This book presents a critical and aesthetic defence of ânon-place â, as an act of cultural reclamation. 1 The intention is to challenge the more expedient perception of such places, by critically âerasingâ the prefix non, to reveal a place with meaning that might be valued in a more imaginative way.
I propose a new conception of the urban landscape non-place through my own photographic research-led practice, supported by references to other photographersâ work. As a personal urban landscape research project, this will hopefully, speak to a broader research community (beyond the location of Leeds, in the north of England), to reaffirm the importance of research-led photographic practice as an incisive discursive methodology within the contested notions attached to urban landscape representation. The book investigates the significance of urban landscape representation as a form of critical mirror, to evaluate changes in contemporary society.
The book is unashamedly eclectic , in drawing from multiple conceptual traditions, which aim to investigate non-place from multiple dimensions. Drawing upon resources from philosophy , sociology , anthropology , memory studies , eco-criticism , geography , urban theory , and photographic history , the book explores the possibilities of attending to a new conception of the urban landscape through the critical conduit of non-place. The term non-place is borrowed from the French anthropologist, Marc AugĂ©âs book: Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995). My own adoption of the term non-place seeks to broaden AugĂ©âs original definition, from transit spaces, such as Paris airport concourses, to include those pockets of abandoned land which are very rarely visited, often prohibited and marginalized by the effects of post-industrial decline since the 1970s (especially in England).
The term non-place inhabits this book as a deliberate provocation/invitation to the reader, to re-engage with those transitional areas of land situated in the urban landscape that are viewed as interstitial âwithout a clear function or meaning, compared to the more valued spaces in the city, such as public parks and memorial sites .
In general, non-places are prohibited sites, which to some degree adds to their anonymity in relation to the general publicâs awareness. Most people (apart from a growing interest from urban psycho-geographers and Urbex photographers) avoid these sites, with their knowledge and understanding largely based on the conventional definitions promulgated by developers with a vested interest in referring to them as: âwasteland â, âbrown field â, terms often associated with the areas of derelict land left abandoned after the post-industrial decline experienced during the 1970s in the UK/USA. Moreover, the purpose of such pejorative terms is to under-value the unique qualities embodied in these disregarded and âincidentalâ urban sites. This kind of negative labelling of landscape through language is challenged through the titling of my own photographs which accompany the book.
The various examples (including my own photographs) of landscape photographic practice which illustrate the book, function as critical catalysts, from which various academic discourses are explored to propose a different conception of non-place.
The book reveals the synergy between photographic research-led practice and its equivalent in writing. Each embodies the other to form the practice. My approach incorporates a qualitative research methodology, which uses an inductive method, and is informed by the concept of interpretivism: âwhere the researcher builds abstractions, conceptions, hypotheses and theories from detailsâ (Atieno 2009: 14).
Although the book is situated critically within the field of urban landscape photographic representation, the text includes an eclectic range of allusions from within visual culture, to promote a broader academic debate between photography and other disciplines.
The book embraces interdisciplinary discourse, mediated and anchored by photographic practice. In this way, a more idiosyncratic critical lens might emerge to challenge how we might conceive the urban landscape non-place. My work re-conceptualizes through the restorative properties of photography, the cultural significance of non-place. Furthermore, the use of a deliberately allusive intertextuality seeks to elicit unexpected interdisciplinary exchanges and possibilities within the space of non-place.
In this context, a parallel can be made with the early twentieth-century geographer, J. K. Wright (1947), who considered the correlation between the imagination and geographic analysis. He also sought to imbue his analytical writing with a poetic intensity, a lyrical style, which would carry âemotional connotationâ. 2
Re-defining AugĂ©âs Use of Non-place
Although I agree with AugĂ©âs general proposition that non-place is an experience of people âpassing throughâ to more meaningful destinations, where history itself âis on our heels, following us like our shadows, like deathâ, I contest his view that people feel alienated from the contemporary airport concourse (AugĂ© 1995: 26, 27). In many ways, the example of the airport concourse space does signify the archetypal non-place: a space devoid of obvious cultural identity (save for global branding of course) in relation to meaning, collective memory, and a permanent sense of belonging, but one might challenge AugĂ©âs specific example of non-place here? For one could perceive such transit spaces as meaningful, in the sense that there is at least the human drama and interaction associated with arrival and departure? These almost primal shared feelings, divests airport concourses of their superficial anonymity, replacing it with meaningâan identifiable sense of place, however, transient that might be.
I frame my own interpretation of non-place, whilst using AugĂ©âs original term as a critical platform from which to broaden the term. Furthermore, my own photographic representations reproduced (and reflected upon) in this book are clearly differentiated, from the rather cinematic spatial case-studies referenced by AugĂ©. Rather, I eschew representations of contemporary infrastructures (and their interior spaces), in favour of the fragmented vacant spaces that these structures both create and often hide. In this sense, I prefer to investigate the ânegativeâ spaces in (what was), my local urban landscape. As such, these spaces have been created inadvertently, emerging as the spatial detritus of more valued developments. And like the transit spaces that AugĂ© describes, the collective view is that these dormant, wasteland spaces must be avoided to achieve safe passage through the urban landscape. This is landscape as the other: feared, ideologically shamed, unloved, abused by investment speculation. Not surprisingly, my book shares AugĂ©âs concern with redefining non-place (negative) in relation to place (positive), and the critical notions attached to personal and collective identity , the relational, and historical (AugĂ© 1995). Moreover, my research-led auto-ethnographic photography embraces AugĂ©âs own reflection on the role of the âpractising ethnologistâ, one that emphasizes the âhere and nowâ and reports what they are observing within the âhereâ of the moment. A condition of ethnographic research that âpresupposes the existence of a direct witness to a present actualityâ (AugĂ© 1995: 8).
Since the mid-1980s in England, the non-place has become synonymous with the late-capitalist regeneration agenda which has resulted in such sites becoming even more elusive to an unambiguous definition and place-making. In this context, I use the specificity of the term non-place, as a polemical agent, to challenge how such places could be valued by culture. 3 To further anchor this proposition, the opposite of non-place would be the National Park , a landscape embedded in national myths and narratives, and of course, the graveyardâthe apogee of a place with meaning and cultural identity.
The way in which my research practice has functioned in non-place has been embedded within this book as an allusive revelation of my âinner worldâ. In this sense, the aim of the text is to operate as an ekphrasis : a vivid description of a visual work of art, more commonly applied as a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form, and in so doing, relate more directly to the audience. 4 Its main role is to demonstrate how the research is embodied in both the collection of photographs, the writing, and literature research.
To provide some clarity for the reader regarding my critical methodology, I have found the analysis of the hermeneutic approach to ârepresentationâ offered by James Duncan and David Ley (1993) extremely useful in my desire to produce a concomitant research journey between the practical-photographic work and the written text. Duncan and Ley assert that, âthe world within the text is a partial truth, a transformation of the extra-textualâ (1993: 9). Moreover, their claim that the same processes âare at workâ in the reading and consumption of the âtextsââinvolving the readerâs own experience of the world, and the âinter-textualâ (the âcontext of other textsâ), has provided me with a more coherent critical architecture from which to explicate my key aim, which is to contribute to the field of landscape photography and the ways in which non-place can be reconceived.
Auto-ethnography and the âNon-placeâ
No research emerges from a tabula rasaâthere must be some âplatformâ for the departure. Some of these may appear anecdotal, but as Meaghan Morris contends:
[Anecdotes] are orientated futuristically towards the construction of a precise, local, and social discursive context, of which the anecdote then functions as a mise en abyme. [For me, they] are not expressions of personal experience but allegorical expositions of a model of the way the world can be said to be working. 5
In 1964, I was six years old living in the inner-city district of Hunslet, situated in south Leeds. I witnessed the deracination of the local, largely white working-class inhabitants, who witnessed their brick-built back-to-back houses demolished, to be offered accommodation in the more peripheral areas of the city. Older patterns of community life, created by the nearness of (often generational) work, school, church, allotments, and numerous recreational activities arranged through the affiliated working menâs club, were disrupted by dispersal into new purpose-built high-rise flats and estates. As a boy, the relocation seemed to take a long time, which allowed me to experience a partially destroyed neighbourhood, containing abandoned houses, complete with flooded cellars. I developed an empathy for bricks. 6 At the same time, along with other children in the area, I developed âmuscle-memoryâ for walking over this landscape of forgotten bricks, remains of bonfires, burnt mattresses, discarded Ringtons tea chests, occasionally exploring abandoned churches, adrift from their absent congregations. 7
These boyhood recollections have formed a coral of memory that has i...