Aestheticising the Post-Industrial Debris : Industrial Ruins in Contemporary British Landscape Photography

Representations of Post-Industrial Shanghai

“…On the one hand, these temporal sequences, as they stretch out in the subliminal landscapes of Burtynsky and Gursky, privilege the parts over the whole, reassembling them in stereotyped visualizations of post-colonized societies, rather than taking control away from expected visions of the industrial other. Documentary photography has transferred colonial and imperial ways of seeing the world to celebrate the benefits of the industrial landscape and to classify the industrialized other with a simplified picture of reality (Kolenda 2019). On the other hand, Burtynsky and Gursky's sublime ethnocentrism blends overpowering colours, which are profoundly altered by non-human forms of industrialization and essentially pose formal and conceptual questions of contemporary art photography: "Although remnants of materiality, of 'thing-ness', still adhere to it [the photo], its value is not in its being a thing, but in the information, it carries on its surface.…”

Ki te kapu o takau ringa - In the Hollow of my Hand: Wānanga based Photographic Approaches to Place Representation

“…Therefore, it has become harder to pin down photographic genres as photographers now work more fluidly constructing open imagery with multiple points of interpretation (Bright, 2011). In this way the contemporary photographer concerned with place and landscape has the option to move way from perpetuating objective traditions by critically disrupting key representational elements (Kolenda, 2019). These ideas are important as part of wider critical reflections on the limitations and implications of photographic modes of place representation and moving into a territory of multimodalities and meanings.…”

“…Portanto, ficou mais difícil definir os gêneros fotográficos, pois os fotógrafos agora trabalham de forma mais fluida, construindo imagens abertas com vários pontos de interpretação (Bright, 2011). Dessa forma, o fotógrafo contemporâneo que se preocupa com o lugar e a paisagem tem a opção de se afastar da perpetuação de tradições objetivas, interrompendo criticamente os principais elementos de representação (Kolenda, 2019). Essas ideias são importantes como parte de reflexões críticas mais amplas sobre as limitações e implicações dos modos fotográficos de representação de lugares e da mudança para um território de multimodalidades e significados.…”