-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Published on 5/17/08
Sign up today!
One wouldn’t normally associate a Wheaten Terrier with unspeakable evil. But New Catalogue’s photographs of a dog led by two hikers; quiet mountain roads; and snow-covered rocks from the 2005 series “A. Hitler and D. Eckart: Obersaltzberg to Hoher Gall” focus precisely on something we cannot see. The images come from Berchtesgaden, a former Nazi resort in Bavaria, where Hitler bought a home in 1932 with royalties from Mein Kampf. Neo-Nazis still make pilgrimages to the site, even as the Bavarian government hastens to cover up its past with a wave of new construction. The spectacular Alpine views captured by New Catalogue (Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler) suggest that Berchtesgaden’s terrible connotations have already been forgotten: We may think that these images tell us everything about a place, but “Loaded Landscapes” demonstrates that their human element is both critical and elusive.
Like New Catalogue’s project, Joel Sternfeld’s photographs are incomplete without their accompanying text. Sternfeld’s matter-of-fact images of the parking lot where the Kent State shootings occurred, the intersection where Reginald Denny was beaten during the 1992 L.A. riots and other infamous locations bear no traces of their tragic history: It’s up to the viewer to remember. Other artists in the exhibition deliberately imbue their landscapes with menace. Alan Cohen’s 2001 “NOW” series depicts Cambodia’s “killing fields,” literally: Cohen pointed his camera at the ground where the Khmer Rouge murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in the 1970s. His black-and-white images are haunted by shadows of trees and the strange shapes of earth mounds covering mass graves.
Violence is also implicit in Simon Norfolk’s color photographs of the U.S.-Mexican border, which portray the desert between southern Arizona and Mexico as a floodlit nightmare world of blank metal fences. Questions about who owns our landscapes—and who has access to them—likewise shape the work of Israeli photographer Shai Kremer and Palestinian artist Ayreen Anastas. In Kremer’s Shooting Defense Wall, Gilon Neighborhood, Jerusalem (2004), two young men use a concrete military barrier as a private hangout, where they can smoke, drink and gaze out at the hills in apparent peace. Anastas’s video m* of Bethlehem (2003) takes the viewer through the ancient city as church bells ring in the background and the artist reads made-up definitions from an imaginary version of the OED: “Palestine” means, she says, “ ‘[to] remove, get rid of, do away with, cause to exist no longer.’ ”
Fictional places also make an appearance, challenging our assumptions about the reality of landscapes themselves. Some of the most chilling pictures in the exhibition are Paul Shambroom’s portraits from “Disaster City” in College Station, Texas, and “Terror Town,” in Playas, New Mexico—models set up to train employees of the Department of Homeland Security.
In the end, perhaps our interventions in the landscape—material, chemical and otherwise—won’t matter and all that will be left is a place without a caption. Atta Kim’s ON-AIR Project, DMZ Series … (2003) and The Central Front, 8 Hours (2004) portray the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea as a sea of lush green vegetation beneath a vaporous blue sky. The DMZ has become a thriving habitat for wild animals because humans are barred from the site. Kim’s photographs suggest that they will remain long after human struggles over the land have ceased.
“Loaded Landscapes” is at the Museum of Contemporary Photography through October 13.
Comment