Book Review

Landscapes without memory
Joan Fontcuberta
Aperture, September 2005
96 pp ; 80 four-color illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-931788-79-3
hardcover, $40.00

About ten years ago, I went hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, eager for the exotic experience of wilderness. After walking for several hours, I noticed one huge tree marked with a plaque declaring it to be the single old-growth tree in the entire area: in the nineteenth century, this forest had been clear-cut for lumber. I realized I have never been in wilderness and never will be. I can only imagine it.

Wilderness is the subject matter of Joan Fontcuberta’s series Orogenesis, presented in the book Landscapes without memory. It, too, is an imagined wilderness where the viewer is a distant observer. In each picture, the land’s topography, its mountains and rocks, are moderated only by the effects of atmosphere and weather. The software Terragen created this particular version of wilderness. According to the Terragen website, the application is a “scenery generator.” The primary use of the software is to create skies and ground textures for games. The program was originally written to translate ground elevations into landscapes. Instead, Fontcuberta converted the digital data of selected images into numerical values and used that data as the starting point for Terragen. The book is divided into two sections: Landscapes of landscapes and Bodyscapes. In the first section, Fontcuberta converted iconic landscape paintings and photographs  into the necessary numerical data. In the second, Fontcuberta used photographs of his own body as the source of numerical data. The book also includes an insightful essay by Geoffrey Batchen

The book opens with a classical landscape created from J.M.W. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1835. The horizon cuts the picture in two equal halves. Soft atmospheric perspective pushes back a thin row of rounded mountains into the distance. The earth is a rich palette of reds and browns balanced by bits of deep blue sky showing through the clouds. Not only is there no evidence of human presence, there are no distinguishing natural features. This is the natural equivalent of a huge office park. An individual would be utterly lost in the uniformity of this place. The particularity of Turner’s London has been turned into nowhere.

On each spread in the book, a small version of the source image is displayed in the lower right hand corner of the left page while the landscape generated by Terragen covers the right hand page. The juxtaposition suggests and then frustrates a direct visual correspondence between the two images. The relationship is invisible, based on the underlying numbers that create each image. The key to these images is not visual. They force consideration of what is not present: nature and photography. Fontcuberta’s Orogenesis insists that nature has disappeared. Human activity has altered the climate of the entire planet. Nature no longer exists outside of culture. A contemporary photograph of wilderness could be considered a greater fiction than these computer-generated simulations.

In Fontcuberta’s series Orogenesis, eautiful landscapes from the history of art and photographs of the body are ground up into homogeneity. This abandonment of visual pleasure serves as a metaphor for the pain of technological change. Only recycled clichés remain, vaguely familiar, yet distant and unattainable. While Fontcuberta embraces new technology to create this series, he uses it to lament the world created by that technology.

published in Exposure, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education, Fall 2007