John Yang & the island as boundary object: photography, marine light & spectralities of national feeling on Ile de Sein

Abstract

This paper explores a series of photographs taken on the Ile de Sein, a 1 km long island off the French Atlantic coast, by architect-photographer John Yang in 1960. Today, these photographs have developed a powerfully auratic life of their own, shaping affective understandings of the island through the multiple spectralities they awaken, thickened by the image’s (and place’s) continued existence in time. This photo-spectrality is underscored by the tendency for islands to serve either as places of loss and nostalgia (for instance, through cultural anxieties about postwar reconstruction and decolonization) or of dystopian visions (through fears about the Ile de Sein’s possible disappearance due to sea-level rise). A more-than-representational analysis suggests that Yang’s photographs’ contemporary affects can only be understood through an expanded concept of place in which material-environmental interactions infiltrate politics, society, and culture. The interplay between figural and metonymical presences in them simultaneously mediates a lifeworld of ‘islandness’ and broader instrumental and discursive histories through which the Finistere littoral has shaped the geographical narration of the French nation. The key to these non-terrecentric empathetic affects is constantly-shifting marine light, at once extra-discursive and atmospheric, and best captured by monochrome photography.

Keywords:

• climate change
• Finistere
• more-than-representational
• Photography
• spectrality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: Interpreting Visual Materials, 3rd ed. (London: Sage, 2011).

2. Peter Adey, ‘Air/Atmospheres of the Megacity’, Theory, Culture and Society, 30/7/8, 2013, pp. 291–308; here, p. 292.

3. The photographs are in fact a selection from a corpus of several dozen taken on Ile des Sein, the originals of which are held in the archives of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), University of Arizona. I am indebted to Naomi Yang for her permission to reproduce the photographs here, as well as to David Yang, for sharing invaluable family memories and personal letters pertaining to his father’s sojourn on the island.

4. Yang could have encountered this style of photography at the ‘Five French Photographer’ exhibition of 1951/2, or the Family of Man exhibition, organized by Edward Steichen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955.

5. See Peter Hamilton, ‘“A Poetry of the Streets?” Documenting Frenchness in an Era of Reconstruction: Humanist Photography 1935–1960’, in Norman Buford (ed.), The Documentary Impulse in French Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 178–217.

6. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s term to describe ‘the essence, in … one single photograph, of some situation … in the process of unrolling … before my eyes’.

7. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 168.

8. Monica Takvam and Sam Vale, ‘Introduction to Nostalgias: Visualizing Longing’, Photography and Culture, 9/2, 2016, pp. 99–102.

9. Here, I use the term ‘place’ in a geographical sense, i.e., a spatial ‘structure of feeling’ through which individuals and groups define and orient themselves, conventionally associated with the (visible) material configurations and performances in a particular landscape or region, but which can never be disentangled from (invisible) narratives, discourses, and imaginaries.

10. See for instance John Wylie, ‘The Spectral Geographies of W.G. Sebald’, Cultural Geographies, 14, 2007, pp. 171–188.

11. Elizabeth Roberts, ‘Geography and the Visual Image: A Hauntological Approach’, Progress in Human Geography, 3/3, 2012, pp. 386–402.

12. Ian Thompson and Peter Howard, ‘Landscape and Photography’, in Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton, and Mick Atha (eds), The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 237–252; here, p. 239.

13. Justin Spinney, ‘A Place of Sense: A Kinaesthetic Ethnography of Cyclists on Mont Ventoux’, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 24, 2006, pp. 709–732.

14. Tania Rossetto, ‘Repeat Photography, Post-Phenomenology and “Being with” Through the Image’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geography, 44, 2019, pp. 125–140.

15. Peter Merriman, George Revill, Tim Cresswell, Hayden Lorimer, David Matless, Gillian Rose, and John Wylie, ‘Landscape, Mobility, Practice’, Social & Cultural Geography, 9/2, 2008, pp. 191–212; here, p. 203.

16. Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack, ‘Thinking with images in non-representational cities’, Area, 41/3, 2009, pp. 252–262; here, p. 253.

17. Ondine Park, Tonya K. Davidson, and Rob Shields, ‘Introduction’, in Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park, and Rob Shields (eds), Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire and Hope (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), pp. 1–15.

18. Lynn Pearce, ‘“Driving-as-Event”: Re-thinking the Car Journey’, Mobilities, 12/4, 2017, pp. 585–597.

19. Park, Davidson, and Shields, ‘Introduction’.

20. Caitlin DeSilvey, ‘Copper Places: Affective Circuitries’, in Owain Jones and Joanne Garde-Hansen (eds), Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming (Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 45–57; here pp. 48–49.

21. Jacky Bowring, Nancy Vance, and Mick Abbott, ‘Between Seascape and Landscape: Experiencing the Liminal Zone of the Coast’, in Mike Brown and Kimberley Peters (eds), Living with the Sea: Knowledge, Awareness and Action (Boca Raton: Routledge, 2018), pp. 15–35; here, p. 16.

22. Ari J. Blatt, ‘Picturing a Nation of Local Places in the Observatoire photographique du paysage and France(s) territoire liquid’, in Ari J. Blatt and Edward Welch (eds), France in Flux: Space, Territory & Contemporary Culture (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), pp. 186–215. Because humanist photography is thought to have helped build a French national identity during the trente glorieuses (the decades of rapid economic growth in France, from the late 1940s to the late 1970s), these two absences could be seen as entangled. See Hamilton, ‘Poetry of the Streets’, pp. 182–83.

23. John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).

24. The political emergence of the modern nation-state during the nineteenth century discursively drew on this geographical reification of the way of life ordinary people construct for themselves under certain ecological, technological, and social conditions.

25. David Yang, personal communication with the author, 11 June, 2020.

26. Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart, ‘Doing Islandness: A Non-Representational Approach to an Island’s Sense of Place’, Cultural Geographies, 20/2, 2012, pp. 225–242.

27. See for instance Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Réalités, 134, March 1957.

28. Visiting the island in 2018, I found descendants of Yang’s subjects readily identified their relatives in his photographs.

29. In 1960, the island’s womenfolk still collected seaweed to fertilize the microfields in which they grew vegetables. These were enclosed and protected from the sea wind by walls created from stones collected from the island’s foreshore (see figure 5).

30. Vannini and Taggart, ‘Doing Islandness’, p. 238.

31. Anthropologist Tim Ingold uses the term ‘taskscape’ to describe the ‘processual unfolding of a total field of relations that cuts across the interface between organism and environment’. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology, 25/2, 1993, pp. 152–174.

32. Philip E. Steinberg, ‘Of Other Seas: Metaphors and Materialities in Maritime Regions’, Atlantic Studies, 10/2, 2013, pp. 156–169.

33. Dilip Da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

34. David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

35. Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul, Simon Gottschalk, and Toby Ellis-Newstead, ‘Making Sense of the Weather: Dwelling and Weathering on Canada’s Rain Coast’, Space and Culture, 15/4, 2012, pp. 361–380.

36. Letter, John Yang to Linda Gureasko (his future wife), 6 February 1960.

37. Justin Carville, ‘Lifeworlds at the Edge of Europe: Photography, Place and Ireland in the New Millennium’, Journal of European Studies, 47/4, 2017, pp. 426–446; here, p. 434.

38. Another way of describing this metonymical presence might be the ‘unconfigured experiences of places afforded those who spend time there — the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feels that constitute its specific ambience.’

39. Shanti Sumartojo, ‘Making Sense of Everyday Nationhood: Traces in the Experiential World’, in Michael Skey and Marco Antonsich (eds), Everyday Nationhood: Theorizing Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 197–214.

40. Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses (New York: Viking, 2021), p. 112.

41. See Melissa Miles, ‘Light, Nation, and Place in Australian photography’, Photography and Culture, 6/3, 2013, pp. 259–277.

42. Edward Eigen, ‘Subject to Circumstance: The Landscape of the French Lighthouse System’, in Jan Birksted (ed), Landscapes of Memory and Experience (London: Spon, 2000), pp. 87–104.

43. Jean-Yves Guiomar, ‘Vidal de la Blache’s Geography of France’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past: 11; Traditions, ed., Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans., Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 187–210.

44. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHPBAylfO6g. Accessed 28 November, 2022.

45. De Gaulle visited the island to unveil a monument to the Free French on 7 September 1960.

46. For example, Marine Le Pen’s attempt in 2020 to use the sixtieth anniversary of the 1940 exodus for a rally of the Front Nationale.

47. John Agnew, ‘Italy’s Island Other: Sicily’s History in the Modern Italian Body Politic’, Emergences, 10, 2000, pp. 301–311.

48. As opposed to oceanic islands. See Lindsay Bremner, ‘Thinking Architecture with an Indian Ocean Aquapelago’, GeoHumanities, 2/2, 2016, pp. 284–310; here, p. 286.

49. In sociological terms, a ‘boundary object’ is a phenomenon capable of being interpreted differently by different groups while still retaining enough immutable content to maintain integrity.

50. Annaig Oiry, ‘Vivre avec ou par le risque a l’ile de Sein?’, EchoGeo, 19, https://doi.org/10.4000/echogeo.12960; published online 10 Febuary, 2012, accessed 30 September, 2016.

51. See Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, ‘Some Islands Will Rise’, Resilience, 4/2–3, 2017, pp. 166–183.

52. Paraphrasing Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change’, Theory, Culture and Society, 27/2–3, 2010, pp. 73–99; here, pp. 73–74.

53. See, for instance, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/world/europe/french-islanders-face-rising-sea-levels.html; accessed 28 November, 2022.

54. Supposedly built below sea level, the city disappeared when the Devil destroyed the dam protecting it.

55. Blatt, ‘Picturing a Nation of Local Places’, p. 204.

56. ‘There is no order in my picture taking … I grab moments which … can be made most expressive within the confines of that [drawing of rectangular frame]. The miracle is that it takes something out of the world beyond recall, and gives it a life of its own’ (italics added). Letter by John Young to Linda Gureasko, 23 January, 1960.

57. Hamilton, ‘Poetry of the Streets’, p. 189.

58. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).