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December 19, 2006
This post is from an interview at BLDGBLOG with Simon Norfolk, which I came across from a link at South Seas Republic. The photographs fit right into the ruins/baroque aesthetics meme of the last few posts and open the meme into the landscape.
European art has a strong tradition for ruin and desolation that has no parallel in other cultures. Since the Renaissance, artists such as Claude Lorraine and Caspar David Friedrich have painted destroyed classical palaces and gothic churches, bathed in a fading golden twilight. These motifs symbolised that the greatest creations of civilisation--the Empires of Rome and Greece or the Catholic Church--even these have no permanence. Eventually, they too would crumble; vanquished by "barbarians" and vanishing into nature.
Simon Norfolk, A government building, from Afghanistan: chronotopia, 2001
Afghanistan is a place that displays the 'layeredness' of time---what Mikhail Bakhtin called a 'chronotope'. Simon says:
Afghanistan is unlike Sarajevo or Kigali or any other war-ravaged landscape I have ever photographed. In Kabul in particular, the devastation has a bizarre layering; the different destructive eras lying on top of each other. I was reminded of the story of Schliemann's discovery of the remains of the classical city of Troy in the 1870s; digging down, he found 9 cities layered upon each other, each one in its turn rebuilt and destroyed. Walking a Kabul street can be like walking through a Museum of the Archaeology of War--different moments of destruction lie like sediment on top of each other.
The war in Afghanistan is now in its 24th year.
Simon Norfolk,Bullet scarred apartment building and shops, Kabul, from Afghanistan: chronotopia, 2001
Norfolk photographs with an old-fashioned 4 x 5” format field camera with slow shutter speeds.
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Hard to see this society getting going again. Beautiful, sad photographs.