My River Murray project can be understood as an aesthetic of catastrophe- tradition. Though this process is happening over a longer time frame, than say Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, what is happening in the lower lakes and the Coorong is a catastrophe:

"wet" lands, originally uploaded by poodly.

How does a photographer represent a catastrophe after the failure of culture to prevent the catastrophe? Referring to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans Aric Mayer says:

Across the media landscape, the means of visually depicting the storm break down into two basic aesthetic positions. One is the traditional documentary realism, which works to focus on the humanitarian issues to evoke a kind of empathy in the viewer by depicting suffering and deprivation. The other depicts the landscape to point to the scale of the destruction in an effort to generate an experience of the breadth of the event.

Mayer in this section of a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that he read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University says:

Central to the practice of making pictures of disaster, suffering, catastrophe and the large events of our time is photography’s unique relationship to the real. One of the products of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, and the concurrent advances in science, is the idea that there is a real world, one that is measurable in distinct times and places. It is empirical and is distinguished by facts and data. This real world also exists separately from the mythic or the general. Photography plays a unique role in bridging these two worlds, trading in both and using one to exert pressure on the other. At no other time in history have we so easily and so convincingly been able to exchange the mythic for the real and back again.

I also have problems with 'mythic' here as well. What does that refer to in the context of the River Murray--- the myth making the desert bloom? The myth of farmers as the embodiment of the Anzac backbone of the nation? Photography is conversation among photographers and others across the national culture - a conversation that does not rely solely on textless images--- about the ecological destruction of the Murray-Darling Basin.

Thirdly, an aspect of the catastrophe of of New Orleans and the Murray Darling Basin is that they cannot be seen as a temporary glitch in an otherwise progressive culture and that life could go on as normal. The culture failed----to ensure the dykes could protect New Orleans and to reduce the over-allocation of water licences for irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin. The fact that a century or more of Enlightenment culture failed to prevent the forces of destruction is an indictment of that culture that stands against attempts to normalise the past and forget the horror. Any notions of simply moving on after the catastrophe are delusory, whilst those who call for the resurrection of this culpable ‘culture’ become inextricably implicated.

Comments

Posted by: Pam | July 1, 2009 4:03 PM