164 | 2023

ANNIKA TOOTS

The Slow Memory of the Seas

The Object in Front of Your Eyes “
The climate crisis is—and is not at the same time—beyond us, within us, in between us, all within capitalism’s situated geohistories. To know and act upon these realities in radical fashion requires a revolution in our ways of seeing, knowing, and enacting the human place in the web of life.”¹

What we know and how we feel about it is deeply connected to the way we can visualize it, which in turn is connected to the way it is represented to us. To represent is to depict or describe the world around us in words, pictures, or sounds. Reading these words, pictures, and sounds creates a notion of something in our minds and our senses. Kristina Õllek’s art is deeply rooted in questions of representation in the digital age, but over the years, it has grown a material layer composed of seawater, limestone, metal, clay, bioplastic, sea salt crystals, fossils, and other related forms that tap into the matter(s) of desire, time, and the anthropocentric impact on our “blue marble.”

The artist’s ecological gaze opposes the overview effect established by the 1968 photograph Earthrise and the 1972 Blue Marble, which depict the Earth at a distance, from space, and are known as the environmentally most important and controversial photographs. The overview effect has been widely used in Anthropocene/environmental photography and has been criticized for amplifying the distance between humans and nature as well as representing the imperial gaze and planetary surveillance. In contrast to this, Kristina Õllek’s most recent photographic installations are focusing on bacteria and on thinking with organisms and inorganic matter of the seas—and thus implement the barely visible or unseen. Her creative work and research often tread the fine, almost invisible line of so-called reality and its representations, or to put it more simply, how we see and perceive the world around us, especially when it is mediated by various technological tools.

1 Jason W. Moore, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Marble: Capitalism, Nature, and the Promethean Gaze, from Mercator to the Space Age,” in Image Ecology, eds. Boaz Levin and Kathrin Schönegg, exh. cat. C/O Berlin Foundation (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2023), pp. 64–75, p. 73.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 164/2023, pp. 7–18.

KYVELI MAVROKORDOPOULOU

Catching a Breath and an Image

In the summer of 2021, while on a ferry to Athens, I was passing by the island of Euboea, where at that time wildfires were raging. Fueled by strong winds, the blaze burned for more than ten days. There were embers in the air—it was raining ash, grayish speckles blanketing the sea’s surface. Instinctively, I grabbed my phone to seize the eerie sight, but the camera could not capture it. The ethereal dust resisted visualization. What does such a non-image tell us about the ways climate phenomena can be visualized, I wondered? What do these fleeting, smoking remnants expose about what can and cannot enter the photographic frame?

Anaïs Tondeur’s capturing of similarly fleeting phenomena gestures toward how photographic engagement might help us to imagine the environment otherwise, visually and materially. At the foreground of her practice are elusive elements of the climate (but also of us), namely, radioactive traces, soot particles, waning plants, a prehistoric scent, human tears—all pointing to the intricate inextricability of our bodies and the world. And all encountered in sites of late industrialism: decaying infrastructures such as former photographic factory sites, nuclear exclusion zones, polluted skies, and planetary spaces where ruins are not inert, but alive with residues unexpectedly full of potential. It is through such places that Tondeur’s work breeds novel engagements, pointing to alternative forms of (toxic) relationalities and photographic materialities.

To make Carbon Black (2017–18), Tondeur chased toxic trouble in the air. In cooperation with a team of atmospheric scientists and through a carefully established protocol, she located floating particles of carbon black in the sky to then produce images of them, but also with them. An air pollutant and by-product of incomplete hydrocarbon combustion, carbon black’s pitch-black hue and powdery texture make it an excellent agent for pigments and printing inks. It breezes through the wind to places far away from where it was initially emitted. It can be found even in the Arctic, where it falls onto the ice, forming a thin black pellicle which attracts the sun rays, accelerating its melting. It also breezes through our bodies, since it can be ingested via inhalation—breathing.
The artist breathed the air on Scotland’s far-flung Fair Isle, where she followed particles of carbon black, initially emitted more than eight hundred miles away, with her camera. Taking “a portrait of the sky” each day while sharing her geographical coordinates with the scientific team, Tondeur traveled the path of the particles all the way back to their initial emission point of Folkestone, England.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 164/2023, pp. 19–30.

DUNCAN WOOLDRIDGE

Thresholds of the Unseen

In her book The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit recounts the pull of the north and south poles. She reminds us that extreme landscapes permit us to imagine alternative versions of the world. Appearing blank or empty, each pole is an ecology with a very different structure and balance, revealing intensities beyond first appearance. Solnit reminds us also that within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles we have to recalibrate our relationship to light: if all parts of the earth receive roughly the same amount of light across the year, they do so on different schedules. At the poles “there is the extravagance of places where summer hardly has darkness and winter hardly has light, as though the light were gambled away or drunk down all in one long exhilarated draught.”¹ Solnit recognizes an excess that goes beyond the assumption, founded in romantic literature, of stasis and emotional cool. Beyond appearance, the poles are not empty at all. In and around the ice is a laboratory for testing ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and knowing.

At the edges of a technical image, extremes of light and dark are also observed. Every photograph we make is bracketed by its monochrome extremities, one possible exposure of total darkness and another of overwhelming light. We rarely encounter these polarities, though they are always there, a condition of the medium’s possibilities. Between them lies a spectrum of appearances: though the automaticity of most of our photographic tools would lead us to believe there is only one correct exposure at the center, skilled image makers routinely make moves towards the photograph’s edges. Conditions of snow and ice force just such an adjustment, as the camera’s mechanical meter seeks the fill of a neutral gray. If conventional images privilege fullness, their experimental twin reveals surprising but significant deviations and new ways of seeing. At the beginning of photography’s formal history, Hippolyte Bayard’s Premier essais photosensibles (First Photosensitive Tests, 1839) or taches et traces (Stains and Marks), small abstract studies of photosensitivity cast into shadow by Daguerre and Arago’s triumphant presentation of the photograph’s descriptive possibilities, opened a world of possible images. Though they have only recently re-entered the narrative of photography’s beginnings, recovered by critics and curators to examine the medium’s unexplored possibilities, Bayard’s subtle and sometimes ghostly traces—exposure and light sensitivity tests, made visible by Bayard where they were concealed by Daguerre, constitute an important event recognizing the photograph as a material process of inquiry. They prompt us to be aware of the photographs’ multiplicities and many channels.

1 Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (London: Granta Books, 2014), p. 43.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 164/2023, pp. 31–42.

TACO HIDDE BAKKER

From the Ocean to the Darkroom

The following is a conversation between Claudia Rohrauer and myself, edited from a chat over Skype about Rohrauer’s artistic practice and our mutual interests. I first encountered her work in 2022, at a solo exhibition at Galerie Marenzi in Leibnitz, Austria. I was immediately struck by the experimental and inquisitive approach displayed in her photographic imagery, which also reflects on the conditions of its own mediality in manifold ways. Currently, Rohrauer conducts workshops on environment-friendly analogue photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna; she also experiments with the phytogram, a cameraless photographic image developed by using the chemical properties of plants (in the case of the project Algae Agent, 2023, displayed here, from algae).

CR Good evening from Vienna!
THB Good evening from rainy Amsterdam! :-)
CR Here it’s as hot as Prague, where I was dancing this weekend, but rain’s in the forecast.
THB How did the dancing go at the festival?
CR Dancing is always good for clearing the mind—I should be focused now.
THB For me, it’s swimming outdoors. Now that we’re on the subject, onward to swimming photographically in developer and other liquids. Let’s not, of course, forget theoretically swimming in ink and paper.
CR I just had a mental image that my darkroom work feels a bit like swimming, at least in the sense that I can watch over the prints floating in the trays.
THB A nice comparison. Also because in the deep waters of the darkroom, many operations boil down to intuition rather than knowledge (or following manuals).
CR Yes, sort of, but on the other hand, darkroom work is so much about control—about controlling the process, including the temperature and state of the chemicals.
THB I know that control is an important issue for many artists, but by embarking on adventurous darkroom practices, I guess you’re also occasionally surprised by unexpected, uncontrollable results?
CR I had this exchange the other day with the Swiss artist Corinne Futterlieb, with whom I share a room in the exhibition FOTOTECHNIKA III at the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel.¹ She also does analogue lab work, and we had a long conversation about the relation between having control over the process (the lab work requires to maintain a stable process) and the “wild element” that arises from the properties of the chemicals themselves. Things happen that you can’t control, which may lead to a problem that can also turn out to be inspirational, when you consider it artistically. By “control,” I really mean the lab process (which I’m involved with because I run the analogue lab at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna). Indeed, the unexpected and uncontrollable is essential for the artistic process and the work’s development. When you don’t do it on your own, in the darkroom, a part is missing.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 164/2023, pp. 43–54.