May 16, 2013
This photo of a detail of a landscape by Judith Crispin is an example of Australian Romanticism that has re- surged after modernism came to an end. The gloomy bush looks haunting rather haunted. It is the darkness, the ominous darkness lying behind it, the rocks and tree and the low light of the picture that contributes to this haunting.
The shift away from objective form enables individual subjectivity to be introduced into the landscape. The haunting then refers to individual experience within this kind of landscape. This, in turn, expresses the tension between familiarity and un-familiarity.
Judith Crispin, Egg, or Tree of the Stone, from the Ness series 2012
'Ness' is the Scottish word for lake. Or it is the Germanic word for promontory in Northern Europe. A promontory is a prominent mass of land that overlooks lower-lying land or a body of water --eg., a lake or seashore. In this case it may also be called a peninsula or headland. Most promontories either are formed from a hard ridge of rock that has resisted the erosive forces that have removed the softer rock to the sides of it, or are the high ground that remains between two river valleys where they form a confluence.
What emerges from Crispin's approach to picture making is a photography that expresses the feeling of the uncanny--an explicitly real emotion that is constituted aesthetically. For Freud the uncanny is a particular form of fear that is derived from the return of something repressed. The original emotion---it could be anger or anxiety--becomes becomes fear by means of repression and return.
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