“The aim of my work is to create a visually attractive image that draws the viewer in, then shocks them with what is represented,” artist Mandy Barker explains. “This contradiction between beauty and fact is intended to make people question how their shoe, computer, or ink cartridge ended up in the sea.”
A short feature for New Scientist, 22 April 2017
Previewing an exhibition of photographs by Richard Mosse for New Scientist, 11 February 2017
Irish photographer Richard Mosse has come up with a novel way to inspire compassion for refugees. He presents them as drones might see them – as detailed heat maps, often shorn of expression, skin tone, and even clues to age and sex. Mosse’s subjects, captured in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, don’t look back at us: the infrared camera renders their eyes as uniform black spaces.
Mosse has made a career out of repurposing photographic kit meant for military use. The images here show his subjects as seen, mostly at night, by a super-telephoto device designed for border and battlefield surveillance. Able to zoom in from 6 kilometres away, the camera anonymises them, making them strangely faceless even while their sweat, breath and sometimes blood circulation patterns are visible.
The results are almost closer to the nightmarish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch than the work of a documentary photographer. Making sense of them requires imagination and empathy: after all, this is how a smart weapon might see us.
Mosse came across his heat-mapping camera via a friend who worked on the BBC series Planet Earth. Legally classified as an advanced weapons system, the device is unwieldy and – with no user interface or handbook – difficult to use. But, working with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, Mosse has managed to use it to make a 52-minute video. Incoming will wrap itself around visitors to the Curve Gallery at the Barbican arts centre in London from 15 February until 23 April.
For New Scientist, a review of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s book How to See the World
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF, a media, culture and communication professor at New York University, wants to justify the study of visual culture by describing, accessibly, how strange our visual world has become.
This has been done before. In 1972 artist and writer John Berger made Ways of Seeing, a UK TV series and a book. This was also the year that astronaut Harrison Schmitt took the Blue Marble picture of Earth from Apollo 17, arguably the most reproduced photograph ever.
By contrast, in How to See the World, Mirzoeff’s mascot shot is the selfie taken by astronaut Akihiko Hoshide during his 2012 spacewalk. This time, Earth is reflected in Hoshide’s visor: the planet is physically different and changing fast. Transformations that would have been invisible to humans because they took place so slowly now occur in a single life. “We have to learn to see the Anthropocene,” writes Mirzoeff.
Images are ubiquitous, and we have learned to read them as frames in a giant, self-assembling graphic novel. Visual meaning is found in the connections we make between those images. We used to flock to the cinema for that sort of peculiar dream logic, but now we struggle to awaken. Mirzoeff cites artist Clement Valla writing that “we are already in the Matrix”.
Simple iconography is in retreat. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Soviet missile trailers were visible in photos shown to the media. By 2003, the photos that US general Colin Powell showed of supposed weapons-making kit were lathered in yellow labelling, claiming to show what we could not in fact see.
Tracing the political, social and environmental implications of our visual culture, in words and black and white images, is a job of work. Mirzoeff succeeds: this is a dizzying and delightful book.
Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and atomic nostalgia, Lindsey A. Freeman (University of North Carolina Press)
Seeing Green: The use and abuse of American environmental images, Finis Dunaway (Chicago University Press)
for New Scientist (4 April 2015),
THE past can’t be re-experienced. It leaves only traces and artefacts, which we constantly shuffle, sort, discard and recover, in an obsessive effort to recall where we have come from. This is as true of societies as it is of individuals.
Lindsey Freeman, an assistant professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Buffalo, is the grandchild of first-generation residents of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Once a “secret city”, where uranium was enriched for the US’s Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge opened its gates to the world in 1949 as America’s first “Atomic City”: a post-war utopia of universal healthcare, zero unemployment and state-owned housing.
In Longing for the Bomb, Freeman describes how residents of Oak Ridge dreamed up an identity for themselves as a new breed of American pioneer. He visits Oak Ridge’s Y-12 National Security Complex (an “American Uranium Center of Excellence”) during its Secret City Festival, boards its Scenic Excursion Train and cannot decide if converting a uranium processing site into a wildlife reserve is good or bad.
It would have been easy to turn the Oak Ridge story into something sinister, but Freeman is too generous a writer for that. Oak Ridge owes its existence to the geopolitical business of mass destruction, but its people have created stories that keep them a proud and happy community. Local trumps global, every time.
This is good for the founders of communities, but a problem for those who want to wake up those communities to the need for change. As historian Finis Dunaway puts it in Seeing Green, his history of environmental imagery, “even as media images have made the environmental crisis visible to a mass public, they often have masked systemic causes and ignored structural inequalities”.
Reading this, I was reminded of a talk by author Andrew Blackwell, where he told us just how hard it is to take authentic pictures of some of the world’s most polluted places. Systemic problems do not photograph well. Some manipulation is unavoidable.
Dunaway knows this. Three months after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, the worst radioactive spill in US history occurred near Church Rock, New Mexico, on lands held by the Navajo nation. It took a week for the event to be reported, once, on a single news channel.
The remoteness of the site and a lack of national interest in Native American affairs might explain the silence but, as Dunaway points out, the absence of an iconic and photogenic cooling tower can’t have helped.
The iconic environmental images Dunaway discusses are essentially advertisements, and adverts address individuals. They assume that radical social change will catch on like any other consumer good. For example, the film An Inconvenient Truth, chock full of eye-catching images, is the acme of the sincere advertiser’s art, and its maker, former US vice-president and environmental campaigner Al Gore, is a vocal proponent of carbon offset and other market initiatives.
Dunaway, though, argues that you cannot market radical social action. For him, the moral seems to be that sometimes, you just have to give the order – as Franklin Roosevelt did when he made Oak Ridge a city.
Anyone wanting a bloodless, contemporary vision of hell should visit Bermondsey, off London’s south bank, and boutique coffee shops that compete to pun on the word “espresso”, and smashed and discoloured prepubescent seventies nudes on old shop signs made modern antiques, and clothes made of 3D-printed string, and Pop-Up Shopping Events, and White Cube.
White Cube, with its high-gated, cobblestone forecourt expressly CAD-designed to accomodate the public executions of the future.
White Cube, passe and oppressive in the same breath, if you can call it a breath: one last, cripplingly painful act of agonal respiration as you wrench open the door and
You’re in. Andrea Gursky is a German photographer whose large-scale photographic work perfectly conveys the human toll wreaked by buildings like this one. (The show’s on until 6 July.) A small, silhouetted human form seeks (and does not find) shelter from the brazen walls of an overlit cathedral-sized faux-gold microwave oven. The stairs and atrium of some presumably pleasant, publicly funded arts venue are collaged into a grotesquely outsize (always outsize) overlit (always overlit) Piranesi dungeon. Spiderman and Batman stand slightly out of kilter before collosal, oversimple seascapes and cityscapes, overwhelmed by the scale of things, turned to clowns.
Imagine turning on an extremely expensive wall-sized television and watching cancer developing in your own lung. This is not an oppressive show, so much as an oppressed one, and your abiding impression of the artist – assuming you can put aside his considerable reputation and the seven-figure prices fetched by his canvases – is of an intellectually sanctioned Roger Dean on a truly epic downswing.
And out.
And look – no, really look at this bloody travesty of a street. The sad and important thing about Gursky is not that he himself is sad, but that he is very obviously right.
