Prior to the autumn of 2015 I had been photographing almost exclusively in and around the Peak District, primarily focusing on landscape as a temporary home and what the implications of this were. I only ever thought of this as a year long project and by this time I had reached a point where I considered the series to be a complete set of images in and of itself. For me the emotional thought process always dictates the length of any photographic project. Seeing a set of photographs within a defined framework self evidently sets its perimeters. I should make it clear at this point that I always work between series of images and am not fundamentally attached to photography as a single frame art form.
The decision I made next however has had far reaching implications on my practice as a landscape photographer, in ways I could not have predicted nor fought against. Prior to and during the peaks series I had already been developing the idea of 'memory walks' and I wanted to take this idea a step further in a new body of work. So with this in mind I decided to return to the landscapes of my early childhood in the heart of the South Yorkshire coalfields. During the 1970's my father had decided to take the family away from the mining industry to begin a new life on the East coast, he later explained the logic of this decision as a two fold strategy. Firstly he didn't want my brother and I to work down the pit and secondly, he believed that the coal industry didn't have a future. My father had trained as a gas pipe fitter and the sustainability of gas both as an industry and resource had at that time been promoted as a cheap and limitless alternative to coal. My initial intention in the series was to return to the family home of childhood and retrace this migratory impulse back to the east coast. In other words, as I suggested in the introduction, to create a series within a clearly defined and structurally limited narrative framework. As I shall discuss in some detail, the series didn't turn out as I had expected. What I had previously considered as the basic structural principles of my practice has to some extent through this series become destabilised as I shall explain below.
Both my paternal and maternal grandfathers had been coal miners and although they lived and worked less than five miles apart the remembered landscapes seemed almost diametrically opposed, one backing onto semi rural agricultural open space, the other spewing out a perpetual blanket of chocking sulphur and soot, black and orange, like a living version of Dante's inferno. Of course the political and personal machinations of several decades had intervened and my interest was to try and see how these internalised early landscapes and the intervention of time might marry as a set of images. I imagined it as if taking two maps of the same region from different time periods and placing one over one another then tracing the contoured differences and similarities.Somebody recently asked me why there aren't any people in these landscapes, I answered by saying 'There are, its just that they're not there just now'. The lag between what we imagine and what reality presents us with holds infinite truths for a photographer. On returning to these landscapes after some thirty years hiatus what disconcerted me most however was not the extent of their transformation but the management and manifestation of these changes. Time in the photographic sense of course is not linear and the interweaving of personal, geopolitical and collective memory is always going to experience this lag as an absence. How could anyone reasonably expect to photograph what is not there? During my time photographing the peaks I had been developing a theory of temporary habitation as a series of markers, booths, signs or indices of safety or shelter. Yet what struck me immediately about the ex-industrial sites was that the epistemological criteria I'd been working on for the peak district didn't fit the actuality of the industrial South Yorkshire region. I want to use the reminder of my time here today to expand what these differences are and how photography might go some way to capturing the differences of this lack.
In either instance, whether it is on the beautiful isolation of the peaks or in the often semi-feral post industrial coalfields the need to name, catalogue, differentiate or map seems a primary unit of impulse for experiencing a landscape beyond its ad hoc aesthetic. Collective lore, ecological history, differentiating between seasonal, regional, imported or indigenous detail all add to our understanding of place as a meaningful encounter. The categorical imperative however has its limits in so much as it can only ever evaluate that which it chooses to include. There is no universal truth for that which has been enclosed, excluded, marginalised or erased. To what extent a priori knowledge of a landscape adds or detracts from our understanding of it has become a fundamental and central question to my practice as a photographer. My reluctance to name the locations of the photographs in 'Recovered Landscapes' are numerous and varied. However it is worth highlighting some of the rationale behind my thought processes here. My decision to name or not name these landscapes has wavered wildly during their production. If I tell you one of these early landscapes overlooked Orgreave, the dilemma might became apparent. Like the majority of people from the region and beyond, my thoughts on Orgreave are inexorably bound to a collective memory. The name itself so is synonymous with a certain point in recent history that it is almost impossible to evoke is name without opening the implications that surround it. It became almost immediately apparent that separating personal, political, ecological or aesthetic criteria was going to be problematic to say the least. I'm not going to recall all the various machinations and opinion mongering that has series has fostered in the interim period, but rather discuss it within a larger context of landscape and memory.
I'm not really interested in nostalgia nor the heritage industry, but what a site discloses or more often conceals is an invariable part of my interest in one particular place over another. Undoubtedly the collapse and dismantling of the region's industrial past has brought with it many ecological benefits, the Dearne Valley and Old Moor regions for example have become havens for the return of multifarious wildlife and fauna. To categorize these sites as concomitant to the leisure industries would be partly to misconstrue their positive effect on the region. But returning to Orgreave my experience wasn't one of symbiosis or adaptation but of alienation and simmering discontent. The treatment and representation of any landscape that holds such huge social and political significance is precarious at best and done without due care or consultation its underlying principles may in the long term be its undoing. What I'm going to suggest next may prickle some of you but please don't misconstrue what I am saying as a direct comparison of fundamentally incomparable historical events. However as a means to discuss the framework for thinking about landscape management and its consequences I think what I aim to discuss here holds an analogous value worth considering. That is of course if we still consider analogy a valid cultural framework within the currant climate.
The reaction and command to news that the allies were about to liberate the Nazi death camps was meet with a final and arguably pre-planned singular action- to erase any or all traces of what had existed there. This is usually taken as a sign of cowardice, as an evidential embarrassment of systematic atrocity. I would argue however that this act has something deeper at its core, that it wasn't just an attempt to hide a crime but rather a systematic programme to destroy the final site of mourning for European Jewry. The Nazis must have understood that Jewish persistence partly existed because its values subsist even through temporality as an ideologue of community, that despite all its efforts to dehumanise a whole race, the notion of community still held fast even at it very base. The Nazis not only sought the destruction of the physical manifestations of collective presence but also to eradicate the need to site its passing. I used to wonder about the ethical validity of visiting Auschwitz, that it was simply a morbid kind of curiosity that drew people to it. I have subsequently come to revise this position. The need to create communal sites for grief and loss is paramount to any sense of reconciliation with collective trauma.
This might also apply to much smaller scale grief, for example, you can often see roadside memorials to accidents, bouquets fastened to lampposts, messages of condolence, vigils, locks on bridges, teddybears. These are not located at the graveside but at the place were tragedy or love happened. They are what might be described as an unofficial mourning. The expression of loss and the location of its manifestations are interlinked in a way that imbues certain places with an almost unbearable yet necessary superabundance. But let me clear here, the expression of grief is site specific and not a universal indicator of its acknowledgement.
Returning again to Orgreave, the problem of representation becomes one of photographing what is not there. The unresolved issues that surround the evident and systematic brutality of the 1984 miners strike remain over the place and its people like a fug. Now renamed benignly and generically as Waverley, the regeneration of the area is undercut by disenfranchisement and anger. Hence my title for the series as a whole Re-covered Landscapes takes on its double edged meaning. Half business park and new housing, half green space, the only real palpable sign of its troubled past is in the absence of its recognition. The commonality of sites where unaccounted, unsignified or unresolved events have taken place often lends an air of melancholy to a particular place. Sometimes the inability to lay a landscape to rest has much darker implications. One only has to think of Saddleworth moor and the impossibility of freeing it of its grief is all too apparent. A strand of unofficial and unsettled Englishness marks part of the landscape tradition across many different genres and periods. You can sense it across work as varied in time and materiality as George Shaw's Tile Estate paintings through to John Clare's heartbreaking dislocation in poetry. Philip Larkin describes it beautifully in the ironically titled Here:
Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Here landscape becomes not so much the physical manifestation of loss as suggested by the sublime but a non-representational field, a sublimation of meaning. It could be argued that art might serve a similar purpose in this instance as those roadside memorials. That is to unofficially mark the passing of something at the scene of its occurrence-not to dig through its details toward objective truth or evidence but as an attempt to capture and lay to rest what is now no longer simply physically fixed to its location but permanently always there just on the very edge of seeing or hearing. So to return to my original framework- what I have attempted to capture no longer holds its truth in being there as witness to the decisive moment but rather in the absence held between not being there and being nowhere, like being someone else, somewhere else.
The full series of Re-covered Landscapes can be viewed here