Head
[20Feb22 p.121] The cmat. characterises Epstein and Burtynsky's work as industrial landscape. The photograph can "beautify the
ugly" and Burtynsky in particular is contrasted with AJ. Russell and Carleton Watkins (both in Part 2)
On this side of the pond, John Davies, who we met on EyV, Part 4, with industrial images typically taken "from high vantage points". The cmat. quotes Liz Wells (2011) pp. 170-71.) who suggests that his personal style overwhelms his subjects. Davies worked a lot in Wales (a rich seam of post-industrialisation) and his approach is contrasted with James Morris' A Landscape of Wales (2010). Their images of Blaenau Ffestiniog are contrasted (I would struggle to say which is which, though one being in colour helps, see figs. A1 and A2. Morris' Holyhead (fig. A3) reminds me, both in form and content, of those from Dana Lixenberg on the previous page (C6 and C7).
b: Griffithstown
Site - BBC
b: Wales
Kestle Barton - Eye
1 John Davies, Ffestiniog Railway, Snowdonia, 1994
2. James Morris, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, 2010 from A Landscape of Wales
3. James Morris, Holyhead, Ynys Mon, from A Landscape of Wales
4. Patrick Shanahan, Barcelona_Catalunya, from Esperantis, 1998-2001
© the artists, their agents or their estates
img: 1-2. LPE pp. 122, 123; 3. Morris; 4. V&A
The distinction between industrial and post-industrial photography is raised and the work of Patrick Shanahan mentioned in this context. Taking a wide historical perspective, it is, perhaps the case that industries and national and local prosperity is in a perpetual medium-term state of flux, wax and wane and so at any time there will be instances of industrialisation and post-industrialisation (blacksmiths and forges becoming car mechanics and garages, etc. etc. on a variety of scales). Still, go with the flow. Shanahan, born in Wales, moved to Cornwall and photographed the development of the Eden Project, Paradeisos, 2005, fig. A4 [no, couldn't an image from Paradeisos]. There's an informative online piece about Shanahan in Eye Magazine (Brittain, 2008),
In 1994, following twelve years as a commercial photographer, Shanahan moved from Wales to Cornwall, one of the first areas in Britain to be altered by industry (mining) and later by tourism, where, influenced by contemporary Italian photography in general, and Luigi Ghirri’s Italian Landscape in particular, he began to photograph the fabricated landscape surrounding him.
‘Ghirri was the missing link,’ Shanahan recalls. ‘The concern with the space between reality and the unreal hadn’t been present in [William] Eggleston or [Stephen] Shore, but it was concrete with Ghirri.’ Since the 1970s, the Italian’s themes had been representation and post-landscape. Ghirri believed we had reached the end of the era of ‘discovery’ to arrive at ‘a closed chapter in the history of images’: ‘not post-modern, but loss of centre’. Theorists have argued that the key condition of placelessness, or post-landscape, is the dissolution of fixed categories and boundaries in the environment and in culture generally, causing anxiety and a yearning for escapism, nostalgia and the romanticism of the pre-Modern. Patrick Shanahan interviewed by David Brittain, 2008
Consideration of industrial and post-industrial leads to decay photography, encouraged recently by a TV series on Chernobyl. The cmat. links to 28dayslater.co.uk and darkplaces.co.uk.
