Final Photo Essay

Link to Photographs:

Urban Agriculture

As writers...some things seem to take shape on their own volition, as if there were some force hiding from us of a universal and potent quality that is too big to comprehend. It has to be dealt out in small servings and tirelessly searched for. It has to wear a veil so that we may only peek at it every now and again. Sometimes it seems like reality is just a reference point, or medium, through which this force communicates to us. There is a necessary filter in our minds, put in place to shadow these somethings, that we may slowly uncover little sparks of what humanity has been searching for, lest everything happen all at once and we are consumed. Yet...somehow Plato was able to escape the cave.

There are little gaps in reality, tiny glitches in the matrix that don't seem to make sense, places in the air that seem to have burped, shifted it's contents along a fault line, and revealed a crevasse descending down, down, deep into the rabbit hole. As humans, these are the places where we must look. These things we see every day that don't make a lot of sense will eventually emit shafts of light like the macro-cosmic face of God trying to squeeze through the sheer eye of a pinhole. And even these small portions are too confusing, but it's our only way of making sense of it. Out of every banality, there is something to be said. It is in these little gaps that we must look to find some sort of truth, and meaning for our lives. Our job as writers is to dive in to these holes, try to interpret towards the bottom, and resurface to name the unnameable.

What I see going on in these photos is one of those glimpses meant to be extracted from behind the curtain of reality. It is a tension creating a crevasse. The reason I've called this collection Urban Agriculture is because what I see going on in these photos resembles the tension that occurs when urban environments intrude into that of the pastoral, especially in the business of agriculture. Our romantic vision of a typical farm setting usually consists of an ideal world with bright red barns, quaint wooden fences, and clothing hanging out on the line. It's where chickens are not cooped up, cattle roam freely through the pasture, and farmer John still works with plow in hand as he sows seeds that have never heard of pesticides or Monsanto products. However, we know that this often not the case. There is a gap here that is getting wider. Reality is crumbling at the nexus of a few grain silos. What was once a symbol of abundance and prosperity is now a symbol of poverty and better days, as graffiti begins to declare war on the sides of walls. It reminds us now, instead, of a standard of life we have set for ourselves that is reaching a point of excess and unsustainability. It's all machinated. And from here, we gain access to the bottom of the well. 

Urban Agriculture: Where the Pastoral, Art, and Industrial Urbanization Meet

Here's a link to the photos, first of all. I was having trouble figuring out how to put a slideshow on here:

Urban Argriculture

I'll have to be honest, when I first set out to take these pictures, I didn't really have a particular theme in mind. I kind of just decided to go for it and see what happened. To my pleasant surprise, the theme I was apparently searching for just happened to take shape on it's own volition. I love it when life works out that way. I've included a lot more than ten, but seeing as how this was our first presentation I just decided to post all the ones I thought were worth keeping and get your guys' opinions on them. From there, I plan to narrow this collection down a little bit, and maybe even go out and take some more.

  Before I even decided on a theme, I knew I wanted to try my best to keep a sense of symmetry and order. The formal structuring of the photos helps to convey more of a sense of how farming, once a messy, work-with-your-hands job, is being transformed into more and more a corporate business, rather than one which is privately owned. The symmetrical ordering helped to conjure up the thought-out structural formalities that you might find in a city blueprint, as opposed to the more chaotic blueprint of nature. This sort of rigidly planned aspect I think helped to offer a nice tension for the context of a pastoral world that is not rigidly planned at all.

The reason I've called this collection Urban Agriculture is because what I see going on in these photos resembles the tension that occurs when urban environments intrude into that of the pastoral, especially in the business of agriculture. Our romantic vision of a typical farm setting usually consists of an ideal world with bright red barns, quaint wooden fences, and clothing hanging out on the line. It's where chickens are not cooped up, cattle roam freely through the pasture, and farmer John still works with plow in hand as he sows seeds that have never heard of pesticides or Monsanto products. However, we know that this often not the case. As the world grows larger we see a blurring of the line between urban and rural, in so far as the rural landscape is becoming almost an extension of it's urban twin, both in look and in lifestyle. Grain silos grow taller and larger as companies begin to take control. Silos start looking more like rural skyscrapers as a fast-growing nation quickly reaches a sustainability breaking point. What was once a symbol of abundance and prosperity is now a symbol of poverty and better days, as graffiti begins to declare war on the sides of walls. It reminds us now, instead, of a standard of life we have set for ourselves that is reaching a point of excess and unsustainability. It's all machinated. For once, there is now a man-made boundary that exists between agriculture and nature, and one can start to see more resemblances of an urban environment.

In the Lobby of the Secret Service Headquarters There Hangs a Picture of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Coincidence?

Richard Ross / Architecture of Authority

     


Richard Ross' photography, and especially his collection Architecture of Authority, stood out to me more than any of the other photo essays that were presented to us, both in subject matter and in form. With the orderly, symmetrical arrangement and subtle, yet, domineering and dramatic perspective of the objects in the picture, it felt like I was looking at a still from the police state love-child of Pink Floyd's The Wall and a Stanley Kubrick film (which, as an afterthought, would be a pretty bad ass combination for a movie).

By making good use of the architectural elements present in his environment, Ross projects an aesthetically pleasing, yet very disturbing perspective onto everyday objects that would otherwise remain dry and static. But still, the most interesting thing about these photographs is that in his critique of institutionalized power and abuse of authority they manage to remain absent and void of any presence of these same corrupt authority figures, or of any human life form. It's almost as if the corruption existed within the present space itself, as if it was there when it was built, as if the purpose behind this architectural design was masterminded with the principles of domination and submission, the master/slave relationship, in mind. 

The elements of action in this photograph (which happen to be furniture and other various household scenery) only create meaning from how their forms interact with each other within their predefined spaces, and therefore, paradoxically transform the viewer into a passive subject predestined by his environment. They show humanity as a majority living under the suspicious thumb of a precious, paranoid few who wish to remain this way through the guise of propaganda that tells its subjects "Be A Happy Worker!" And the only reason these elements are effective is because they lack a human presence. With bodies filling the seats of the auditoriums and prison cells, we lack a proper structural perspective on how these institutions are inherently set up to control and indoctrinate the individual. The creepy, cathartic feeling that the viewer is left with comes from the sudden realization that these are scenes and activities that we participate in every day.

What Ross is getting at is not so much that corruption of power exists within the individual, but in the established system he has created for himself that is almost doomed to breed corruption. His photos depict an almost Orwellian society of citizens who are predetermined, by simple fact of behavioral conditioning through environmental stimuli, to be unwillingly manipulated into obedience. And within these manipulative scenes, Ross simultaneously manages to also bring broad overtones of aesthetic pleasure which inspire fantastical dreams of grandeur and beautiful architectural landscapes within a man-made world, that seeks to subvert any sort of fantasy or beauty that might remain. And therein lies the trickery. It's almost as if these scenes were artificially in place before humanity, like a child's empty play set, constructed by the powers that be, which already has the Barbie dream house and the Malibu roadster, and just needs some bodies to fill the seats and carry out instructions. The only exception is that the dream house is a heavily surveillanced prison cell and the Malibu roadster is your inevitable casket hurling down the interstate at 85 mph (not that we would know the difference between dream houses and prison cells, anyway). Man is a victim in the environment of his own invention.

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door...

You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no 

knowing where you might 

be swept off to."

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

~Photographs by Kenny Johnson