptual limit of the form, a microcosm for the forces that shape our lived reality, all unstable systems of representation and whatever slips through the cracks. The technology changes, the game doesn’t.

The floating world of appearance and its contingent architecture is fleetingly revealed in even the most casual snapshot – or this digital composite. Photography is a mutant, a shape-shifter and its development is ongoing. Hell, Pluto is not even considered a real planet anymore…

Michael Flomen

 

  

 

At a moment when it seems to be increasingly obsolete, it might be useful to reconsider the crystalline materiality of the photographic object, how much our understanding of the image is occupied by the process itself and how much is the subject – or its context. Perhaps it is not even possible to think about a photograph as an object at all. They now seem to function more as surfaces, or screens, meaningful only for their content, not as a distinct material form, but data flows. Then again, the argument could be made – even persuasively – that photographs were never anything else, despite having a material presence, that we only ever looked through them, toward their illusive spaces of memory and absence, never concerned with this strange displacement of seeing beyond the actual dimensionality of the photograph. The work of Michael Floman goes to the heart of these issues, the alchemy of process, transformations in (what was) the basic substance of photography, to create startling new visual landscapes. There is nothing more “purely” photographic than what he does, leaving a trace, an outline, on the paper – there is a directness of contact in these photograms that once seemed the standard of authenticity for the photograph and that is here – for once – genuinely immediate, a material reality. While they are undoubtedly best viewed in person, an extensive range of work can be found on his website.

Ali Taptik

 

 

 

Ali Taptik is a photographer who moves effectively between twin poles of intimacy and estrangement, drawing you in and pushing you back, showing you everything or only the barest surface, a cryptic arrangement of matter, making a visual and psychological geography of place, mapping imagined territories where personal and collective histories both are intertwined. Here “place” is not merely a destination, with architectures and population densities, but something entirely more ambiguous, something like a narrative of implied presence, of something just having happened. Even his most formally rigorous work has a distinct intimacy to it, while his diaristic pictures have enough rigour so they don’t seem too closed off, overly private. All together it gives a distinct sense of how volatile the interaction of place, self and history is, of how boundaries are fluid; you are never sure just where you stand as it all flows around you, through you. Perhaps only the photographer can be still enough, in that fraction of deep time, to expose the micro-forces of history as they shape our lives and the places we live. You can see more of his work here.

 

 

John Stezaker Interview

In a bumper week for interviews, this time with John Stezaker, discussing various aspects of his intriguing collage work. Admittedly it's a few years old (way back in 2006) but given the consistency of Stezaker's methods over the years it all seems quite relevant. You can read some more thoughts on Stezaker a few posts down...

Ballen In Conversation

From Jim Casper's venerable Lens Culture comes an insightful video interview with Roger Ballen, who I think we've established as one of my most admired contemporary photographers. In the course of the interview Ballen discusses the development of his work and the psychological quality of his images. You can view it here.