Paper Monument

I’m not normally one to group artworks into rigid categories, but lately I’ve noticed that a certain type of photograph has been cropping up all over the place. I first began spotting them in blogs, newspapers, books, and galleries just after Hurricane Katrina. In the fall of 2005, snapshots of water-damaged living rooms, roofless houses, and overturned cars from New Orleans and southern Mississippi began to trickle in on the photosharing website Flickr. Then, in March 2006, a series of photos of deserted Ukrainian villages appeared on the BBC website in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And last summer, reviews of a book by the journalist Alan Weisman titled The World Without Us showed up all at once in the pages of the New York Times, Newsweek, and Scientific American, replete with computer-generated images of a posthuman Manhattan. Many of the most disturbing photos show everyday spaces in states of irreversible disrepair, e.g. rusting Ferris wheels, crumbling asphalt avenues, hallways with layers of dust and debris on the floor. Most impart a feeling of abandonment, but, strangely, not all of them are of ruins. Some are of pristine lobbies and other well-maintained institutional interiors; in some of them, the fluorescent lights are still on.

If these photographs constitute a genre, it’s one that goes a long way back. Eugene Atget’s depopulated Parisian street scenes from the early 1900s, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological treatments of industrial structures from the 1960s and 70s, and, more recently, certain of Jeff Wall’s meticulously-staged tableaux are all obvious forerunners. However, in the last few years, these pictures have migrated from the world of contemporary art into popular culture, and the ubiquity they’ve attained in the mainstream media makes me think there must be some logic behind the phenomenon. It may invite hyperbole, but the mass appearance of these photos before a Western audience at a time when economic orthodoxies and political alliances are being severely tested is at least curious enough to make me wonder whether similar photographic trends didn’t occur, say, in Argentina toward the end of the military junta or East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall—the pictures serving as a kind of semaphore of the institutional destruction to come.

Let’s call them end-of-the-world photographs. There are a few basic rules defining the category: (1) the pictures are always empty of human beings; (2) their subjects are always human social spaces; and, in fact, (3) the pictures are typically concerned with the interior of these spaces, so that the viewer is brought or invited inside, e.g. inside a living room, office, prison, tunnel, city. And finally, (4) the space is never of the kind you just happen upon in the course of a normal day; on the contrary, either something extraordinary has occurred there, or all kinds of bureaucratic stamps-of-approval have been procured and arrangements made in order for the photographer to capture the image.

Of course, there are tons of thoroughly banal photos that match these criteria; shots of high-end apartments in lifestyle magazines, images of factories in corporate annual reports, and documentary photos of house fires for insurance companies would all technically fit these requirements. But the interesting ones will tend to cause a psychological dissonance in the viewer. One gets the impression that in all of these spaces things could go on as they habitually do were it not for one fairly obvious detail: all the missing people. And they are missing. They’re never just in the other room or out of town carrying on as usual. If the space isn’t already in a state of visible decay, then there are other, more subtle signs that things have come, resoundingly and permanently, to an end.



—

Whatever your opinion regarding the quality or power of these particular photographs, the category as a whole raises some interesting questions about what the medium of photography can and cannot do. So before venturing to answer why they’re popping up all over the place these days, let’s quickly consider what’s formally and historically significant about them.

The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto claimed recently, in a review of Fernando Botero’s paintings of Abu Ghraib, that, were the paintings photographs, they would have none of the subtlety and complexity of a truly “disturbatory art,” which he insists the paintings most definitely are. He writes: “Photographs can only show what is visible; what Susan Sontag memorably called ‘the pain of others’ lies outside their reach. But it can be conveyed in painting … for the limits of photography are not the limits of painting.”[1] We’ve heard this somewhere before.

Despite the institutional inclusion of photography in MFA programs and museums all over the world—not to mention the thorough reevaluation of any stable concept of “high art”—there’s more resistance than you might think to the idea that photography is on a par with painting or sculpture. Photographs are often taken to be blunt, utilitarian instruments; their proper role, many still assume, is to relay information, or else serve as hard evidence for information relayed through the spoken or written word. As such, the question of their trustworthiness—not their expressive power—is habitually taken to be central. War photography can shock, of course, but even then, according to conventional wisdom, the proper question is: in the service of what prevailing ideology? It’s how well photographs capture a factual or historical truth that’s proper to their domain, not how well they embody the sweeping universal truth of real honest-to-goodness art. Perhaps surprisingly, more than a few prominent photographers themselves have subscribed to something like this view. Mathew Brady, for instance, famously proclaimed that “the camera is the eye of history.” Walker Evans described himself as “a connoisseur of the visible,” and once likened the role of the photographer to that of the collector or curator.

This isn’t a particularly compelling view of the nature of photography to my mind, but, in rejecting it, I wouldn’t want to deny an obvious fact implicit in Danto’s thesis—that different artistic media work and perform very differently. There are sometimes highly specific rules that correspond to the peculiarities and possibilities of a specific material for producing—let’s call them, with no pejorative intent—illusions in the minds of viewers. Flaubert, for example, once argued that writers need to mention at least three objects in order to generate a three-dimensional impression in the mind of the reader; film editor Walter Murch has said, for similar reasons, that a proper non-vertigo-inducing cut has to preserve “eye-trace,” or the location and movement across the screen of the audience’s focus of interest. Often the subsequent historical development of an entire medium can unfold according to artists’ stances towards highly specific rules like these, and there’s no reason to think photography is any different. But, contra Danto, I don’t think these prescriptions should be seen as necessarily limiting the expressive range of any given medium. Despite their differing methodologies, there’s no reason to think any particular kind of illusion (e.g. “pain”) is possible in some media and impossible in others. To illustrate this, I want to make two general points about our specific category of end-of-the-world photographs. First, they don’t show or represent only what is visible. Second, they don’t make ordinary truth-claims about particular historical events, people, or places, but, instead, aspire to the same level of generality as the allegory or fairy tale.

Take the above two photographs; the first is by Benjamin Tiven, a young photographer working in Brooklyn; the second is by the prominent German photographer Thomas Demand. The room on the top is a defunct exercise room at the decommissioned military base on Governors Island, in New York Harbor. The room on the bottom is a cardboard reconstruction of a seemingly ordinary copy room. Both photographs have conventional framings; they both square up the room and exclude what looks like windows to the left. Demand’s photos, like those of his notable peers Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, are concerned, literally and metaphorically, with the construction of the photographic image: extended viewing and contextual information make it clear that we’re not really seeing what we think we’re seeing. And it’s true. That particular copy room doesn’t really exist, or if it does, it exists at a further remove than we might at first think. But is the picture lying or misleading? Under what circumstances would we really need to know the room is real? Demand’s room is made of cardboard; the exercise room above it is made of drywall and concrete: neither space serves the function it was apparently meant to serve. The room in the Demand photo doesn’t bear the same marks of age, and yet its hyperrealist look makes it seem like the room is preserved in amber or covered in wax. As with the Chernobyl photo above, looking at either one of these for too long can make you feel like the last person on earth. In other words, both spaces exist firmly outside the everyday (sub specie aeternitatis, as philosophers used to say), but they’re also, importantly, generic. They’re ephemeral and yet somehow eternal; both undeniably particular but vaguely abstract.

That’s a paradox, I want ultimately to suggest, that serves to shift photography’s traditional emphasis on the evidentiary to a very different emphasis on the ontological. In contrast to the conventional photographic mode, it doesn’t matter if the space is real or the photographic representation accurate, because the questions these pictures raise are on a different level of generality. What we’re led to wonder about is how any space like this could exist anywhere on the planet, and in case it does, as they almost all do, how and why they exist like that.

To see more exactly what I mean, let’s look more closely at the subjects of these photos. There’s a sense in which all designed, interior spaces are what Goethe would have called “ur-phenomena,” in that they embody this paradox of the particular and general, the empirical and timeless. For instance: not only are they the concrete embodiment of abstract blueprints, but they also often instantiate forms with cosmic significance. According to the anthropologist Mircea Eliade, a column in the middle of a room can signify an axis mundi between heaven and earth, and a circle can serve as a foundational orbis terrarum, or what Eliade calls “the navel of the earth.” For, as he writes over and over again in The Sacred and Profane, “settling a territory is equivalent to founding a world,” and “to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods.” But more importantly to us here, architectural spaces also channel the very social practices and conventions they were designed to accommodate. These practices can include very simple things like a game of duck-duck-goose or standing in line, or more complicated ones like the nuclear family or state constitutions, but all of them are composed of more or less abstract social rules, which are expressed and embodied by the material contours of these interior landscapes.

In the two photographs juxtaposed below, you can begin to see just how subtle and powerful the interplay between rule and space can be. The photo on the left by photographer Richard Ross is of a Montessori classroom in California, and the one on the right is a snapshot by David Balzen of Hurricane Katrina refugees in the Houston Astrodome (not in our category but instructive nonetheless). The identical green rugs and the inverted platonic shapes of the dome and play-circle are striking formal parallels, but it’s the duct tape I’m really interested in. What’s amazing about the tape is its ability to create an objective volume out of practically nothing. Although it doesn’t offer real shelter, the duct tape does begin to “found a world” in much the same way as four solid walls and a roof would. That could only be possible if meaningful space exists as much in the individual and collective imagination as it does in the three-dimensional world of objects.

Despite the wealth of details in these spaces and the variety of ways we could interpret the content of their photographic depictions, our attention is most strongly directed to the needs, desires, and habits of their absent, implied inhabitants. This effect is reinforced and even magnified by the peculiar way these photos trade on the medium’s relation to time.

Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, among others, have famously argued that an essential function of the photograph is to serve as a memento mori for the viewer. A photograph stops time at a certain historical moment, it is argued, and—at least in the case of the recreational snapshot—when the viewer returns to the photo years or even decades later, he or she is vividly, sometimes nostalgically, reminded of the loss of the intervening time. Interestingly, our end-of-the-world photographs don’t have this effect on us—quite the opposite, in fact. By selecting especially generic spaces and relegating historical cues to the perceptual and emotional perimeter, the photographer constructs an image that obviates this usual act of remembering. In this way, the viewer is prevented from entering into a subjective relationship with the picture, and the memento mori function of the photograph is itself generalized and made impersonal: without the invitation to recall a specific event in the past, we’re not likely to consider our own personal march toward death, as is the case with many photographs. Rather, as we contemplate these spaces and their implied practices, we recognize that historical time—or civilizational time—as a whole is coming to an end.

In the tradition of fairytales, then, which often achieve uncanny effects by exaggerating our conventional narrative experience of scale (e.g. a shoe blown up to an incredible size), these photos produce unease by hyperbolizing our conventional photographic experience of time. Like all photos they stop time; it’s just time at the end of time.

—

If Walter Benjamin is to be believed, Eugene Atget’s photos of desolate Parisian streetscapes are more than just formal forbears to the pictures in our genre. According to Benjamin, by removing the people from his photographs Atget produced images in which cult value—the auratic power of an image, by that time entrenched in notions of remembrance associated with the human face—was supplanted by exhibition value, the capacity to be seen by a mass audience and held up to a new form of directed, critical scrutiny. This was the beginning, he argued, of a kind of imagistic political research and even critique, in which each individual photograph was brought into metonymic relief by every other photograph preceding it.

Two recent book-length projects have inherited the Atgetian mantle; one is by a contemporary artist and one is by a photojournalist, and both are pretty political. The first, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, by Taryn Simon, collects stylized photos of hidden institutional interiors, often with surprising, even sinister significance: CIA headquarters in Virginia, the contraband room at JFK airport, a jury simulation room of a litigation consultancy in New York. The second, Architecture of Authority, by Richard Ross—author of the Montessori classroom picture above—gathers photographs of spaces of political and physical domination and pairs them with the more humdrum spaces of schools, hotel lobbies, and government agency waiting rooms. Like Fernando Botero, Ross visited Abu Ghraib, and also snapped photos of the shower stalls at Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In one sense, I guess, it’s obvious why photographs like these would be appearing on the cultural scene right now: we’re at war and the natural order is on the cusp of a full-fledged rebellion. But it’s worth noticing just how different these pictures are from the socially responsible photographs of other eras.

Walker Evans’s WPA photos of southern sharecroppers are obvious examples, but the work of New York street photographers of the 1930s and 40s—Helen Levitt, Rebecca Lepkoff, Evans himself—provide an almost too-perfect counterpoint. Street photographers were famous for using right-angle viewfinders and hiding their cameras behind coats in an effort to capture unsuspecting subjects in moments of unguarded authenticity. James Agee, in the introduction to Levitt’s book A Way of Seeing, suggests that this is because good photographers have to be constantly on the lookout for those rare and fleeting moments in which the composition of reality isn’t somehow lying. The actual world, he argues, offers up these moments of insight and truth, and the skill of the photographer lies more than anything else in being able to “see” them. “[Anyone] who is in a position to fully enjoy these photographs,” he writes of Levitt’s photos, “… will realize how constantly the unimagined world is in its own terms an artist, and how deep and deft the creative intelligence must be to recognize, foresee and make permanent its best moments.” That’s a lovely—if counterintuitive—thought in some ways, but it’s precisely not what’s going on with our category of end-of-the-world photographs.

In our photographs, we don’t get the impression that the photographer is searching out a “moment of truth”: the photos don’t seem to capture any particular moment at all, much less one that would reveal something definitive about the depicted space. As a result, we don’t pretend to see the world as the photographer does, and we’re not left imagining what it would feel like to actually inhabit that space—it’s as if the photographer had disappeared along with all of his subjects. Instead, in looking at these photos, we’re made to feel like archaeologists from the future who know very little about the historical particulars and so are compelled to use the spaces as clues to the broader structures and forces of society. From this vantage point the isolated event or object is unimportant, as is any question of the particular. This particular day, person, or place, they are all only secondary to the concern with ongoing practices, institutions, and laws. Thus, again, from the perspective of the history of photography, the traditionally central epistemic concern with truth and truthfulness is replaced by an ontological concern with practices and conventions; the traditional preference for what can be seen is eclipsed by an obsession with what is absent—a point that’s only reinforced by the fact that many of these spaces are themselves normally hidden from public view.

Designed spaces may be products of our imagination, but they’re not illusions. They depend on real-world agreements and have actual consequences. Making them the subject of a photograph—to the exclusion of virtually all other traditional concerns of photography—has the potential to raise important questions about why these spaces exist at all. And this, I think finally, must be the reason these pictures are showing up everywhere right now. We’re not only at war; some of our deepest political institutions and traditions are undergoing a fundamental crisis of legitimacy. By invoking a fictive future apocalypse these pictures put us in a frame of mind conducive to evaluating the present-day warning signs. Perhaps this is what I meant when I said at the beginning that, in these photographs, one gets the feeling things have come to an end: the human world is dead, the worst has come to pass, and now it’s our job to figure out where everything went wrong.



[1] From “The Body in Pain,” Author Danto, The Nation, November 27, 2006. Also quoted in John R. MacArthur’s introduction to Architecture of Authority by Richard Ross.