Donovan Wylie's Kandahar outposts

copyright Donovan Wylie, Magnum. Observation Post. Exact location unknown. Kandahar Province. Afghanistan, 2011

Although Canada was part of ISAF and in Kandahar Province until just this summer, we rarely saw where they were.  Rick Mercer went to the base at Kandahar, stood in front of Tim Hortons, we saw ramp ceremonies, CF members sent messages back to their families at Christmas on CBC, but it was all in the bright lights of tv cameras and the cleanliness of the main base.  Even news reports of the poppy fields being destroyed were as beautiful as poppies are.

Donovan Wylie, a Belfast photographer, was embedded with the Canadian ISAF contingent and funded through the Bradford Fellowship 2010/11 from Bradford College, the University of Bradford and the National Media Museum, located in Bradford.  His series of photographs of FOBs is on display at the National Media Museum until mid-February 2012, and will be published in an accompanying book. 

Forward Operating Bases are just that: the forward part of the line, observation posts usually made of hesco bastions, and very, very vulnerable.  This is the Afghanistan in which our forces did their tours, and in which 158 died: dusty, brown, lunar, lonely.  We, in Canada, were never shown this environment.  Our various ministers of defence never walked into these outposts on IED mined tracks.  They never lived there.  

One of the characteristics of WWI and the horror of its trench warfare was the eternally cheerful letters from the front sent to families back home. And when those who survived finally did make it home, they never talked about it.  After seeing Wylie's photographs, I feel that we in Canada were let down by our national media, who also sent cheerful reports from the front.  Why is PTSD as epidemic as it is?  Perhaps it is because hardly anyone is talking about what happened. 

Isabelle Hayeur: Underworlds

Isabelle Hayeur. Lampsilis.

Isabelle Hayeur has been photographing bodies of water since 2008 – as she says, 'the turbid waters of navigation canals, troubled waters of dubious, uncertain origin'.  

So often we register changes in rivers, lakes, oceans and wetlands from standing head height, rarely from the water itself, in section.  Hayeur's images record the death of so many waterways de-oxegenated through pollution at a massive scale.  Rather than the glittering reflective surface that is so deceptive, her work takes us below to a world both disturbed and disturbing.

Taysir Batniji's Watchtowers

Watchtowers (Israeli military miradors in West Bank, Palestinia), 2008 serie of 26 photographs B&W, digital prints, 40 x 50 cm (photo Dieter Kik).
Taysir Batniji is showing a series of photographs this year at Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011 which investigates the relationship between art and politics. Batniji's series, Watchtowers, consists of watchtowers on the West Bank border with Israel.  There is a project of witness here, the recording of the watchtowers' existence, and there is a formal project, the typology of the watchtower, and there is a project of photography, the implications of the processes and products of the Bechers, their watertower series in particular.  

Water Towers (Wassertürme), 1980. Nine gelatin silver prints, unique, approximately 61 1/4 x 49 1/4 inches (155.6 x 125.1 cm) overall. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 1980 Bernd and Hilla Becher

Batniji describes the watchtower project:
Significantly, the project registers the attempt (or the situational difficulty in trying to attempt) to follow the Bechers’ method. The particularly perilous conditions of these photographs render them compromised. As a Palestinian born in Gaza I am not authorized to return to the West Bank, so I delegated a Palestinian photographer to carry out these photos. They are out of focus, clumsily framed, imperfectly lighted. In this territory, one cannot install the heavy equipment of the Bechers or take the time to frame the perfect position, let alone afford to wait days for the ideal light conditions. Aestheticization becomes a vivid political challenge, both in the creation of these photographs and in their reception, as these images challenge viewers to see these functional military constructions as sculptural, or as a part of a formal architectural heritage.

Aestheticisation is such a danger and must plague all photographers in war situations where the camera both sees and makes beautiful simply because it isolates a dynamic and horrific scene in a detached and calm image, and the calmness, and our inevitable space-time distance as viewers from the scene, sanctifies it somehow.  The janus-face of documentary photography.

Giulio Petrocco

Giulio Petrocco, photographer. Juba, 2011Giulio Petrocco  took the photographs for Joshua Craze's article on Juba, South Sudan in On Site 25: identity.  Petrocco is an Italian photojournalist who places himself in dire and dangerous circumstances: see for example, his work from Sana'a, the Yemeni spring which becomes progressively more violent, or a curious site: a neighbourhood in Queen's which was built on a swamp and was a mafia dump.

 Through Petrocco's lens the third world seems to exist anywhere there is struggle.  One wonders if the first world is a definition of sleep walking with plenty of rights and lots of food.  

He keeps a running commentary on his blog What I Learnt Today.

Joshua Craze is an essayist based in Juba, Southern Sudan. With Meg Stalcup, he investigated counterterrorism training in America, which was published by the Washington Monthly.  Now maybe I am a naïve first world sleepwalker, but I found this study really upsetting – not that there is terrorism and counter-terrorism, but the massive distortions of identity and affiliation that can get one so easily killed.  His piece for On Site wasn't quite so dismaying. It was about South Sudan, new country, no identity other than tribal groups which have animals as totemic markers.  There was a perhaps spurious plan to rebuild Juba, the capital, according to a plan the shape of a rhinoceros, the totem of the current power group, the eye being the seat of government (and no doubt a great site for future protests – a Tahrir Square in the making).  Frankly, I thought it looked reasonable as a plan.  As reasonable as any other kind of abstract diagram upon which to base a city. 

The distance between this idea and Juba's reality as shown in Petrocco's images is indeed vast, but the plan is so hopeful, so clean, so deceptively simple.  For something of the complexity of this area see Craze's piece on Abyei in The Guardian.

Proposal for the rebuilding of Juba, South Sudan, 2010.

Rouleau, Saskatchewan

George Hunter. Rouleau, Saskatchewan 1954. CCA Archives.

Rouleau, Saskatchewan (1903), photographed from the air by George Hunter in 1954.  This is the classic image of a prairie town, located within the Dominion Grid (laid down between 1879 and 1884), wood grain elevators lining the tracks, the world of Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), a train stop on the SOO Line (to Chicago) built during the wheat boom that ended sharply in 1910.  Lots of dates, but all within the space of fifty years.

Rouleau, Saskatchewan. Google Maps, 2011Rouleau on GoogleMaps.  Not a lot has changed.  Rouleau is in the infamous Palliser Triangle, an area (officially a semi-arid nutrient-rich steppe) deemed by John Palliser, who surveyed it in 1858, to be uninhabitable because it didn't support trees.  The whole area suffered greatly during the droughts of the 1930s, but nearby is Claybank Brick Plant, now a historic site.  The clay was particularly suited to firebrick, used to line fire boxes in train and ship engines: CPR, CNR and RCN all in expansion mode up to WWII  – voracious clients for firebrick.

From 2003 to 2008  Corner Gas was filmed in Rouleau.  The iconic Saskatchewan rural wheat town was the physical fabric that supported a vision of Canada as a friendly but sometimes sharp-edged community, funny, pathetic, brave, funny, ridiculous, heroic, funny, everyday.  Corner Gas was the Canada that we like to carry about within us, without actually living there.  

Rouleau's slogan is 'Saskatchewan's First 1 Million Bushel Town!'  Does this mean much to any of us not from a farming background? No.  Does Rouleau care?  No.  Is this a brand?  No.  Does this say a lot about Rouleau?  Yes.

Gerster 2: land prints

Gerog Gerster. Harvest, Idaho, 1988

Is ploughing, cutting and threshing so individual that their patterns act as a fingerprint?  Something like the individuality of a welder's seam?

I would hazard that these are fields not part of the Dominion Survey, or in the States, the Land Ordinance Act, both of which divided the land into a 6 mile grid, implacable and immutable.  Such fields are square, ploughed squarely, unless there is a slough, or an erratic, or some awkward bit of topography in the way.  Or maybe farmers just get bored.

Well, no. The point of contour ploughing is to increase water retention in sloping soil and to prevent water erosion, survey grids notwithstanding. So something indicates the need for water conservation in these fields.

Gerster seems to have returned to this area, eastern Washington and Idaho many times.  Almost all his work, which is from all over the world, is about the interaction of industrial practice with the landscape – the mark of man, the hand, the machine and the land.  

Georg Gerster. Lentils, USA, 1980

Georg Gerstner: land

Georg Gerster. Felder im Palouse, USA, 1979

Okay, done with the hand for now, the closest landscape we have.  Georg Gerster, German photographer, did a lot of aerials from helicopter and small planes from the 60s to 90s.  Beautiful photography, National Geographic stuff, very photogenic landscapes.  The one above, found in his photo gallery on his website, is a ploughed field in eastern Washington State, near Palouse, shot in 1979.  

Wonderfully graphic, one does have to ask why it is so.  Looked up the area around Palouse on Google Maps and found that on the western slope of the Rockies it is indeed highly topographic, contour ploughing raised to land art.

We have a call for articles out for issue 26: dirt.  Land is dirt, dirt grows crops, crops determine planting and harvesting with large machines these days, those machines make patterns and we find them often enchanting.  

Google Maps: Palouse Washington USA

civic identity

Michel Lambeth. Kensington Market 1955

Susan Crean's project on Toronto, research for a book, starts with this statement:  I’m looking for the city that is part of all our lives. Not just the one that exists at City Hall, or in books at the TPL, but the city we carry around in our heads.

In the context of the current issue of On Site: identity, it occurs to me that the gap between what we know and feel as individuals and what we are told is important to know about a place – its brand, its economy, its heroics – is a huge crevasse, a significant alienation.  My instinct is that this gap should be bridged in some way, but the official city reading is shooting off at such a speed that I don't think we can catch up.  Where does this leave us?  Looking at the details, despairing at the 'big picture' and eventually realising that we don't live in the big picture.  Physically, perhaps.  Intellectually, maybe.  Emotionally, no.  The tendernesses in Susan Crean's Toronto are in the past, brought forward to the present by telling the stories.

On Site recently had an article about a large community garden, kitchen and market in a Toronto park, where the sun appeared to continually shine, children were fulfilled, adults wore interesting shoes and glowed with a green organic fervour.  This is the potential of Toronto, to have such a park. The woeful miscalculation of the ascendence of the right wing of the Liberal party with Ignatieff at the helm is also the potential of Toronto.  I am incapable of reconciling these two things as they play out on the civic terrain of the city.  They are narratives that never meet.  

The language of each narrative – the vocabulary, the syntax – is almost unintelligible so freighted are both with ideology, righteousness and history.  Is there a Toronto, or a city anywhere, whose meta-narrative can encompass all fractions and factions?  This is the task of city administrations, supported by media and marketing.  Susan Crean's project pierces the ambiguities and lacunae of official histories by asking for personal considerations of what Toronto is, and it seems this is a story that can only be told in details. 

Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington. Still from Restropo, 2010.Tim Hetherington was a British news photographer who made a career covering conflict for news organisations and for Human Rights Watch.  He was not a removed observer behind the camera, but an engaged humanitarian who intervened either directly or through a sustained commitment to struggles such as the Liberian civil war, and the current Libyan war in Misrata, where he was killed on April 20.

Current estimates put the death toll in Libya between February 16 and April 21 as two and a half thousand opposition and eight hundred Gaddafi loyalists.  It is an ugly war with executions, lynchings, rapes, mercenaries, untrained troops, betrayals, lies and human shields.  The death estimates indicate the asymmetry of this war.

Restropo, from which the above still is taken, was a 2010 film about US forces in Afghanistan, in the Korengal Valley.  The image could have been from many or any war: dugouts, trenches, blasted landscapes, small indications of soldiers trying to stay human. Photo-journalists, such as Hetherington and Chris Hondros, also killed on April 20 in Misrata, or Rory Peck killed in Moscow in 1993, reporters such as Orla Guerin – they are witnesses, for us, at great personal sacrifice. 

Marlene Creates

Marlene Creates. Entering and Leaving St. John's Newfoundland 1995. collection: Government of Newfoundland & Labrador, Provincial Art Bank.Marlene Creates, Newfoundland artist, has long photographed signs by the road, in the woods, attached to telephone poles, assembling the images into visual maps that indicate the emptiness of space in this country, whether they are in downtown Victoria or the outskirts of Hamilton.

Her early work shows influences of both Ian Hamilton Findlay and Richard Long: marks on the landscape, minimal reorganisations of nature that document that one was there.  More common are the highway signs, enigmatic markers of the edges of the city, or the edges of acceptable urban behaviour found in 'no parking' signs. 

Ian Toews did a segment of Landscape as Muse on Creates – The Tolt, the Droke and the Blast Hole Pond River; including, memorably, a project where she holds a camera under the blast hole pond and takes photographs looking upward, through the boiling water to her own face. 

Of Entering and Leaving St. John's Newfoundland, 1995, she writes,
'The City Limits signs that first caught my attention are the pair across from each other on the Trans-Canada Highway. When approaching St. John’s, one comes upon a sign announcing the city’s limits, but then there’s another 30 km of driving by woods and bogs before seeing any evidence of the city. And when leaving St. John’s, one drives those 30 km before coming to a sign that tells you that you really hadn’t even left the city yet.
Most of the landscapes surrounding these signs do not correspond at all to the image one might have of St. John’s. This creates a disconnection between the label announcing the city, the actual surrounding place, and the idealized image one may have of this city. St. John’s is larger than whatever idea we may have of it, including for those of us who live here. And Newfoundland, too, is and is not the Newfoundland of the imagination. Which is why my work may or may not be what one expects of a Newfoundland artist.'

Sohei Nishino

© Sohei Nishino. Paris, May 2007 - November 2008. Light jet print. 1558×1348 mmThis work by Sohei Nishino comes to us by way of Tim Atherton who alerted us to the wonderfully named Hippolyte Bayard's photography site.

Sohei Nishino walks cities, photographs them and assembles the photos into vast cognitive maps.  He states that this is 'the re-imagined city from my memory as layered icons of the city'.

Spectacularly unsuited to looking at on the screen, they are large, black and white pieces, 4 x 4' more or less.  Knowing the process, one can imagine what they might look like, as unbalanced and as true as all cognitive maps, studded with fragments of startling detail.  

The detail of Istanbul, below,  shows something of the method: like small narratives in the topography of memory complete with sky and ground, some buildings and spaces are made special by their disconnection from the logic of a conventional map.  This is what google maps has liberated us from: the misleading veracity of the aerial view.

© Sohei Nishino. Detail, Istanbul Diorama

company towns

George Hunter. Flin Flon, Manitoba, 1960. gelatin silver print. Collection CCA PH2009:0006:014. Gift of George Hunter. copyright George HunterThe Canadian Centre for Architecture holds the photographic archives of George Hunter, a photographer who, in the 1950s, photographed Canada's towns and cities from his light plane.  There is a series of mining towns, of which Flin Flon, above, was one.  As many of these were company towns, the series of eight images on the CCA website might be interesting to anyone who is working on our OIL: a new town competition/exhibition. 

Housing in such places is always laid down with zero concern for personal identity.  Is this to do with company priorities, or was there little concern for personal identity in the 1950s in general.  This dreary subdivision from 1958, Mayfair, is now quite a good Calgary neighbourhood.  We have the luxury of thinking about identity as we, in Canada generally, are wealthy and peaceful enough to think of such things.

Looking east on 66th Avenue (later Glenmore Trail) toward Elbow Drive, Calgary, May 7, 1958. Glenbow Archives File number: NA-5093-466

Diana Thater: Chernobyl

Chernobyl, Production Still; 2010 © Diana Thater; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth A few more links to Diana Thater's video installation on Chernobyl, showing at Hauser+Wirth, London. 

Her own website: thaterstudio

Which leads you to kickstart, a funding site for the Chernobyl project.

A short interview at dazed digital, which includes these two paragraphs:

Chernobyl is the only post-apocalyptic, or post-human landscape on earth. Today it’s falling into ruins, but it still looks like a city; there’s stores, apartment buildings, schools. And even though it’s completely deserted and falling apart, animals are moving into the city. So, on the one hand you have this perfectly preserved Soviet city from 1970, and on the other hand you have this post-apocalyptic landscape where animals are living.

I think it’s both political and cultural. Chernobyl represents the failure of lots of things – a massive political system, a way of life, of science. Yet even with the human failures, nature continues to persist. Not because it wants or chooses to, but because it must.

e|348 arquitectura: capela de Santa Maria da Feira

e|348 arquitectura. Chapel, Santa Maria da Feira. photographer, Fernando GuerroThis is a lovely little chapel, built in a triangular plaza where three roads meet in Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal.  Here is a case where there is a dramatic photograph, and as it is unlikely we will ever see this chapel, could be simply dramatic photography, but no, it is actually a shapely little building by e|348. 

This project comes, as usual with all the Portuguese projects I show here, from FG+SG, Fernando Guerro architectural photographer, who regularly sends photographic portfolios of new Portuguese architecture.  While there is coverage of Alvaro Siza and Gonçalo Byrne, there are also very small projects from young firms. 

And, thinking of issues of national identity, there is a real love of bleached wood floors and white plastered walls, and a minimalism that for a while I thought came from the photographer, but must come from a common sensibility where buildings – chapels, cottages, schools – are minimal containers for a rich life built by the inhabitants. 

Ferando Guerro documents the material fabric of each project.  e|348 photographed the chapel in use. We need both.

e|348 arquitectura. Chapel. Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal, 2010. photograph, e|348e]348 arquitectura. Chapel. Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal, 2010. photograph, Fernando Guerro

the surrealism of ordinary things

Paul Nash. Chain and Net, John Nash’s home, Meadle, Berkshire.More from the exhibition of Paul Nash photographs. Margaret Nash wrote on the original negative of  Chain and Net, 'surrealist a very important experiment'.  This is not the surrealism of distorted vision as in Magritte or Dali, but rather the surrealism of Duchamp who seemed to find everything curious, even more so if ordinarily curious things were reassigned slightly twisted names.

It is the attention given to the ordinary that moves these images from snapshot to study.  They aren't documentary, although they have toponymic titles and dates.  They don't reveal a passionate study of a place, although they are all 'placed'.  There is a loving interest in form, not for its perfection, or its pathetic fallaciousness, but for its shape.  These seem quite pure photographs in the sense of being disinterested in the rules, the conventions, the emotive content of art.  

Paul Nash. ‘Totems’, old shipyard, Rye harbour. 1932

Paul Nash: the surrealist eye

Paul Nash. Boat on the Shore, South of France, 1933/4

Last week the Guardian had this photo on their website from an exhibition of Paul Nash's photographs currently on view in Sheffield.  Coincidentally, I just finished reading Pat Barker's novel about the Slade, WWI, war artists and the purpose of war art, Life Class, published in 2007. This appears to have been loosely based on the WWI experience of both Paul Nash (1889-1946) and his brother,  John Nash (1893-1977) who also enlisted in the Artists Rifles. Both might be called meticulous and passionate landscape draughtsmen, rendering complex landscapes into simpler sheets and planes that record an ancient topology usually scarred by some form of modernity.

Between 1931 and 1946 when he died, Paul Nash had a No. 1A pocket Kodak camera with which he photographed landscapes, objects, rocks and rubbish with a slightly crooked surrealist eye.   The exhibition mounted by Abbott and Holder shows a few of these photographs, from the White Horse at Uffington to an Avebury standing stone.  Tree trunks and fence posts become sculptural, ploughed fields become pattern, a topiary garden with a large looming house on the other side of a hedge becomes comically Gothic. 

The Guardian blurb mentions a pathetic fallacy at play in these photographs.  I must say I'd forgotten what the pathetic fallacy was for a moment, but I don't think this is what it is.  One might project all sorts of social preoccupations on the subject matter, but if one was a visual artist, a surrealist and insisted on using your pathetic little pocket Kodak for everything, I would take the cue from surrealism instead.  These are photographs of curious, inexplicable things. 

Paul Nash. The Box Garden, Beckley Park, Oxfordshire. 1943

Mali: Ali Farka Touré, Toumani Diabaté, Malick Sidibé and Ruby

Malick Sidibé

Malick Sidibé. Nuit de Noël, 1963Each spring when TVO does its photography month of documentaries it shows Dolce Vita Africana about Malick Sidibé.  Sidibé opened his photography studio in Bamako, Mali in 1958, and is best known for his photos of Bamako youth, dancing at clubs, clowning around on beaches, posing formally in their coolest clothes.  He photographed everyone however, from babies to the very elderly charting over 50 years and hundreds of thousands of photographs.

Malick Sidibé. Friends, 1976
In Dolce Vita Africana he meets up with a group of men, in their seventies as was Sidibé at the time, with all the photos of them in their teens and twenties.  Much laughter at the clothes, at their youth at their beauty.  One says of all the girls in their bathing suits, 'some of these girls are in burqas now'.  When they have a party, for old time's sake with all the old 45s and everyone dresses up, yes, most of the women are very covered.

Mali achieved independence from France in 1960; it is 90% Muslim, speaks French and has a secular constitution no doubt greatly influenced by the French civil system.  The original Mali Empire controlled trade in the west Sahara, a fluid empire and territory which, after several internal shifts in power over 600 years fell to the French in the late 19th century and became French Sudan.  With decolonisation French Sudan became the Republic of Mali and Senegal.  At which point Sidibé opened his studio and documented the effervescent and heady gaiety of newly postcolonial Mali.  The old shackles were off, the new ones had not yet arrived. 

There is a brief postcolonial interregnum which is a social free-fall, a period of great creativity as paradigms crash before some new ideological system moves in.  Cuba between pre-1959 American colonisation and post-1961 Soviet interest.  Spain between Franco's death in 1976 and joining the EU in 1992.  It is a delicate time, when new values are tried out and either kept or discarded. 
Sidibé comes out of that time.  His eye is so free.  His studio is small, difficult, he lives a social life in his neighbourhood in Bamako, he takes, still, thousands of pictures of people who are presented calmly, formally and respectfully.  The photographic space is shallow, people are significant.

The relatively recent discovery of Malick Sidibé in Europe and the attendant exhibitions, prizes and lifetime achievement awards perhaps indicates the appreciation of a photographic eye that is not ideological and cares very much about the subject, rather than the process of making photographs or using photographs as text, as voice.  This is Sidibé's photographic clarity, his modernity.  

Malick Sidibé. View From the Back, 2001good interviews and reviews from LensCulture, Frieze, and the Guardian.

and the trailer for Dolce Vita Africana:

Michel Campeau, Darkroom/Chambre Noire

Michel Campeau. Sans Titre. Darkroom (2005-2006)

Darkroom - Chambre Noire
On the obsolescence of the sliver gelatin process in the age of digital reproduction
De la désuétude argentique à l'ère de sa reproductibilité numérique

Twice this morning Walter Benjamin has been evoked.  Benjamin liveth. 

Michel Campeau has just been given the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography from the Canada Council.  The CC press release states that 'Michel Campeau has been part of the contemporary photography scene for four decades. His work explores the subjective and narrative dimensions of photography, that contrast with the conventions of documentary photography', which tells us precisely nothing. 
However, on the web is a site for the Darkroom project, series of photos of darkrooms —'a monography of images articulated around the decline of sliver-gelative photography, taking as my object the obsolescence of the darkroom.'

One could see this as an homage to a lost art form: the trays, the darkness, the rickety wires and clothespegs -- something very romantic, but this work isn't romantic at all.  The darkrooms are photoographed in the glare of the flashbulb in all their tawdriness, in all their squalor, actually.  The distance between these ad hoc environments, surely the only environments where appearance does not matter as they exist only in the dark, and the products produced in these environments is immense.  The clinically beautiful iMacs used now will never be the subject of such a photo project.  Pixels and levels adjustments have no physicality, the terrors of virtual reality where all is disembodied came with the first point-and-shoot digital camera. 

Campeau however has a classical photographer's eye: the subject matter is at once interrogated for its really pathetic expedience while rendered beautiful.  The photo above, the poetically identified CRW3446 – layers of plywood partitions hacked through with a skilsaw for a drainpipe, is phenomenally eerie, beautiful in its details: the splintered paint surface, the necklace of steel strapping, the hose clamps, the crossed lines at the corners of the openings as if it had been casually drafted with a sawblade.  It is a most lovely thing, graphically, abstractly, and in its capture of a very human struggle with obdurate building materials.

Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky. Ocean V, 2010. 
Chromogenic Print 
366,4 x 249,4 x 6,4 cm. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin.

Andreas Gursky is showing his series Ocean I-VI at Sprüth Magers Berlin right now.  The images are large – all around 2.5-3.5 m x 3m+, and originated in the kinds of views on flight monitors that show whatever the plane is flying over.  These are all images of the oceans, the land shows as busy little fragments around the edge: peripheral and of no great mystery compared to the seas which show as deep and silent.

Gursky apprenticed with Bernd and Hilla Becher, and something of their stillness underlies all his work.  While Ocean I-VI might look like straight satellite images, and indeed the bits of land are from satellite photos, the oceans themselves have been constructed.  There are no clouds or storms, their proportions aren't geographically correct – they take cartographic licence as all maps do.

These pieces of water all have names, but Gursky has called them simply Ocean I, Ocean II; just as land doesn't have all the political and economic markings we understand as constituting land inscribed on its surface, neither do the oceans have pink dotted lines floating on them marking 250-miles limits, or large letters floating across them saying Pacific Ocean.  Really, maps as we know them, are very crude. 

Gursky has, for many years, done large photographs of large things: immaculate and perfectly regimented crowds in North Korea, flattened screens of social housing projects, any repetitive elements that are so vast in number that they become a kind of colour field, which of course is the thing that pulls him away from the often near-identical photographs of Ed Burtynsky.  Repetition and the small shifts in detail in like objects were at the core of the Becher's work: I doubt they were wildly interested in water towers although they photographed hundreds of them. Their project was photographic, setting the camera in a precise and repetitive relationship with the subject, removing all the seductive elements the camera so easily exploits: colour, sun and shade, fast-frame capture of birds, wind, people.

Much is written about Gursky's work as a critique of capitalism: here are capitalism's excesses, with Burtynsky, Gursky and Polidori as a club going about documenting all its evils.  I'm not sure this is quite how it is, or all that it is.  There is a photographic project here, rather than a documentary project.  Oceans I-VI is not documentary, it is a construction of a mystery, of inaccessibility, of understanding something one can only see in the abstract; the near-impossibility of clicking out of the abstract into some sort of existential, phenomenological present, which can only be found at the scale of standing with one's feet in the water at Departure Bay and thinking 'this water goes to Japan'.