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Overview

"The camera has the ability to be the harshest critic in depicting reality and the most sensitive in registering its beauty." Abdul-Jalil AI-Rashed

The concurrence of beauty and abjection in a photograph registers the pollution of ideas. Documentation flatly records the signs of industrial waste as a pictorial convention, in the 'ruins' there is both the horror and the sublime. A pollution of ideas is generated, within the submerged 'opposition' of nature/culture, as the 'evidence' of a lost Eden. Industrial prowess depends on melodrama and escapism, the dream of Nature rather than the praxis of environmental 'art'. Romantic yearning for the lost communion of Nature, locates the fear of the ordinary world and its abject limits. These are not the traces of dead symbols of an Epoch of Man, but real conditions photographed, instantly memorable or forgettable. The idealized image of abjection is also advanced via the new picaresque of industrial waste. There is a 19th century museum genre at work in much documentary photography. The painterly quality of the images of this 'Hell on Earth' erases the real possibility of salvation as a legislative procedure and ecological, matter-of-fact equation. These photographs plainly deliver the image as register of the contingent possibilities.