This issue of Photography & Culture looks at location and context, as seen through photography from Andreas Gursky (in Christopher Williams-Wynn’s paper) to Esko Männikkö (in Paul Wilson’s essay). These two photographers have very much shaped our ideas of what contemporary photography should look like – Gursky’s mammoth set pieces and massed people, Männikkö’s intimate portraits of isolated men in a remote part of northern Europe. Williams-Wynn and Wilson unpick the work of these two influential photographers carefully, and although their works have been much written about over the last two decades, provide new contexts in which to consider them.
Significant too in shaping our worldview is the work of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, a prodigious archivist of place and object. The Stanley Kubrick Archive was explored by Caterina Martino, while working for a year at the London College of Communication as part of her PhD studies at the University of Calabria, Italy. Martino studies the color transparencies and filmstrips produced during the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey and her piece describes in detail the archival processes which she absorbed while working with these objects. Photographs like this create a liminal space for imagery – when all that seems real may not be so, and as images serve the monolith of the filmmaking process. In “Photography: The Abundant Art” the authors Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites argue that “photography enables a mode of enchanted seeing that offers a profound relationship with the world, and a model for democratic association on behalf of an abundant life for all.”
Location is central to the work of British photographer Dave Green, who, in the regular section “Portfolio” exhibits his photographs of the Devon coast, in southwest England. Green uses place to construct images of these lonely cave sites, and remarks that “these images give me solace as some of the places I find to photograph can certainly seem very remote, unseen by human eyes – unexplored.”
Ann Kroon’s short essay for the section “One Photograph” is a remarkable slice of autobiography, triggered by a bland picture postcard. Challenging the idea of Sweden as a modernist idyll, Kroon’s writing is about dysfunction, dirt and displacement, as she reflects on her early life as a child in the care of the state. Photographs, as we all know, trigger memories, catch us unawares, leave us gasping.
Ilaria Puri Purini’s essay about the dance photography of Charlotte Rudolph in her essay “Gret Palucca and Charlotte Rudolph: Promotional Strategies to Access Modernism” is a valuable and welcome contribution to our knowledge and understanding of this most neglected of photography’s manifestations. Photography & Culture has consistently explored the many and different histories of photography, which change and expand as new research is made, and Puri Purini has made an important contribution to our understanding of this photographer, and the world in which she operated.
Later this year, our Americas editor, Thy Phu will depart from Photography & Culture. Thy is a wonderful scholar and has been a tireless editor, and although being based in different countries meant our opportunities to meet were few and far between, we always looked forward to the annual summer meeting of the journal and its publishers in London, which Thy managed to attend almost every year. We will miss her. A new Americas editor will be appointed soon.