For this project we have to work on the theme of waste as if it where a commission task.
This is to help us become more flexible and able to respond to a diverse range of tasks and briefs, and to familiarise ourselves with the demands and expectations of a commission.
The assignment requires us to look at the theme of waste as an index for the industrial globalised world we live in. Global actions such as consumption, recycling and the artefacts of waste have an interconnected relationship with people at every local level and the theme for this commission promotes reflection about the world in which we live.
The body of photographic work we produce can use the genres of portraiture, environment or still- life.
Developing an idea
As soon as we began talking about the industrialised world, and the Global consequences of consumption, I had images of what could happen in the future if we continued in this manner.
As the words 'Global' and 'Industrial' where used within the brief I could not help but think visually of these effects on a large and devastating level, and the barren life less landscapes it may or has created.
Within the brief there are several examples of how to interpret this theme of 'waste', and the two that inspired me most where:
Andreas Gursky 'Untitled XIII'
and...
Yao Lu 'Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Fuchun'.
Gursky's piece in Mexico City captured me because at a glance or viewed from a distance it is unclear as to what you are viewing. It could be an abstract painting with it's obscurities and droplets of colour darted throughout it, however when you look closer you begin to make out familiar shapes or things, products. Eventually you can make out the empty cans and boxes, you see the products you use in every corner of the globe as waste. This endless sea of waste products I found quite inspiring, as Gursky keeps in the horizon line for perspective, it helps you recognise that it is in our world, on our landscapes, it also helps you recognise the sheer scale of it.
Yao Lu's 'Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Fuchun' stuck out to me for it's camouflage. It is in the print style and framing of old traditional Japanese, and Chinese scroll paintings. Showing a beautiful landscape of lakes and mountains and the ideal scenery. There was something unsettling about it though that I could not recognise, also I did not know why this was in our brief on waste.
This is in fact a scene of a rubbish dump in China, however they often cover these dumps with a green 'shield', a green netting.
So this is quite a horrid large scale putrid dump of waste, that they attempt to hide and transform into something else, once you recognise this, I get a sense of shame from this piece because it has been camouflaged.
These two photographs began to make me think of a landscape on an almost 'post apocalyptic' scale, these scenes devoid of natural or clean life, and just an endless masked wasteland.
This idea of the endless wasteland made me think of a Korean animation known as 'Sky Blue'.
Sky Blue
In this film civilization has been destroyed by war and pollution, the survivors built a living city, named 'Ecoban' to survive in, as most natural resources have been exhausted, and the world has been so polluted, that this 'living city' is powered by pollution. The skies are blocked with smog in every corner of the globe, blocking the sun, and bringing endless toxic rain.
This setting, and the beautifully drawn, but wholly dead and empty, landscapes in this film spurred my idea of our waste and what it does. I began thinking of portraying less, the waste we cause and dump, and more what will become of us if we continue down this path, with images of these 'epic' landscapes of the barren, with only a hint or two of the humans that where once there.
Pieter Hugo - Permanent Error
South African photographer Pieter Hugo's series 'Permanent Error' is a series of photographs around a Ghanian dumping ground for global electronic waste, this dumping ground for 'E-Waste' is home to many slums, with people that must traverse the dumping ground, damaging their health burning the techno-trash to harvest precious metals.
In recent years, our consumption of electronic goods has increased rapidly, and today's gadgets and goods become obsolete within merely a couple of years, creating around 50million metric tonnes of 'e-waste' a year.
Much of Hugo's work is done in Ghana, in the new global waste ground for discarded computers, games, mobile phones, printers etc.
Hugo's photographs show the slum-dwellers burning trash in this bleak landscape; the toxic fumes they create endanger both their own health and the environment in which they live, and keep their livestock, creating a lasting problem that produces a permanent error.
These photographs very much depict my 'post-apocalyptic wasteland', which I find really quite shocking, as we all have these notions of man's effect on the world and what will become of us due to our waste and global warming, but few people put serious thought to it. Even less people acknowledge or know of the extent of this damage, myself being one them found Hugo's work staggering in terms of the damage we have done already.
People shrug and adopt an 'out of sight out of mind' attitude towards this kind of thing, and many people that are proactive about these wastelands would focus on helping these people, stuck in these dumps.
Part of this commission requires our photographs to be taken locally, at first this seems rather belittling or irrelevant compared to the wastelands elsewhere in the world, but these wastelands are made because of where we are, our local areas.
Thinking locally of what effects Medway, what Medway generates, my first thoughts are drawn to the River Medway, as it has long been dubbed by locals as 'the river Mudway'.
Sebastiao Salgado
"Inside Kuwait was the sense of being in this huge theatre the size of the planet, with these oil wells burning all around. Sometimes you would go two or three days without any sunlight getting through the vast clouds of black smoke, then suddenly the sky would open."
Sebastiao Salgado did a series of photographs, mainly following some Canadian firefighters in Kuwait in 1991 just as the Gulf War ended. He followed these fire fighters in their plight against damaged and leaking oil wells all across Kuwait, many of which had been ignited.
This was an incredibly dangerous venture for both Salgado and all the fire fighters working there, as so much as a single spark from any tools would ignite them all. Salgado himself became completely immersed in the stories of these fire fighters struggling, he followed them very closely for many days.
Looking at the entire chain of events that led to these wells becoming damaged and spilling oil all across Kuwait, it could not have more relevance to looking at 'waste' and mankind's effect on the earth.
As Kuwait was invaded by Hussein in 1990, and became a war zone between Iraq and the United States. After it's seven month long occupation came to an end, the Iraqi forces set ablaze to around 773 oil wells during their retreat, creating an environmental catastrophe.
It is a devastating example of mankinds effects on the planet, and the waste we create, in every sense of the word.
This was Salgado's favourite shot he took in his time out there. It is of two workers attempting to cap a well, they are completely covered in oil which makes them appear statuesque in the light.
The dehumanisation of this piece is what I find most striking, as these men are completely submerged in the environmental chaos in which they are battling, they become part of the landscape, through this oil that smothers everything.
The idea to use the oil as a metaphor came to me looking at this photograph, as it has consumed these men into the chaos, it is a poignant symbol for our effects as a species on the environment.
Riverside
I followed a footpath along the river Medway to experiment with what I could find along it relating to this idea of waste. With how far back the tide retreats the first thing I noticed was the endless 'sludge' along the coast, where the shallow river reveals what people chuck into it. I framed with horizon looking down at this sludge coast, and tried to create something that looked similar to the endless shiny black scenes from Sebastio Salgado's work, and make the river look like an endless see of oil and filth.
As much as I like the aesthetics of this, upon reflection, it is not the idea I have stuck in my mind for this, and I would rather attempt to create this idea of destruction as a result of mankind's actions, as a pose to simply a visual metaphor.
More than rubbish there appeared to be a lot of abandoned boats, I particularly liked this one as it had deteriorated to such an extent that appeared more like skeletal remains that an old boat.
I got as close as I could hopping along rocks for this shot, I framed it with a factory in the background to try a comment on industrialisation and pollution, but once I looked at the photo I also decided to crop it and blow it up to see what just the skeletal boat would look like. It is a concept I quite like as it unifies the mechanical with the organic with this skeletal like quality. It shows a decomposition with our creations, and unifies it with nature as well, much like Pieter Hugo's computer keyboard shot.
I kept jumping down as close to the river's edge, or rather the edge of the sludge wasteland, to see what rubbish I could find. At first I liked the colours standing out with the green fence and the red gift bow, as they stood out as unnatural amongst the rocks and moss.
I decided to experiment more with the abandoned boats, using larger scale landscape shots. I wanted to use this murky sludge landscaped and the abandoned boats to shift the look of the river Medway, into this original idea of the 'post-apocalyptic'. What the land will look like after our destruction.
If I were to continue this idea I would like to get as accurate horizon lines as possible across all three so that they may be displayed in a row, all fairly matching up to depict a pan shot of a barren landscape.
As much as I liked these photos of the waste landscape, it did not feel as though it was enough. They were simply shots alongside Riverside park, and as much as I tried to push contrasts and to catch the tide when it was as far out as possible, this idea of the waste landscape was not coming across how I wanted, as I would return when the tide was in, and it was a completely different and more pleasant landscape, and I did not want to falsify or force these landscapes, I wanted to find an actual example of our impact.
A word has kept coming up in this project for my idea, which is abandonment, it is an idea I really want to focus on, however these boats do not show it with as much impact as I would like, but they do strike me with the word 'abandonment'.
As I walked up and down Riverside I saw glimpses of an old smashed in building behind a fence and some bushes, with the letters M R S in rusted iron on the building side. After spotting this building each time I went looking down the river I started to think of the idea of the abandoned building.
The building is man's stamp on the natural world, they are the signs of our nesting grounds, our hives. If these buildings go without human contact for a while nature begins to take over again in many ways. The place rusts and decays and the absence of human presence is visually incredibly striking and clear.
Eugene Richards
Eugene Richards spent some time photographing in Corinth, North Dakota. Corinth is a town that once had roughly 300 people residing there, that over time became a ghost town, it was abandoned by almost all it's residents and the buildings left behind, vacant.
Eugene Richards describes his abandoned as more spiritual than churches. The above photograph was taken in 2006, in temperatures 30 degrees below 0.
Richards later found the owner of this bed, was the mother of a Maureen Wisdahl, Maureen is one of the only remaining residents of Corinth with her husband. Richards found that her mother died in this bed which made it all the more spiritual to Richards.
This documentary style photography captures vacancy in this room, a simply plain bed, next to a broken window with snow spilling onto it. It is very simplistic, with the bare minimum in view, but from the obvious abandonment we begin to wonder who's bed was this? What kind of person where they? what role in their life did this room play?
This is another image from Eugene Richards' "The Blue Room", it looks at the instability of this in-between of man and nature over his travels through rural America. The dead animal acting in an incredibly harsh contrast to the abandoned house in its colour and texture, however the two are one and the same, in that both have died and been abandoned by the world to rot.
Alexander Apostol
Alexander Apostol made a series called 'Skeleton Coast' on the island of Margarita. By the late 80's the island soared in tourism in Venezuela, it developed a real estate boom alongside this in hotels and leisure centres. During the early 90's however it suffered an economic crash, which resulted in many of these structures being abandoned mid construction along the beaches.
These images gives a tremendous sense of both loss, and loss of life to these buildings. As a pose to buildings built, abandoned and left to rot, these where abandoned mid construction, leaving only their skeletal structures behind, as if it is a skeleton. This creates an incredible contrast of emotion towards this image, as it is only a skeleton left, it is quite a dead subject and empty, however in appearing like a literal skeleton, we do not see a depressed rotting outer shell to the building, and we can imagine it's original 'skin' and how it's skin looked when it was alive. However remembering that these buildings never where alive, it creates a brilliant complexity to this image and how we interpret the buildings, as they, at a glance, could even look mid construction, as if the area was still in it's boom period creating a facade over the real depressions the island actually feels.
Manit Sriwanichpoom
These are from Sriwanichpoom's series, Dream Interruptus (2000) his statement on the series was:
'Dream: of upgrading the nation's status to a NIC - Newly Industrialised Country. Not through hard work but stock market and real estate speculation.
Not towards democratic maturity but all for concrete development. Highrises shoot up reaching for the sky. Circa 1985-1997
Interruptus: The bubble burst in 1997. Money from nothing, goes back to nothing. Not enough left even to finish the skyscrapers.
The city's full of graveyards, half-finished buildings hulking in their own shadow; empty shells and ruins left from a global economic war.'
These skeletal half finished skyscrapers serve as a reminder of the negative effects of globalisation in Thailand, particularly Sriwanichpoom's quote of "money from nothing, goes back to nothing", which could not be a more poignant statement about the modern economy and the state we are in now as a world.
These pictures are of a very high contrast to the point where parts are consumed in blackness. This extreme tonal range outlines the skeletal frame very harshly, and we are forced to see these as negative, dark almost monolithic structures.
Simon Norfolk
Simon Norfolk claims his work documents an international "military sublime". His photographs depict half-collapsed buildings, cinemas, and abandoned urban ruins, in places including Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He looks at mostly the distant landscapes of modern warfare but also the sterile, climate- controlled rooms of military command centres, and the giant supercomputers that simulate nuclear warheads.
He struggles to identify how we war, and the need to fight war, as many of the spaces we occupy and the technology we use are created by military conflict.
The colours he gets from his photographs are quite warm, and contain a sense of light within this, they are at the dawn and dusk of something of grand scale, which is reflected by the grand landscapes he shows.
Matthews Equestrian Centre
The building I spotted along riverside was called Matthews Equestrian Centre, it used to be an international horse riding grounds built in the early 80s by a local business man and 70s wrestling champion Tony Rocco. The centre was named after Tony Rocco's son Matthew, who apparently died at a very young age of Leukaemia, however exact details are hard to find. It hosted around half dozen major international horse riding championships, however Medway council did not, at the time, approve of this centre. There where concerns about the full planning permission, as apparently it had been built without any to begin with, and also a main concern from the council was the lack of a decent access road to such a centre that was to play host to such large events. Eventually the centre ran out of money pursuing the full permission and it was abandoned in 1986, Tony Rocco refused to pay for it to be demolished himself, and the council never bothered either, ironically in the early 90s the access road was built anyway for other purposes and the centre would have been potentially a success.
Much later in 2009 a pair of 14 year olds broke into the centre and set a fire to the place, destroying a main section of the centre and collapsing that portions roof.
To this day the place remains abandoned and forgotten about.
These are some preliminary digital shots I took up exploring the Equestrian centre.
These couple of outside shots show the desolate old equestrian centre, the thirds shot is a little closer in, there the roof collapsed in one of it's adjoining buildings.
I did not have a clear idea of how to present this building yet, or even if I would, so I merely explored and 'snapped' if something intrigued me. The first thing I wanted to document in this building was the 'overgrown', where it had been abandoned for so long that plants began consuming it. All of the plants however, where dead, many not naturally growing, but cut, destroyed and dumped over it when trees had been trimmed on neighbouring properties, so the entire building looked dead.
I did a full walk around the buildings perimeter on this visit, to see what I presume was a secondary entrance to the main reception, as these walkways extended from the adjacent field. I photographed it for the element of the 'dead', as again the walkways where blocked with cut down and destroyed trees, and so all was cut short, and dead.
I climbed a fence to reach the main doors where the horses would enter and exit the main complex and go into, what I assume, was the performance fields.
I wanted to capture these cement blocks that barred the entrance, with their rough spray paint of 'Danger Keep Out'. It intrigued me as to what was inside this dead building, as these barricades make me think of horror films, particularly zombie horrors, where people accidently uncover some horrible creature.
Inside the place looked like a massive hangar, as it was an inside showroom as well, it had become a massive hangar, for dirt floor and decay.
The walls where covered in graffiti, from youths breaking in and exploring the place. It had lost it's value and its purpose, it was dead and decayed, with the walls marred and painted over.
After a tutorial I was advised that I had gotten lost in my location, and had forgotten my projects intent and message, which was very true in my photos.
I looked at the graffiti and colour within this 'hangar' and merely documented those as I did not expect to find them there, I forgot my intent in my aesthetics.
Donovan Wylie
In his series titled 'Maze' Donovan Wylie looked at the Maze Prison in Belfast, when it was decommissioned in 2003. It was a prison where Paramilitary prisoners of both sides of Ireland's conflict where incarcerated in 'the Maze'. They where sorted into H Blocks, depending on their affiliation. It is the prison where Blanket and Dirty Protests of the late 1970s and the 1981 Hunger Strikes took place.
Donovan Wylie describes how he interpreted the place photographically in saying:
"The trick of the project was to try to understand the psychology of it. The building is a hybrid between a civilian prison and a military prison, but the whole thing is a machine and every part of it is a component and it all works together. Once you understand it as a machine, you can desconstruct it as a machine, photographically. Then you fully understadn the shape of it, why it doesn't have any steps, why there are so many layers to it, why it is so uniform."
Looking at his photographs there is something incredibly uniform about them. He uses very overcast natural lighting, along with very desaturated film to create these soul less and dead images. He photographs the decommissioned prison, and what it is now perfectly, it is simply 'empty'. He also, as he states, very much looks at his photographic method for this as uniform and mechanical, for the type of prison that dehumanises it's prisoners, and runs like a well oiled military machine, he keeps he subtly changes his framing method and angle to suit which part of the 'machine' he focuses on.
Particularly looking at the fences, and the beds in the bedrooms, I notice these individual objects the most, and think of their original use and purpose, I imagine what they where like when this place was used, and it reinforces this dead emptiness throughout the series.
South African photographer Pieter Hugo's series 'Permanent Error' is a series of photographs around a Ghanian dumping ground for global electronic waste, this dumping ground for 'E-Waste' is home to many slums, with people that must traverse the dumping ground, damaging their health burning the techno-trash to harvest precious metals.
In recent years, our consumption of electronic goods has increased rapidly, and today's gadgets and goods become obsolete within merely a couple of years, creating around 50million metric tonnes of 'e-waste' a year.
Much of Hugo's work is done in Ghana, in the new global waste ground for discarded computers, games, mobile phones, printers etc.
Hugo's photographs show the slum-dwellers burning trash in this bleak landscape; the toxic fumes they create endanger both their own health and the environment in which they live, and keep their livestock, creating a lasting problem that produces a permanent error.
These photographs very much depict my 'post-apocalyptic wasteland', which I find really quite shocking, as we all have these notions of man's effect on the world and what will become of us due to our waste and global warming, but few people put serious thought to it. Even less people acknowledge or know of the extent of this damage, myself being one them found Hugo's work staggering in terms of the damage we have done already.
People shrug and adopt an 'out of sight out of mind' attitude towards this kind of thing, and many people that are proactive about these wastelands would focus on helping these people, stuck in these dumps.
Part of this commission requires our photographs to be taken locally, at first this seems rather belittling or irrelevant compared to the wastelands elsewhere in the world, but these wastelands are made because of where we are, our local areas.
Thinking locally of what effects Medway, what Medway generates, my first thoughts are drawn to the River Medway, as it has long been dubbed by locals as 'the river Mudway'.
Sebastiao Salgado
"Inside Kuwait was the sense of being in this huge theatre the size of the planet, with these oil wells burning all around. Sometimes you would go two or three days without any sunlight getting through the vast clouds of black smoke, then suddenly the sky would open."
Sebastiao Salgado did a series of photographs, mainly following some Canadian firefighters in Kuwait in 1991 just as the Gulf War ended. He followed these fire fighters in their plight against damaged and leaking oil wells all across Kuwait, many of which had been ignited.
This was an incredibly dangerous venture for both Salgado and all the fire fighters working there, as so much as a single spark from any tools would ignite them all. Salgado himself became completely immersed in the stories of these fire fighters struggling, he followed them very closely for many days.
Looking at the entire chain of events that led to these wells becoming damaged and spilling oil all across Kuwait, it could not have more relevance to looking at 'waste' and mankind's effect on the earth.
As Kuwait was invaded by Hussein in 1990, and became a war zone between Iraq and the United States. After it's seven month long occupation came to an end, the Iraqi forces set ablaze to around 773 oil wells during their retreat, creating an environmental catastrophe.
It is a devastating example of mankinds effects on the planet, and the waste we create, in every sense of the word.
This was Salgado's favourite shot he took in his time out there. It is of two workers attempting to cap a well, they are completely covered in oil which makes them appear statuesque in the light.
The dehumanisation of this piece is what I find most striking, as these men are completely submerged in the environmental chaos in which they are battling, they become part of the landscape, through this oil that smothers everything.
The idea to use the oil as a metaphor came to me looking at this photograph, as it has consumed these men into the chaos, it is a poignant symbol for our effects as a species on the environment.
Riverside
I followed a footpath along the river Medway to experiment with what I could find along it relating to this idea of waste. With how far back the tide retreats the first thing I noticed was the endless 'sludge' along the coast, where the shallow river reveals what people chuck into it. I framed with horizon looking down at this sludge coast, and tried to create something that looked similar to the endless shiny black scenes from Sebastio Salgado's work, and make the river look like an endless see of oil and filth.
As much as I like the aesthetics of this, upon reflection, it is not the idea I have stuck in my mind for this, and I would rather attempt to create this idea of destruction as a result of mankind's actions, as a pose to simply a visual metaphor.
I got as close as I could hopping along rocks for this shot, I framed it with a factory in the background to try a comment on industrialisation and pollution, but once I looked at the photo I also decided to crop it and blow it up to see what just the skeletal boat would look like. It is a concept I quite like as it unifies the mechanical with the organic with this skeletal like quality. It shows a decomposition with our creations, and unifies it with nature as well, much like Pieter Hugo's computer keyboard shot.
I decided to experiment more with the abandoned boats, using larger scale landscape shots. I wanted to use this murky sludge landscaped and the abandoned boats to shift the look of the river Medway, into this original idea of the 'post-apocalyptic'. What the land will look like after our destruction.
If I were to continue this idea I would like to get as accurate horizon lines as possible across all three so that they may be displayed in a row, all fairly matching up to depict a pan shot of a barren landscape.
As much as I liked these photos of the waste landscape, it did not feel as though it was enough. They were simply shots alongside Riverside park, and as much as I tried to push contrasts and to catch the tide when it was as far out as possible, this idea of the waste landscape was not coming across how I wanted, as I would return when the tide was in, and it was a completely different and more pleasant landscape, and I did not want to falsify or force these landscapes, I wanted to find an actual example of our impact.
A word has kept coming up in this project for my idea, which is abandonment, it is an idea I really want to focus on, however these boats do not show it with as much impact as I would like, but they do strike me with the word 'abandonment'.
As I walked up and down Riverside I saw glimpses of an old smashed in building behind a fence and some bushes, with the letters M R S in rusted iron on the building side. After spotting this building each time I went looking down the river I started to think of the idea of the abandoned building.
The building is man's stamp on the natural world, they are the signs of our nesting grounds, our hives. If these buildings go without human contact for a while nature begins to take over again in many ways. The place rusts and decays and the absence of human presence is visually incredibly striking and clear.
Eugene Richards
Eugene Richards spent some time photographing in Corinth, North Dakota. Corinth is a town that once had roughly 300 people residing there, that over time became a ghost town, it was abandoned by almost all it's residents and the buildings left behind, vacant.
Eugene Richards describes his abandoned as more spiritual than churches. The above photograph was taken in 2006, in temperatures 30 degrees below 0.
Richards later found the owner of this bed, was the mother of a Maureen Wisdahl, Maureen is one of the only remaining residents of Corinth with her husband. Richards found that her mother died in this bed which made it all the more spiritual to Richards.
This documentary style photography captures vacancy in this room, a simply plain bed, next to a broken window with snow spilling onto it. It is very simplistic, with the bare minimum in view, but from the obvious abandonment we begin to wonder who's bed was this? What kind of person where they? what role in their life did this room play?
Alexander Apostol
Alexander Apostol made a series called 'Skeleton Coast' on the island of Margarita. By the late 80's the island soared in tourism in Venezuela, it developed a real estate boom alongside this in hotels and leisure centres. During the early 90's however it suffered an economic crash, which resulted in many of these structures being abandoned mid construction along the beaches.
These images gives a tremendous sense of both loss, and loss of life to these buildings. As a pose to buildings built, abandoned and left to rot, these where abandoned mid construction, leaving only their skeletal structures behind, as if it is a skeleton. This creates an incredible contrast of emotion towards this image, as it is only a skeleton left, it is quite a dead subject and empty, however in appearing like a literal skeleton, we do not see a depressed rotting outer shell to the building, and we can imagine it's original 'skin' and how it's skin looked when it was alive. However remembering that these buildings never where alive, it creates a brilliant complexity to this image and how we interpret the buildings, as they, at a glance, could even look mid construction, as if the area was still in it's boom period creating a facade over the real depressions the island actually feels.
Manit Sriwanichpoom
These are from Sriwanichpoom's series, Dream Interruptus (2000) his statement on the series was:
'Dream: of upgrading the nation's status to a NIC - Newly Industrialised Country. Not through hard work but stock market and real estate speculation.
Not towards democratic maturity but all for concrete development. Highrises shoot up reaching for the sky. Circa 1985-1997
Interruptus: The bubble burst in 1997. Money from nothing, goes back to nothing. Not enough left even to finish the skyscrapers.
The city's full of graveyards, half-finished buildings hulking in their own shadow; empty shells and ruins left from a global economic war.'
These skeletal half finished skyscrapers serve as a reminder of the negative effects of globalisation in Thailand, particularly Sriwanichpoom's quote of "money from nothing, goes back to nothing", which could not be a more poignant statement about the modern economy and the state we are in now as a world.
These pictures are of a very high contrast to the point where parts are consumed in blackness. This extreme tonal range outlines the skeletal frame very harshly, and we are forced to see these as negative, dark almost monolithic structures.
Simon Norfolk
Simon Norfolk claims his work documents an international "military sublime". His photographs depict half-collapsed buildings, cinemas, and abandoned urban ruins, in places including Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He looks at mostly the distant landscapes of modern warfare but also the sterile, climate- controlled rooms of military command centres, and the giant supercomputers that simulate nuclear warheads.
He struggles to identify how we war, and the need to fight war, as many of the spaces we occupy and the technology we use are created by military conflict.
The colours he gets from his photographs are quite warm, and contain a sense of light within this, they are at the dawn and dusk of something of grand scale, which is reflected by the grand landscapes he shows.
Matthews Equestrian Centre
The building I spotted along riverside was called Matthews Equestrian Centre, it used to be an international horse riding grounds built in the early 80s by a local business man and 70s wrestling champion Tony Rocco. The centre was named after Tony Rocco's son Matthew, who apparently died at a very young age of Leukaemia, however exact details are hard to find. It hosted around half dozen major international horse riding championships, however Medway council did not, at the time, approve of this centre. There where concerns about the full planning permission, as apparently it had been built without any to begin with, and also a main concern from the council was the lack of a decent access road to such a centre that was to play host to such large events. Eventually the centre ran out of money pursuing the full permission and it was abandoned in 1986, Tony Rocco refused to pay for it to be demolished himself, and the council never bothered either, ironically in the early 90s the access road was built anyway for other purposes and the centre would have been potentially a success.
Much later in 2009 a pair of 14 year olds broke into the centre and set a fire to the place, destroying a main section of the centre and collapsing that portions roof.
To this day the place remains abandoned and forgotten about.
These are some preliminary digital shots I took up exploring the Equestrian centre.
These couple of outside shots show the desolate old equestrian centre, the thirds shot is a little closer in, there the roof collapsed in one of it's adjoining buildings.
I did not have a clear idea of how to present this building yet, or even if I would, so I merely explored and 'snapped' if something intrigued me. The first thing I wanted to document in this building was the 'overgrown', where it had been abandoned for so long that plants began consuming it. All of the plants however, where dead, many not naturally growing, but cut, destroyed and dumped over it when trees had been trimmed on neighbouring properties, so the entire building looked dead.
I did a full walk around the buildings perimeter on this visit, to see what I presume was a secondary entrance to the main reception, as these walkways extended from the adjacent field. I photographed it for the element of the 'dead', as again the walkways where blocked with cut down and destroyed trees, and so all was cut short, and dead.
I climbed a fence to reach the main doors where the horses would enter and exit the main complex and go into, what I assume, was the performance fields.
I wanted to capture these cement blocks that barred the entrance, with their rough spray paint of 'Danger Keep Out'. It intrigued me as to what was inside this dead building, as these barricades make me think of horror films, particularly zombie horrors, where people accidently uncover some horrible creature.
The walls where covered in graffiti, from youths breaking in and exploring the place. It had lost it's value and its purpose, it was dead and decayed, with the walls marred and painted over.
After a tutorial I was advised that I had gotten lost in my location, and had forgotten my projects intent and message, which was very true in my photos.
I looked at the graffiti and colour within this 'hangar' and merely documented those as I did not expect to find them there, I forgot my intent in my aesthetics.
Donovan Wylie
In his series titled 'Maze' Donovan Wylie looked at the Maze Prison in Belfast, when it was decommissioned in 2003. It was a prison where Paramilitary prisoners of both sides of Ireland's conflict where incarcerated in 'the Maze'. They where sorted into H Blocks, depending on their affiliation. It is the prison where Blanket and Dirty Protests of the late 1970s and the 1981 Hunger Strikes took place.
Donovan Wylie describes how he interpreted the place photographically in saying:
"The trick of the project was to try to understand the psychology of it. The building is a hybrid between a civilian prison and a military prison, but the whole thing is a machine and every part of it is a component and it all works together. Once you understand it as a machine, you can desconstruct it as a machine, photographically. Then you fully understadn the shape of it, why it doesn't have any steps, why there are so many layers to it, why it is so uniform."
Looking at his photographs there is something incredibly uniform about them. He uses very overcast natural lighting, along with very desaturated film to create these soul less and dead images. He photographs the decommissioned prison, and what it is now perfectly, it is simply 'empty'. He also, as he states, very much looks at his photographic method for this as uniform and mechanical, for the type of prison that dehumanises it's prisoners, and runs like a well oiled military machine, he keeps he subtly changes his framing method and angle to suit which part of the 'machine' he focuses on.
Particularly looking at the fences, and the beds in the bedrooms, I notice these individual objects the most, and think of their original use and purpose, I imagine what they where like when this place was used, and it reinforces this dead emptiness throughout the series.
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