I have been photographing these old apple trees for over ten years now. Relics of an outdated rural economy.

Location – Mountain View Road, Boonville, Anderson Valley, northern California. The valley is now increasingly dominated by vineyards.

I have been waiting for it to happen.

I take photos of the textures of everyday life.

Everyday life is under challenge. Ireland is on the brink of ruin. “We are back to the old three ‘Ps’ Michael”, someone says to me – “Pints, Ponies … and I can’t remember the third” … Heritage comes back to haunt the Tiger Celtic economy, now no more.

I am in Dublin in an old bar, somewhat twee and conservative, but definitively Dublin.

I take a photograph and a couple complain. Not to me, they are sitting next to me, but to “The Management”. The photo is not of them, but they object to an invasion of “privacy” – in this public space. And I had not yet presented them with the release form securing my right to publish the picture (irony – this is a deeply personal visual note, a memory never intended for distribution).

Worlds breaking apart.

Perhaps appropriately.

OK – here it is.

PhotoGraphy from ShiKai Tseng on Vimeo.

(An artifact is placed inside a pinhole camera that records a 360 degree panorama onto its surface.)

Further focus on medium as mode of engagement, as much as signal and communication; the camera as architecture, here theater and prop.

Topic – archaeology, ruins and the picturesque landscape.

The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché.

How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today?

Should I just give up photography? As a tainted medium?

This is too simple a response (not least, it doesn’t make sense to say that media can be wholly compromised). Though for a long while I worked with the arts company Brith Gof [Link], and we explored relationships with place through site specific performance – see my book with Mike Pearson Theatre/Archaeology [Link] and his new book Site-Specific Performance [Link].

In our conversation in that archetypical English pub in Durham, Bianca, Chris and I decided to avoid the search for a definitive solution, and adopt instead an attitude taken from design thinking -

be mindful

and embrace the contradictions – for they are at the heart of how we connect with (archaeological) landscapes

- be mindful and work with the contradictions (iteratively – for there never is a definitive solution).

How?

• acknowledge and break the rules, reveal the constraints
  (eg break the framing in a time series, collage or some other manner)
• interrupt the work performed by the aesthetic with commentary or annotation
  (eg break the illusion, Brecht-like)
• recontextualize
  (eg use the images in an incongruous setting, or as a series that supplies a critical setting)
• intervene, use the images actively as engagement with a place and re-presentation rather than treat them as simple descriptive document
  (Mike Pearson and I adopted this tactic in many “performed lectures” we presented in the mid 1990s).

This all takes me back to a paper I published (very obscurely) a long while back – Critical romanticism on a visit to the past [Link].

I included a discussion of both Turner (see the previous entry [Link]) and another archetypical romantic, Wordsworth.

Wordsworth walked. His poem on Tintern Abbey deals not with the ruin so much as the synaesthetic and constitutive imagination – how place engenders certain responses in us, particularly through memory, but is dependent upon our creative apprehension that organizes the very substance of experience. As one walks and looks. Both Turner and Wordworth dealt with the topology of time – the folding of time, how pasts and presents meet in the composition of the “figure in the landscape”. And how this encounter is ultimately incomprehensible – sublime – prompting us to restlessly experiment with our responses, representations, reflections.

Here is how I summarised a critically romantic attitude:

• local self-assertion as opposed to universal systems (offering definitive solutions);
• an attention to the ordinary and the particular;
• an interest in the darker side of experience in the sense of that remainder which always escapes the claims of a rational system;
• defamiliarising what is taken as given, revealing the equivocality of things and experience;
• reality conceived, genealogically, as historical process;
• an attitude critical and suspicious of orthodoxy, because of the impossibility of any final account of things.

Norham Castle

To continue with the concern that I shared yesterday – the ideology of land, property and labor transformed into aesthetic form – landscape.

Images that disguise history?

(guilty pleasures of the sublime picturesque) [Link]

It is not difficult to identify various components of this aesthetic. (I recall dealing with a lot of this in a couple of classes I ran on landscape [Link])

Consider Turner’s Norham (1798) - [Link]

Key concepts

pastoral | bucolic | the idyll | picturesque | sublime | beauty

Psychology

Ask – What are the pleasures/gratifications of these landscapes?

Ask – How are they connected to people’s sense of identity? National, personal, ethnic?

Emplotment

Some narratives/scenarios embedded in landscape – return and retreat into repose (nostos) | adventure | the frisson of risk, looking over the precipice | escape into melancholy | the walk to eden | sporting pleasures | agricultural labor

Components of a landscape aesthetic

Techniques for mobilizing this ideological field:

• The figure in a setting – person | monument | ruin | artifact

(see my blog category – figure in a landscape [Link])

• Contrast/tension/justaposition/transition – in tone or tonal range (eg shadow and highlight) | in scale | in form (horizontal/vertical, textures/smooth, natural/cultural eg ruin, town, bridge)
• Formalization – making aesthetic through: framing (the proscenium arch) | abstraction | mannerism (especially over-stylization and in the use of color)
• Composition – framing | perspective (linear and atmospheric) | layered planes, stratigraphy, viewpoint (the viewer set back and up from the composition, as audience, never fully involved)

So Turner’s compositions are framed windows or proscenium arches with staged dramaturgies – backdrop, three side flats (two on the right), stage forming the river winding into the distance.

The tensions and contradictions

Past and present | city and country | real and ideal | celebration and regret | melancholy and comedy (the bucolic) | distance and intimacy | alienation and redemption | the everyday and the allegorical

Ask – How is the artist working with and against a set of media conventions and constraints?

Temporality

References to an indeterminate historical time | to a lost golden age | nostalgia | a celebration of the saturated present moment (the sublime moment of controlled shock, and/or of calm repose)| memory as actuality – the juxtaposition of different times in the now

The politics

An absence of any working community in landscape | the status of the observer (usually abstracted from what is being represented) | an escapism (from social reality) |  a contrast between the viewer and the anonymous (sublime) popular masses – vernacular human detail.

Watercolor from 1823 (Scotland is on the left bank)

Norham sunrise – oil 1845 (an exercise in form)

The cultural politics of this aesthetic have long fascinated me. This is not just a new elite aesthetic. Turner was very aware of the politics, manipulating the well-established theatrical scenography to organize his landscapes, staging vernacular dramaturgies of rural life and sporting pursuits, combining both with an experimental and rationalist realism. Like many in Romanticism, he was working with new conceptions of place, time, and relationships between the viewing visitor and the land and its objects, manifested in how travel is organized, where one stops to look at a view, how one looks at the land, what is brought to bear on this apprehension, how one builds landscapes.

The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché.

How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today?

I will take up this question in another post [Link]

One of the images that is concerning me – a landscape in the central section of Hadrian’s Wall – largely the work of John Clayton’s conservation efforts in the mid nineteenth century, continued currently by the National Trust

In conversation with Bianca (Carpeneti).

My early morning runs are troubling me deeply …

these encounters with a sublime picturesque [Link] [Link] [Link]

Photo – dawn on Holy Island. Watercolor – J.M.W. Turner (exhibited 1829) (the castle in the background)

Turner’s figures in the landscape (they are on the shore by Cuthbert’s island) indicate more going on than the conjunction of wind, sky and sea.

My concern – something of an ascetic moment, a methodist moment -
guilty pleasures
in landscapes and ruins that attest not to the realities of history, but to what the wealthy and powerful have done to turn labor on the land (and sea) into aesthetic allure.

The politics of land and ownership turned into a pleasant vista.

As I mentioned the other day [Link], Lindisfarne castle is a sixteenth century military fort by a nineteenth century industrial facility turned into a wealthy man’s holiday home (Edward Hudson, proprietor of magazine “Country Life”, commissioned Edwin Lutyens to oversee the tasteful conversion); Gertrude Jekyll added a walled garden.

How can we deny the taste, and this form of the landscape?

Lindisfarne – stairs and kitchen by Edwin Lutyens

The site in the 1900s, when Hudson bought the castle, was still dominated by an industrial facility – what was left of a substantial lime kiln works that had produced agricultural fertilizer. Over by the small harbor (the Ouse) were fish processing plants (mainly for gutting herring – and there are still some remains of the great fishing boats upturned on the shore – [Link]).

And, in a remarkable design gesture, Lutyens took the bricks used as ballast in the boats brought to carry the lime and used them, herringbone, for the new floors of the castle:

Here is how Thomas Girtin, contemporary of Turner, dealt with this conjunction of picturesque history and industry:

My concern

how do we deal with this now?

More thoughts to follow … [Link]

Up from Peel Bothy, Hadrian’s Wall, central section.

These photogenic experiences are starting to bother me …

Field season 2011. Staying by Hadrian’s Wall – Peel Bothy, Once Brewed (built/restored by John Clayton in the nineteenth century as part of his reconstruction of the Wall). Two more early morning runs – refusing to succumb to jet lag.

(Use the controls to navigate through the panorama)

Peel Bothy is a renovated workers’ cottage right by one of the turrets in this infamous central section of Hadrian’s Wall. This week I have been staying there.

Another morning run.

Exploring the Borders with Gary (Devore).

Jedburgh Abbey – an extraordinary building.

In the footsteps of Roloph Beny – remarkable photographer, remarkable and misguided snob.

Here is his photo from the lavish Thames and Hudson edition of Rose Macualay’s “Pleasure of Ruins” (1962).

Out running – jet lag gets me up rather early – here at about 5.30 am local time.

Lindisfarne, Northumberland – sixteenth century military architecture and a nineteenth century industrial facility turned into a wealthy man’s holiday home (Edward Hudson, proprietor of magazine “Country Life” commissioned Edwin Lutyens to oversee the conversion – very tasteful).

What is left of the nineteenth-century wooden jetty. In the distance – Bamburgh – royal seat from the eighth century.

All too nice through HDR Pro on an Apple iPhone.

So reminiscent of my childhood in a shipbuilding port in the north east of England. My history and childhood seems to be black and white and written now in silver crystals.

Flickr galleries – [Link] [Link]

Here are some notes accompanying the fascinating and sometimes wonderful pictures.

Nostalgic, Personal, Neglected, Treasured, Rejected: The Other Photography in Archaeology
Colleen Morgan, University of California, Berkeley, clmorgan@berkeley.edu
Our record of archaeological uncertainty is becoming dazzlingly clear; professional-quality digital SLR cameras producing high-dynamic range imaging are becoming the norm on archaeological projects and our photographic archives, once highly-curated collections of “scientific,” carefully set-up shots, have exploded in size and diversified in content accordingly. Along with this extraordinary, high-tech verisimilitude runs a counter-narrative—photography on sites performed by students, workmen, professionals, and tourists using their cellphones. In a session focused on exploring the work that archaeological photography does, I will investigate the hazy, inaccurate, personal, and extra-archival qualities of the archaeological snapshot.

Tintype Portraits – Objects of Self-Imagination
Heather Law, University of California, Berkeley, heather.law@berkeley.edu
For this session I’ll be presenting an assemblage of late 19th and early 20th century tintypes in order to initiate a discussion of the role of portraits as both objects employed in the construction of self, and as artifacts that might contribute to conversations of materiality and personhood in archaeological contexts. The tintype, as the first affordable form of portraiture available to middle class Americans, has the potential to illustrate diverse processes of self imagination made possible by the novelty of photographs as objects of self representation.

Topographic – Photographic: Dialogues with the Recent Past
Thóra Pétursdóttir, University of Tromsoe, thora.petursdottir@uit.no
Photography’s contribution to archaeology is unquestioned. However, its importance in terms of both documentation and representation notwithstanding , it largely holds a secondary value in archaeological discourses. The role of images is to be subservient to the text, to “illustrate” and support, and more active, experimental and “artistic” uses are often dismissed as subjective and unscientific. Using examples from my research on modern Icelandic ruins, I will challenge this hierarchy and show how photography enables alternative and genuine statements about the past and provides a means to make manifest the heterogeneous and ineffable that often is left out of scientific prose.

History Making and Memory Keeping: Photographs as Artifacts of Black Family History
Annelise Morris, University of California, Berkeley, aemorris@berkeley.edu
Founded in the late 18th century by free black pioneers and occupied continuously ever since, my family’s ancestral homestead is also the archaeological site I will begin excavating for my dissertation. With generations of family portraits and photographs available, I’m interested in exploring how photographs are used to create site histories and, similarly, their role in the memorialization of the black experience. For this session, I’ll present a sample of these photographic artifacts discussing their unique visual access to lived experiences of an archaeological site, as well as their ability to represent changing articulations of the self and the family.

More recognition that archaeology is always of the present – because we work not upon the past, but upon what remains.

See also – archaeography.com and archaeographer.com

Here I am up the Tyne Valley – where the Roman bridge crossed the river, carrying Hadrian’s Wall.

Wonderful comment this morning from Victoria Bellotti (PARC) – that archaeology is dethnography

Absolutely – (d)ethnography – d.ethnography – the intermingling of dreams and mortality, utopia and the realities of material constraints, the angel of death whispering in the ear of aspiration. What is more human?

Death at the heart of living; negative entropy as a life force. Very Gothic. Very Heidegger. Very Benjamin.

And a great excuse to post another example of haunted media! (Ethnographers in industry like to show lots of photographs of their subjects – but should beware of the politics of the fetishistic gaze )

Daguerreotype. c1850. Digitally restored. [Link]

(Use the controls to navigate through the panorama.)

In the North East of England for the Binchester excavations – Vinovium.org.

Just to the north of our site.

Looking southwest, the Stanegate (Roman, named “stone road” in early medieval times) runs from the left of the picture, through the fort of Vindolanda and then straight up the rising ground beyond; Hadrian’s Wall is on the skyline running in from the right.

One of the few remaining Roman milestones still sits where the Stanegate enters the fort.

In the North East of England for the Binchester excavations – Vinovium.org.

Dere Street, the Roman road that passes through Binchester, here runs north across what is now the English-Scottish border.

There was a medieval village – Kemblepath – up here in the wilds of Upper Coquetdale. On the site of Chew Green, the Roman fort and earthworks.

Map – UK Government M(ulti) A(gency) G(eographic) I(nformation) for the C(ountryside)

(Aerial photo – Tim Gates)

Dere Street crosses the River Coquet.

“I was seeing layers of typography, paint, colour – and combined with the texture of the crumbling and flaking materials, many of them were appealing to me as contemporary pieces of design in the vein of work by Ray Gun magazine.”

Manhattan

(see also archaeography.com)

Staying with Christina (Unwin) and Richard (Hingley).

Checking out Hadrian’s Wall for our summer tour.

Chorography – checking out the car parks!