![]() The photographs serve as a platform for aesthetic appreciation and existential reflection for those consuming the image, starkly contrasting with the lived experiences of the labourers working in these industries. Burtynsky’s photographs suggest a Technological Sublime (after Nye, 1995), with a fear, awe and terror either at man’s ingenuity or man’s self-destruction, but still with a tone of poeticisation. Whilst performing an informative role, many representations have also tended to aestheticize landscapes of industry and trade, from Edward Burtynsky to Andreas Gursky, where, notably, human labour is often absent from or minimized in their photographs. Certain representational tropes have formed in genres of Documentary, Photojournalism and Contemporary Art, where an overall commonality between them is to represent and raise awareness of marginalised social groups through an aesthetic form that can convey a sense of urgency and ‘nowness’, in the hope that this will inform social intervention and action by the viewer. There are a range of artists works that address the issue of global divisions of labour and production chains, varying in approach from raising consciousness through representation to direct intervention from YoHa’s Coal Fired Computers (2010) exploring the physical impacts of mining on labourers bodies’, to Judi Werthein’s design and free distribution of ‘Brinco trainers’ (2005) for migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. It examines the photodocumentary and traditions of the industrial sublime to find ‘time-images’ that speak to the material and labour worlds of global capital. Looking at the works of various photographers it examines how waste ships are made to work aesthetically. This paper interrogates these counter-images of global capitalism. Here then is the antipode of globalisation - ships, once carrying cargoes now themselves sold around the globe for scrap and ending up broken up according to the very logics of cheap locations that their routes made possible. Critiques of global trade have latched upon the counter image of these mighty ships' ruinous carcasses beached and being broken in South Asia. However, not far behind has been the cumbrous yet essential 'big box' of containerisation, shipping all manner of goods across the planet on great vessels remorselessly circling the globe. The iconic images heralding an age of connectivity are the plane and the trace of digital flows bearing information.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |