Fortunes of War

Photography in Alter Space

Eric Lesdema, Alfredo Cramerotti

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781783209040
• eBook ISBN: 9781783209057
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

Eric Lesdema's photographic series Fortunes of War was awarded the UN Nikon World Prize in 1997. Originally a series of fifteen images, this extended edit includes 83 colour photos, accompanied by a series of essays by leading academics in the field. The essays explore ideas raised by the prescient nature of the work, offering a highly original and engaging debate about its alternative approach to documentary photography, which views photography as an alternate space with the potential to project events rather than record them. In exploring an approach that cuts against the traditional concept central to documentary photography since its inception, the book thus raises important questions about twenty-first century interpretations and applications of photography and media. With thought-provoking research and a diverse array of essay contributions, Fortunes of War proposes new lines of interdisciplinary investigation, reflection and inquiry.

 

Nikon Award info:   https://www.artimage.org.uk/artists/l/eric-lesdema/

THE PRACTITIONER IN ALTER SPACE

ERIC LESDEMA

Q¹: Is physical time a form of techno-capital?

A²: On defining an organism Immanuel Kant proposes: that in which every part is at once means and end.

(Immanuel Kant (1999: 260)

Fortunes of War as a body of photographic work seeks to illustrate the relationship between the human organism and its regulatory paradigm: material activity as physical and mental production.

The set of images suggests this operation by expressing through a gestalt of detailed visual fractures a seizure, a whole being divided. Material like a single image cleaves from a pre-eminence of a whole, an entirety, a world.

This hidden world emerges through the combined metaphors and symbols divulged within the set of counterparts as a whole. The whole is a seed providing maturations through divisions of parts. Matter-real.

These remote views of categories within the aesthetic of the work align themselves with the disconnection, the confirmed reality of human organism’s affiliations with this regulatory paradigm.

Such instrumentation orders an interrelationship at the antipodal of an intuitive adaptation or/ and to an analytical adaptation of ontogenic reality; imparted by the thermodynamics of chemical substances or mixtures of substances that together constitute the world and its weather patterns.

‘Flirting’, flirting with materials – Pre-Neolithic; ‘courting’, courting with materials – Neolithic Revolution; ‘petting’, petting with materials – Agrarian Revolution; ‘dating’, dating with materials – Elizabethan, Italian and French Renaissance; ‘wedding’ wedding with materials – Industrial Revolution and on to the contemporary hostage-ship of the materials. Understood by reference to the consequence of Boreal and Hyper-Boreal thermodynamic adaptation.

What would remain then, would be the state and it is much more difficult to bear. It is true, nature does not ask us to restrain our impulses: it leaves them to freedom but it has its way, and particularly effective, to restrict us; it destroys us coldly, cruelly, brutally […] and this precisely sometimes for the occasion of our satisfactions. It is precisely because of these dangers, which the nature threatens us, that we come together and create the civilization which, among other reasons, is to allow us to live in common. In truth, the main task of civilization, its essential raison d’etre is to protect ourselves against nature. Following a description of the natural cataclysms, Freud continues: With its forces, nature stands against us, sublime, cruel, inexorable: thus, it reminds us of our weaknesses, our distresses, which we hoped to evade thanks to the labour of our civilization.

(Jaccard 1978: 35)

Fortunes of War through the medium of photography exploits this as a lack of isotopy; a term used in linguistics to consider a text as a coherent entity. Text as a linguistic manifestation of visuals (con in Latin, to convene, to connect, textere in Latin to weave) influenced by a grid of readouts. A grid of readouts acting as counter-instruments, found in photography and other mediums, which veil its origins from the social economic order, rendering the active reader/operator/ being pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• From the Series Editor to The Reader: The Immateriality of Culture
• What’s in a Day?
• Right on Target
• A Visual Historiography
• A Reading, in Retrospection
• ‘… Pro Foro Mori’
• Unstuck: ‘War Artists Without a War’
• ‘Closed For Judging’: The Just Emplacement of Eric Lesdema
• The Practitioner in Alter Space
• About the Contributors