Photo Essay: Nancekuke, by Michael Crocker

By Michael Crocker:

Nancekuke is situated on an isolated cliff top between the villages of Portreath and Porthtowan on the north coast of Cornwall. With uninterrupted horizons and far-reaching coastal views, it is an alluring and beautiful space to visit.

In the 1950’s, Nancekuke was the home of a British government chemical defence establishment where 20 tonnes of Sarin nerve gas were secretly manufactured. By the 1970’s, the site was cleared, with the toxic manufacturing facility being levelled and then buried on site in disused mine shafts. Today, the site continues to be the operated by the Ministry of Defence and is now known as Remote Radar Head Portreath. With a disturbing history, Nancekuke remains shrouded in relative secrecy.

The project documents Nancekuke and its surrounding area as it is found today. The rugged natural beauty of the coast is juxtaposed with a secretive and sinister past, leaving the informed visitor to contest opposing identities of place. The images offer the viewer conflicting interpretations of place; those of beauty, serenity and nature are challenged by remnants of a sinister past, where a human desire to kill and to harness science for widespread destruction remain ever present within the landscape.

The Nancekuke project records the rugged vistas and the ever-changing seascape of the area, whilst acknowledging it as a place with a destructive and unsettling history when viewed through a contemporary lens.

About the photographer: Michael Crocker’s creative practice is centred around photography of the landscape and the agency that can be formed between place, artist and visual outcome. His work creates a visual response to the phenomenological link between spatial experience and consciousness and is often informed by literary sources recording experiences of place. The notion of what we consider place to be within space is an area of interest within his image making.

Home Scar

By Rosie Sherwood:

Limpets can be found affixed to rocks on beaches up and down the country. When covered by the sea each limpet moves around in search of food, returning to their favourite spot when the tide goes out. Eventually, they wear away a patch of rock that fits the shape of their shells. This patch keeps the limpet alive: letting in oxygen while trapping seawater to keep the limpet from drying out. It is known as a home scar.

BIGBURY, DEVON (2020)

For over a year we’ve been bound more tightly to our homes than ever before. Covid-19 has kept us indoors. We’ve gone to work and to school in our homes. When we’ve left the confines of our walls we haven’t strayed far from the front door. Family and friends have been off limit; restaurants and shops closed; sporting stadiums and galleries empty. Through all this, home has been our one constant. 

When I first heard the phrase home scar, it struck a chord somewhere deep inside. My homes are etched into the very fibre of my being. Like the limpet, my home scars are my foundation, my safety net. They are the places from which I grew, perfectly fitted to allow in all I needed, and to keep me safe.

LAURIER RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 1

LAURIER RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 2

I grew up in London, living in the same house for the first 24 years of my life: No. 20 Laurier Rd. Two floors, 6 rooms, a garden. I was almost born in this building, who I am was born in this building. In my mind I can walk through this place with ease, a lifetime of personal history all visible at once. The stairs carpeted and uncarpeted. The room in which I had my first kiss. This room a bedroom, then a living room, then a different bedroom. The small kitchen in which I learnt to cook. Walls where doors used to be, doors where walls used to be. Games of fancy dress played across every room. Through it all the bannister at the top of the stairs is held together with blue wire and red string. 

We moved out years ago, but I still have the key. 

It is not only the buildings in which we live that create our home scars. The streets that surround them and all they contain are also part of our homes. I could take you to them now – I could walk you to George’s Shop, the local grocers with its delicious Cypriot poppy seed bread and loving owner, though the shop isn’t there anymore; I could walk you to Camden Market, though my Camden Market is long gone, transformed into a sanitised tourist trap; I could walk you across The Heath to the Hollow Tree, to my valley, to where I stayed out all night with friends. 

No. 20 Laurier Road, its orbiting streets and pockets of ancient woodland framed my early development, my teenage self, and the start of adulthood. It lies at the core of who I am, a perfectly fitted home scar. When we left, I didn’t leave entirely.

LODDISWELL WOOD, DEVON (2020)

From Laurier Rd my mother relocated to Devon and to No. 5 Veales Rd, Kingsbridge. In the 10 years she lived there I have come and gone, to Australia and back, to London and back. I was drawn in, pulled by the sea. A new home scar developed, carved by double fronted bay windows and an elegant porch, by my sister’s hen party and my mother’s 50th, by the family kitchen perfectly designed for every kind of cooking, by Christmases and birthdays, by woods and rivers and beaches, by a thousand everyday actions and the creation of art. I did not expect this place to impact me the way it did, for it to form a home scar. 

VEALES RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 1

VEALES RD, JUST BEFORE MOVING OUT 2

Last March, with the pandemic taking grip of the country, and an inevitable lockdown looming, I boarded a train from Paddington Station loaded down with fears, suitcases, bags and a backpack. I was meant to be spending six months in London doing a Fellowship in the foundry at Chelsea College of Art, but the college had closed it doors. I decided I would rather ride out the pandemic in Devon. Paddington Station was virtually empty and there was no one in my train carriage. I felt like I was fleeing from something, running from the danger posed by the densely populated city I had called home for the better part of my life. The eerie emptiness and silence felt like something out of a post-apocalyptic story. But when I stepped through the front door at Veales Rd I felt safe.  

PUBLIC FOOTPATH (2020)

In the months that followed I walked the public footpaths and lanes that span out from the front door. I fell more deeply in love with the land around Kingsbridge, with the estuary and the coastline. And I fell more deeply in love with the house itself. Like much of the nation, I baked, I read, I found ways to stay entertained and connected from the sofa. I became embedded within the walls and footpaths of home. New routines cut paths through the house, new walks took me to familiar destinations I had only driven to before, the steps and breaths taken becoming part of my body. Time was the only thing I had in abundance, so I used it to explore, deepening my home scar.

This March, after just over a decade, we moved out of Veales Rd and out of Devon. In the final weeks, I walked through the house gently touching the walls, memorising their contours and corners. I followed well-loved public footpaths capturing them with my camera. I said farewell to views and fallen trees I had come to treasure: the estuary bed that somehow captures heat from even the cold February sun; the blackened branches of trees that drop low over the water at high tide; lime kilns nestled seamlessly into the land around the water’s edge; the far-reaching views of gently curving hills and patchwork fields; the red earth turned over by a plough; the dappled light on the river slipping through the trees of Loddiswell Woods. I marked this home scar, tracing its edges.

RIVER AVON (2020)

KINGSBRIDGE ESTUARY (2020)

OUTSIDE WEST CHARLETON (2020)

I am lucky. To me home means something warm and safe and full of potential. Lockdown was painful, sad, and complicated, but it was contained by the refuge of my home. For many across the country, and across the world, home means something else entirely, it isn’t a refuge, it isn’t safe. For some it doesn’t exist at all; it’s been lost or taken away, all that remains an object, or a memory, or a hope. Covid-19 has thrown these stark realities into sharp relief. There are those for whom job losses or furlough made rent or mortgages impossible to pay, the future of their homes uncertain. For others being in lockdown within the walls of their home was a danger, emotionally and physically. 

Home should be a human right. Every person deserves a home scar shaped by happy memories, deserves the haven of walls and roof, of streets and land they know within their bones. No home scar should be misshapen or lost to abuse and violence, to bombs and wars, to evictions, job loss and disease. And yet so many are, too many people are left to walk through the world without a home, and without the knowledge of safety it brings. 

I have been blessed with two home scars so well defined that they keep me anchored within the world. As lockdown eases, as we step out of our homes ready to face a changed world, I am reminded that we need these perfectly fitted spaces into which we slot, the spaces from which we grew, and to which we can return, safe. We need them and we deserve them. Perhaps at this precipice of a new normal, this moment with such potential for change, we could come together to take the first steps in ensuring no one has to grow up or live without a home scar.

ESTUARY SKY (2020)

***

Rosie Sherwood is an artist, writer, curator and scholar. Her interdisciplinary practise incorporates photography, sculpture, book art and text. Sherwood founded As Yet Untitled in 2012, specialising in limited edition book art and events. From 2017-2020 she was Creative Director of turn the page Artists Book Fair and Symposium. In 2018 Sherwood was a finalist in the National Sculpture Prize, for which her sculpture, Akin, was installed at Broomhill Sculpture Gardens. Sherwood has been published on a range of subjects and has work in national and international collections including Tate, The British Library and the National Libraries of Victoria and Queensland, Australia.

Sherwood’s current creative research, An Ever Moving Now, is an exploration of wildness, rewilding, and our relationship with nature. The project addresses experiences and sensations of being embedded in nature, and connects these to the broader concepts of environmental conservation. To create the work, Sherwood moves between immersive, multi-day hikes, to developing ideas in her studio, an interplay that enables conversation between the work and the land. To date the project has been supported by numerous sponsors and organisations including the Marine Institute at Plymouth University.

Before Covid-19 Sherwood had begun a Fellowship at the Chelsea College of Art Foundry. This position will resume when it is safe to do so.

Five Questions for... Tiina Törmänen

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

By Sara Bellini

During the polar night, the sun sets and doesn’t reappear on the horizon for days at end. At the poles this means complete darkness, but in subarctic regions closer to the polar circles it looks more like twilight. In northern Lapland the polar night lasts for almost two months, while in southern Lapland winter days can be as short as 3 hours. In these very short days the light changes fast and it’s quite magical to see the sky reflected in the snow in shades of pink, peach, powder blue, cotton candy, lilac, turquoise, apricot, amaranth, mauve, gold, lavender, cerulean, salmon, seashell... It’s these dreamy landscapes and snowy forests that drew attention to Tiina Törmänen’s photography.

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

Tiina first picked up a camera over twenty years ago, when she was working as a chef in Helsinki, instinctively attracted to documentary and street photography. She eventually went back to her native Lapland, in the north of Finland, and dedicated her artistic practice to the landscapes she had grown up with. Tiina’s creativity brought her to brave the weather conditions in order to capture the natural beauty that exists because them. In the past couple of years her attention has moved towards a different Nordic environment through underwater photography, exploring the abundance of lakes and ponds Finland is famous for and even diving into the Norwegian Sea.

We caught up with Tiina in between two group exhibitions, getting ready for the underwater season: “I got my camera gear updated from Canon 5D Mark IV to the new Canon R5 with Nauticam underwater housing [...] Of course it is always about the eye, not the gear, but at a certain point your skill level gets limited with limited gear. I had Olympus TG-5 and Sony A6500 with me on my underwater exploration so far, so it feels inspiring to have a pro camera with pro housing for my upcoming adventures!” 

Photo: Tiina Törmänen

What does home mean to you? 

It is where your heart is. For me, well... I feel at home almost everywhere if I have a safe and nice place to stay. I travel a lot, so I am used to just being in the moment. But of course, true home is a totally safe place to relax and reload batteries. I would say I have two homes. Our flat with my husband is like an everyday, normal home. Then my true home is our family place with all the land we own. That is a place where I can always return, a place in the middle of nowhere but surrounded with pure nature in the heart of Lapland.  

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I have a special connection to the north, where our home is. I love the nature, woods and waters. My main focus now is exploring northern waters: We have thousands of lakes, ponds and a lot of springs. There are so many underwater gems and I love being able to explore this unseen world. Most of us have seen coral reefs and the beauty of the oceans, but not many have seen the beauty of harsh arctic fresh waters.  

What is beyond your front door?

Forest. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I’d really like to dive into the Arctic Ocean in Greenland. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now? 

Things have escalated and I started investing into crypto currencies. I’m spending all my spare time reading and watching trading videos to learn how to become a good trader. I’ve also been learning about the NFT* space and minting my first NFT items.

Tiina Törmänen's Website
Tiina Törmänen's Instagram
Tiina Törmänen's Cryptoart

*Non-fungible tokens are unique digital assets that can be bought, sold and traded like other crypto currencies, but unlike those, they cannot be exchanged like-for-like. NFTs can be anything digital, including drawings, music and other art forms.

Printed Matters: Point.51

By Sara Bellini 

The 51st parallel north is the point where continental Europe and the UK meet, halfway between Dover and Calais in the English Channel. This meeting point also inspired the name of Point.51, a London-based magazine of slow journalism and documentary photography.

The look is simple and effective: a red matte cover, a full-page portrait, one word that identifies the theme of the issue and a phrase to invite you in. The content requires time, a comfortable armchair and a cup of tea: Don’t flip through the pages, linger, take everything in. This is what I immediately loved about this new publication, the slow and in-depth approach to stories, narrated equally through words and images. 

We all consume the news, or more often than not, news headlines, and their abundance and speed detach us from the content and from the people the headlines are about. Point.51 gives you the opportunity to explore significant news topics through personal stories, focusing on ordinary people and how they relate to the bigger narratives of our multi-layered present. It gives you time to empathise, reflect and form an informed opinion, which is crucial in shaping contemporary conversations.

Issue 4 will hit the shelves in May, and meanwhile we caught up with editor Rob Pinney:

What was the inspiration behind Point.51 and what drives you?

We wanted to do something that gave us the space and time to really dig into complex stories – both in the writing and in the photography – without having to strip them down. We want to work on stories that challenge us, and challenge our readers, and I think that curiosity is really what drives Point.51 forward. 

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format?

I think we knew that Point.51 was going to be a print magazine from the outset. In fact, I don't think I can remember us having a conversation about the possibility of doing it any other way. But as we've grown, I think it's now clearer than ever that print is the right format for us.

I like to think about it by flipping the question on its head: how would we want to read these stories? For me, it is undoubtedly in print. I want to sit with them and read them through, following the story as it unfolds, without distractions.

Point.51 comes out twice a year, and so the stories we work on for the magazine are usually put together over fairly long periods of time. They're designed to last – we want them to feel just as relevant in five years time as they do today – and there's a permanence to pulling them together in a printed magazine that reflects that.

Then it's also important for the photography. My background is as a photographer, and we pride ourselves on commissioning and publishing really great documentary photography that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with our journalism. There are 102 images in our latest issue, and without wanting to sound too old fashioned, I think that work really is at its best when seen in print.

At the core of your magazine are a strong sense of place and a genuine interest in people, what’s the relationship between these two elements?

Definitely. Both people and place are essential to the stories we work on. But they come up in different ways, and I think the relationship between them changes from story to story.

People are at the forefront of all of our stories – that has been a constant throughout. But place comes up in different ways. To give a couple of examples: there is a story in our first issue about Cuban asylum seekers arriving in Serbia to make use of visa-free entry for Cuban passport holders, which exists as a legacy of the Cold War. In that case, place plays a very specific and explicit role in the story. Then there's a story in our second issue about Port Talbot, an industrial town in north Wales known for steel production. When the steelworks opened there in the 1950s, it employed 18,000 people – literally half the town – but today that number has fallen to just 4,000. At the centre of the story are multiple generations of a family with a long-standing connection to the steelworks, and you get to see how those different generations – with different experiences – relate to their town. Bringing those different perspectives into our stories is really important.

So I don't think you can say that there's a fixed or static relationship between people and place in the magazine, but the stories are definitely concerned with the way the two inform and shape each other.

How has Point.51 changed since Issue 1 and what are your plans for Issue 4?

When we started out, lots of friends and colleagues thought we were crazy trying to start a print magazine for long-form journalism and documentary photography when other publications were disappearing left, right, and centre. They were probably right – it's certainly not easy. But we've seen the magazine go from being just an idea to an established title with a solid and growing reputation.

Issue 4 is well underway, and should hit the shelves in May. The theme for the next issue is Nations and Nationalism, but as with all of our issues, we're coming at it from a variety of angles – from the story of a "micronation" in Italy to the relationship between people living in Gibraltar and La Linea de Concepción, the towns on either side of the border.

The team of people working on Point.51 has also grown – Nick, Sara, and Meg have joined us, and their knowledge and hard work is already showing. So yes, there have been lots of changes.

But I also think that, in a fairly fundamental way, it hasn't changed at all. We had a very clear idea of what we wanted Point.51 to be when we started it: a straightforward magazine for considered long-form journalism and original photography. I think we've stuck to that pretty doggedly, and I think it's what a lot of our readers really like about it.

Can you tell us a bit more about the concept of little story/big story behind Point.51?

Yes certainly! "Big story/little story" is an approach we use when working on stories for Point.51. We can't claim it as an original concept – it has been put to use (and written about) widely – but it's something we try to put into practice wherever possible.

Essentially it comes down to the choice between doing something that is wide but shallow or narrow but deep, and deciding where you think the real value is. The stories we like to work on for Point.51 are usually concerned with pretty big topics: we've reported stories about migration and asylum, the climate crisis, mental health, Brexit, and the Irish border, to name a few. But in each case we're zooming right in to tell a smaller story within that, concentrating on just a few individuals, or a single place, or maybe both.

The small stories are the ones we can really relate to, and that stay with us. And I think that if you tell the small story really well – bringing in all the detail and complexity that exists in real life, and which often gets cut out – then you're also providing a much richer perspective on the big story too.

We're not trying to tell readers what to think or to persuade them to see something in a particular way. We want to bring people great stories that are told thoroughly and faithfully, but ultimately it's for them to engage with them on their own terms.

As usual, Berliners can find Point.51 at do you read me?!? and Rosa Wolf. Check out the website for online shopping and a free newsletter with more articles and photography.

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Five Questions for... Alison Pouliot

By Sara Bellini

I first came across Alison Pouliot in the pages of Mervin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, published just a few months ago. Sheldrake introduces us to the world of fungi and their complexity: They can digest plastic and crude oil, they give us bread and medicines, and they connect plants in an underworld network. They are much more underrated than plants and animals, and yet they are extremely fascinating, if only we give them a chance to shine. 

This is exactly what Alison Pouliot has been doing in her photography. With a scientific background as an ecology historian, Alison focuses on the more mysterious woodland creatures, like fungi, as well as on abandoned places bearing the traces of human disregard. 

While admiring her photo essays, it occurs to me that we don’t simply occupy the planet, we are part of it, and yet there is so much we don’t know about it. I think about how, in order to build a more sustainable relationship with nature, it’s necessary to slow down and look closely at the other part in this equation. How deeply do we understand how the environment works, what it needs, which human behaviours are helpful and which ones are destructive? It’s this attentive and caring gaze that allows Alison to capture the diversity of fungi: soft-textured geometric patterns, ghostly shapes that could be the stunning guardians of the Underworld and alien-looking mushrooms with a glam aesthetic. 

Her photography is now moving from a documentaristic to a more artistic approach: “I am striving to produce work that might just touch someone somewhere and make them feel differently about the world. It’s a time of such radical change and also a time of opportunity to test the waters and do things differently. I guess it’s often times of adversity that bring out the most innovative or creative or inspirational aspects of one’s work.”

Alison’s plans for the new year start with the publication in March of Wild Mushrooming, a book she had been working on for the past five years with mycologist Tom May. The book approaches foraging from the point of view of conservation and ecosystem balance. Alison lives between Australia and Switzerland and we caught up with her after she had just completed a series of six short videos on fungi and was back in Europe for the cold season. 

What does home mean to you?

I’m not sure that I’ve ever really worked that out. It’s certainly not a physical place. I’ve straddled both hemispheres for the last two decades (so that I can have two autumns a year and get myself a double dose of fungi) so I don’t really have a sense of a particular ‘place’ called home. In a sense I feel like I’ve been on the move all my life as we moved around a good bit in my childhood as well. I have few material possessions and find it easy to make a nest and feel comfortable pretty much anywhere, so long as there’s clean air, natural surrounds and little concrete or noise. When people talk about ‘settling’ or ‘settling down’ or getting ‘tenure’ in a job, it makes me shudder.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

Oh wow, that’s a big question. I have a short list of several hundred... Anywhere in the field really, the more remote and less inhabited the better. Of course, as an Australian and having spent many years exploring that continent, I feel incredibly connected to it, especially to the remote and wide open spaces of the interior. The blank spaces on the map, those often ungraspable, indeterminate, shimmering places that can feel so old, so solid, yet like a dream. I can’t get enough of them!

But as I’m writing these words, I’m actually wondering if one can ever really feel ‘connected’ to a place, or do we just feel comfortable or familiar? I mean, of course it’s more palpable than that. Sure we can feel a powerful inexplicable affinity, or something bigger more visceral, a physical bodily sensation, an intensity that we feel in one particular place and not another, an attachment of sorts that can be profound, but is that really ‘connection’? I know when I return to my grandmother’s home in Tasmania, now occupied by new residents, that I feel an overwhelming and inextricably entwined sense of emotion and memory solely linked to that place, but I’m not sure that I’d call it connection.I’ll have to give that some more thought. 

One of the things I love about Australia is its unpredictability, its extremes and its resistance to being controlled and regulated (as one sees, for example, in Europe) although we’re trying out hardest to do so. I love that it’s not ‘comfortable’, that it resists, that it’s so highly changeable. That it’s elusive and often incomprehensible. For me it begs one not to linger too long. It’s unsettling. It’s dis-placing. Perhaps I’m just more comfortable on the move.

What is beyond your front door?

Do you mean the flap of my tent? Wow, a wonderland of textures. A bruising storm front and ever changing light. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I’m not sure that it’s ‘a’ place, a geographically defined place. A particular location. It’s anywhere that sparks my imagination and reverberates in such a way that excites or inspires or makes me feel vertiginous. Or perhaps where there’s something I feel or experience or taste that I’ve not done before. Or likewise, where a sense of intense familiarity can be just as compelling. While going back to loved places can be powerfully nostalgic or reassuring, I also think ‘going back’ can be hard. The world is changing so fast and it’s easy to become attached to the idea of how a place once was, and hence, once can quickly feel disappointed or disenchanted. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now? 

I’ve got several books on the go but am utterly engrossed in As we have always done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. An incredible piece of writing. I’m also re-reading some of the work of that amazing Alaskan anthropologist Richard “Nels” Nelson who died just over a year ago.

I’ve always got the radio or a podcast on and have just been listening to Nahlah Ayed’s program called Ideas on CBC (Canada) Radio. Am now listening to Far and Wide on RRR (Melbourne independent radio station). Otherwise everything from Anouar Brahem to Khruangbin to Carbon Based Lifeforms...  As for viewing I’ve been watching some short docos on AeonVideos.

Alison Pouliot's website
Alison's video The Kingdom Fungi

The Beautiful Abandoned: An interview with Andrew Emond

Photo: Andrew Emond

A few weeks ago we presented the work of photographer Andrew Emond in an essay by William Carroll. We follow up with a conversation between William and Andrew as a companion to the earlier piece. 

William Carroll: I was first shown your instagram page by a friend, and was of course immediately struck by your style and subject matter. How important has this kind of word-of-mouth publicity been to the growth of your page and profile? 

Andrew Emond: I’d say it’s been pretty essential. I haven't really gone out of my way to promote the work in any significant way so the growth of my account has happened fairly organically. I'm a bit stubborn when it comes to just letting things evolve that way-- and hopefully having people respond favourably to the work. I’m sure there are faster ways to grow an instagram account, but taking the slow and steady approach is more my style and seems to be working fairly well so far.

WC: I remember when I first contacted you I asked about the tagline in your bio which reads 'Messages from the Interior'. Having studied the American photographer Walker Evans, I asked you if this was a direct homage to Evans to which you assented. How important has Evans been, and indeed other American photographers, to the development of your style? 

AE: I didn’t study photography in school so I wasn’t really aware of Evans’ work beyond his most iconic images. I started taking photographs of abandoned spaces in 2004 and for about four years I was just doing my own thing, working in a creative vacuum and staying pretty naive when it came to the history of photography in general. Coming across Evans, and in particular his treatment of vernacular interiors was enlightening and encouraging. It’s been this way with other photographers whose work I’ve discovered along the way, ilike John Divola or Lynne Cohen.

When I find similarities in other bodies of work, I don’t get discouraged because it’s been done before, but try to use it as something I can springboard off of or respond to. What I love about Evans’ book Message From the Interior is its sense of mystery. The whole thing, even its title (what’s the message?) is a riddle. It’s also a bit of a fuck-you to the the perception that he was a social documentary photographer or even a documentary photographer to begin with. 

WC: You're based in Toronto and so the majority of your photography is informed by the city. Do you look for the same kinds of abandoned/disused spaces when you're travelling? Do you have any intentions of long-term projects outside of Toronto? 

AE: I tend to treat travelling as a way to take a break from what I’m usually photographing in Toronto or sometimes photography in general. I’ll shoot in a different style and generally be less concerned about projects or themes. I haven’t considered working on anything outside of Toronto in a very long time. I can’t imagine it happening unless I had the opportunity to spend an extended period of time in one particular location. It’s pretty hard-wired in me to look for neglected places at this point, so if I do visit them outside of Toronto, it’s more for the experience than anything.

I also feel like slipping in interiors from other places is a bit like cheating. My photographs aren’t intended to be a record of Toronto. I’m not really interested in making any particular statement about this city or even the nature of the spaces themselves. These photos are often more about me than anything else. I want the places to be anonymous, but at the same time I want them to be located here. There’s a logistical reason in that I usually don’t have more than a few hours a week to shoot, but I also get a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment by producing this body of work using what I have around me. 

Photo: Andrew Emond

WC: What other media informs your work? I'd be really interested to hear what films, literature, and even music inspire you? I often find that creatives have myriad interests, and your work conjures up quite a few in my case. I find it hard not to hear Godspeed You! Black Emperor when studying your work...

AE: Painting, sculpture, and installation art are often my biggest influences. Sometimes I’ll walk into a space and the arrangement of objects reminds me of particular works in modern or contemporary art. There’s also sometimes a fair amount of staging and intervention that takes place in my photos so I often find myself taking cues from those mediums. 

Then there are other things, like the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Stalker by Tarkovsky, certain songs like It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue by Dylan, R.E.M.’s Chronic Town EP, that wonderfully strange room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m drawn to things that have subtle elements of surrealism. Godspeed is a little too moody for me, but the way they sway between tranquility and chaos is certainly something I try to bring into my own work.

WC: Lastly, I guess I just want to focus a bit on the state of things in 2020. Your work has taken on an eerie prescience given the current climate, which I reference in the companion article. Do you feel an unsettling clairvoyance in your work? Did you envisage these spaces becoming semi-normalised, all those years ago, when you started photographing them? 

AE: I’m not sure anyone could have predicted vacancy becoming semi-normalized even a few months ago. Toronto is like a lot of other cities around the world right now, with shuttered businesses and empty workplaces as employees are now working from home. I’m sure there are many scenes inside buildings right now that resemble ones found in my photos, but I’m resistant to creating a commentary on this current situation. 

Years ago, I was keen on making a statement about deindustrialization and the loss of jobs happening during that particular era, but these days my hope is that this body of work is a bit more timeless  and open-ended. I’m still very much conscientious of the fact that some of the places I visit are the way they are due to economic or personal misfortune-- some of it may even be COVID-19 related, but those sorts of backstories add a layer of real-world context that I try to avoid. 

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page

The Beautiful Abandoned: Andrew Emond’s photography of urban decay

Photo: Andrew Emond

By William Carroll: 

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page feels like the visual diary of an apocalypse, a compendium of photographs that chart a beautiful, devastating collapse. The gutted maws of baroque fireplaces leer out at empty rooms, with dusty tchotchkes and ripped hardcovers gathering about the mantelpieces. Old staircases, their bannisters splintered and broken, lead up and down invariably to darker unknowns. In one photograph, uploaded on April 28th 2020, a disordered back office is punctuated by an old CTR television set, showing static. A piece of stock art, parodying the halcyon days of the Hudson River School, dangles limply above it. Elsewhere, in a photograph taken in an old office complex, a prosthetic CPR mannequin sits upright among a pile of assorted metal debris. “Everything’s Fine,” Emond’s caption reads. 

Based in Toronto, and using a Samsung Galaxy S8 to take his images, Emond is a photographer to whom urban decay, domestic neglect, and the general collapse of capitalist spaces pose an irresistible lure. Mostly shot in square format, a technique which Emond admitted often confuses people into thinking he’s shooting on film, his images are like dystopian Wes Anderson still frames. Centrally aligned, with often a visual pun substituting the need for a lengthy caption, the images are frequently colourful in spite of all their internal disorder. Armchairs with stuffing foaming their edges are often captured front-and-centre, whilst mirrors (often broken) refract what lies beyond the frame ad infinitum. The sheer ubiquity of these scenes that Emond happens upon – ‘I find 95% of these places myself’ – suggests that the equivalent collapses of public space are happening everywhere simultaneously. For each new unit erected on an industrial estate in record time, all polished metal and girders, there is another hulking wreck a few miles away in which birds roost and wild animals haunt. Emond has no time or interest in the former. 

When I first came across Emond’s photography on Instagram, I was immediately struck by two particularities of his profile. Firstly, his style of so-called ‘Abandoned Porn’ – an aesthetic movement particularly in vogue during this age of ‘dark tourism’ -  was as visually arresting as it was disquieting. Whose front room is this, that lies so unloved and in such squalor? Where is this office complex, with the glass of its dividing walls and conference rooms scattered across the floor like so much snow? These spaces seemed at once anonymous and yet tied inextricably to their recent abandonment. I wanted to know where, when, who. At the same time, I was also strangely afraid of the answers. 

Photo: Andrew Emond

When browsing his catalogue of colourful destruction, I was struck by his profile’s bio, which reads: ‘Messages from the interior. ’I’d heard that before, but couldn’t quite place it. Eventually, something clicked and I reached out to Emond via direct message. 

“Is the bio line a nod to Walker Evans or am I reading too much into that?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s totally a nod. Glad someone noticed,” he replied. 

The tradition of Evans’ style is evident across Emond’s work – so often is he positioned on the threshold of some devastated scene, haunting the doorway of an apartment left to ruin or turning the corner of a long, snaking corridor. His captions, like Evans, are similarly obscure, obtuse, or metatextual, rarely betraying anything beyond the scene’s immediacy. This brevity extends to subject matter, too. Evans believed in the beauty of the quotidian, and his frequent subjects, especially during the Depression, included rustic kitchens, empty chairs, and tenant farmer shacks slowly eroding in the dustbowl winds. Separated by nearly a century, Emond’s modern answer to Evans’ vernacular, documentary style feels distinctly modern and prescient, doubly so in the current pandemic. 

These abandoned spaces have become familiar to many of us over the last 6 months, and the tragic decline of thriving commercial centres and local businesses has become a plague in of itself. When one set of shutters have fallen, all too often have two more followed suit. In spite of this stark and alarming present we inhabit, Emond’s recording of these spaces far before COVID-19 suggests a certain inevitably. The novel coronavirus may have hastened certain violences, certain collapses, but Emond reminds us that these scenes have been around far longer, and will continue their own ironic propagation as generations change, as the global climate passes its own event horizon, and people continue steadfastly in their living and their dying. To have such a public record of that, and to make it so readily available to anyone with a phone, feels both voyeuristic and yet undeniably creative. Emond isn’t the first person to document abandoned scenes through the medium of photography, but his spartan equipment, use of Instagram, and traditional influences mark a unique and appealing documentarian. 

Beyond the simple aesthetics, there are many literary qualities to Emond’s work and a raft of cinematic influences that likewise bleed in. Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and indeed, the film’s own source material of Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky brothers, are immediately called to mind in his darker, industrial scenes where refuse lies scattered and discarded as if by some uncaring, unseen monster. In his more colourful domestic scenes, where the detritus of family life has pooled like floodwater, I can’t help think of Grey Gardens (1975) or even modern television programmes centred around ‘hoarders’ and their obsessive inventorying of everyday life. Our own perverse interests in the spectacle of collapse are widely documented, from Freud’s ‘Death Drive’ to Suzi Mirgani’s Spectacles of Terror (2017), and Emond’s images represent all of these interests in neat, square packages that can be consumed individually or en masse. There will always be photographs to take, always rooms that have been locked for years. This is not a finite pursuit. 

Above all these converging influences and themes in Emond’s work – [which he alludes to in the interview I conducted with him] -  there is a single lyric that I find myself humming, even singing, when looking through his work. It’s from Sebadoh’s ‘Spoiled’, a song made famous for its use in Larry Clark’s controversial coming-of-age film Kids (1995) – a film in which the grimy underside of New York is not a world away from Emond’s tenement interiors. The lyric captures the lure of Emond’s work and why we, as a race, continue to find beauty in our own destruction:

We will wait for tragedy
And scatter helpless to the fire.

As haunting and pertinent as it may be, I can’t help think Emond would find it a bit too on the nose. Evans would too, no doubt. They’re both probably right.

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page

Michael Schmidt at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Ein-heit (U-ni-ty) by Michael Schmidt

By Sara Bellini

When I think about the photography of Michael Schmidt, I think of Berlin. I think of his shots of Wedding* and of the Werkstatt für Photographie (Photography Workshop) he founded in Kreuzberg* in the 1970s. But you could argue that what really captures the attention in his photos is not the subject, but the way it’s presented.

Michael Schmidt was a policeman and a self-taught photographer. Some of his first notable works were commissioned by the Berlin Senate or districts of the city, as if the city commissioned him to reflect on itself. If we look at these series, like The Working Woman in Kreuzberg (1975), we see a documentary style, which became more and more abstract over the years.

The exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart is the first retrospective in Michael Schmidt’s native city in over twenty-five years. It encompasses forty years of photography, between 1965 and 2014, and it shows Berlin shifting from the post-war period to division to a re-unified city, tapering out in his last project on nature. Cityscapes, portraits, backyards, human bodies, pigs and apples find their place in the rooms of the station-turned-museum. From Wedding to Kreuzberg, from Waffenruhe (Ceasefire) to Ein-heit (U-ni-ty), from Stadtbilder (Cityscapes) to Lebensmittel (Food), from Frauen (Women) to Selbst (Self) to Natur (Nature), each project and aspect of Michael Schmidt as a photographer is there. And yet he always evades our complete understanding at the last moment, as if our reading of his work was never exhaustive.

Natur (Nature) by Michael Schmidt

I would recommend following the chronological order conceived by the curators to fully appreciate a changing city as well as Michael Schmidt’s evolution as an artist; from black and white to sporadic colour units to pictures of pictures and cropping techniques. From ‘The Wall’, that makes it clear where and when the image belongs, to a close-up on an anonymous wall that could be anywhere. I find it somehow poetic that Michael Schmidt’s final art book, published when he was already seriously ill, focused on the beauty of nature, transcending the urban landscape and ultimately human life itself.

The exhibition will reach first Paris and then Madrid in 2021 and will end in Vienna in 2022. Berliners will be able to see it until January the 17th, wearing a face mask and after buying a time-slot ticket - online or at the venue. Check out the SMB website for up-to-date opening hours and health measures. 

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* Wedding and Kreuzberg are districts of Berlin