Fortunes of War

Eric Lesdema

Description

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/

FROM THE SERIES EDITOR TO THE READER: The Immateriality of Culture

ALFREDO CRAMEROTTI

What’s in a Day?

ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS

Right on Target

JAN BAETENS

A Visual Historiography 

JANE TORMEY

A Reading, in Retrospection

NICOLETTE BARSDORF-LIEBCHEN

‘… Pro Foro Mori’

GERALD MOORE

Unstuck: ‘War Artists Without A War’

PAUL GOUGH

‘Closed for Judging’: The Just Emplacement of Eric Lesdema 

ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS

The Practitioner in Alter Space 

ERIC LESDEMA

About the Contributors

Sujets

• Individual Photographers
• Artists' Books
• Philosophy
• Artist's book
• Multiculturalism
• Photography
• Journalism
• Documentary film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 10 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783209057
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

FORTUNES OF WAR

First published in the UK in 2021 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2021 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image and photographs: © Eric Lesdema
Copy editor: MPS Limited
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production managers: Mareike Wehner and Helen Gannon
Typesetting: Holly Rose
Series editor: Alfredo Cramerotti
Hardback ISBN 978-1-78320-904-0
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-906-4
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78320-905-7
Critical Photography Series ISSN 2041 8345
Printed & bound by Severn
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
CONTENTS
FROM THE SERIES EDITOR TO THE READER: THE IMMATERIALITY OF CULTURE
ALFREDO CRAMEROTTI
WHAT’S IN A DAY?
ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS
RIGHT ON TARGET
JAN BAETENS
A VISUAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
JANE TORMEY
A READING, IN RETROSPECTION
NICOLETTE BARSDORF-LIEBCHEN
‘… PRO FORO MORI’
GERALD MOORE
UNSTUCK: ‘WAR ARTISTS WITHOUT A WAR’
PAUL GOUGH
‘ CLOSED FOR JUDGING’: THE JUST EMPLACEMENT OF ERIC LESDEMA
ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS
THE PRACTITIONER IN ALTER SPACE
ERIC LESDEMA
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
FROM THE SERIES EDITOR TO THE READER
THE IMMATERIALITY OF CULTURE
ALFREDO CRAMEROTTI
I am keen to link cultural matters with scientific insights; and see if the two overlap or collide. For instance, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, in its simplest form, advances the idea that the gravitational field, the ‘system’ that conveys gravity (as an electric field conveys electricity) is not diffused through space; it is that space itself. Space is not something through which things move, distinct from matter; it is a material component of the world. As such, it is an entity whose form ‘undulates, flexes, curves, twists’. 1 It curves where there is matter; it expands and contracts constantly, endlessly; it moves like the surface of the sea.
Similarly, culture (and its multiple and seemingly infinite ‘products’) is not a fixed thing. Even if at a first glance a work of art, building, speech, book, dance or film is shaped in a relatively fixed form or is presented as a given output, in reality it is subtler that it appears. It is never fixed in perennial state; it is subject to different uses, and is an invitation for reshaping, manipulation, interpretation, restaging, twisting. It is the same piece of art, but it is seen and perceived differently from what it has been in the past and will be in the future. As an electron is simply a series of jumps from one interaction to another i.e. it materializes only when interacting with something else, a cultural form only comes to existence when colliding with another one.
In quantum mechanics, no ‘object’ (we are talking about particles here) has a position for good. It can only be detected when colliding with another object. Only then does it assume a definite position. We are left with the problem that we do not know where or when its components will reappear; we can only estimate through calculation the probability of them showing up here or there. Things, in other words, are made of elementary processes in which ‘quanta’ of matter and space flow and continually interact with each other, providing us with the illusion of space forming and time passing. Similarly, in a cultural context we do not really know what happens when something materializes; what we can know is only how physical aspects of reality affect one another. It is not about the ‘what’ but rather about the ‘how.’
Cultural form is also a matter of interaction. Culture is elastic even if it appears solid, concrete, rigid. It is like the cosmos itself, where light and things move constantly but appear ‘static’ to the naked eye. Photons (particles of light) and atoms (particles of matter) on a perennial journey; infinitesimal wavelets that move, rendering everything never stable but merely a jump from one state to another. Culture is not of fixed shapes or materials; it is a continuous, restless swarming of states, appearances and disappearances, materialization and dissipation, existence and non-existence; a set of vibrations, of interactive relationships, of happenings.
Endnotes
1 See Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics ( Sette brevi lezioni di fisica ), trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (London: Penguin Books, [2014] 2016).
WHAT’S IN A DAY?
ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS
Complicit
Where is the conflict? This is the question Eric Lesdema asks with his photographic series Fortunes of War . The question is asked obliquely yet relentlessly, haunting the bodies and the spaces between those bodies. Every single image booms with the question, planting in the viewer the compulsive urge to find the conflict, folded somewhere between the material of the image and the bodies represented in it. We are all captured in this search, in our turn performing what we unconsciously do anyway: we populate space with conflict and its violence, and we position ourselves in relation to it, whether this might be in the deep end or at a distance, taking sides or blocking the conflict from our view.
These images render one complicit with the conflict they capture. They set up their temporal and spatial parameters in such a way that they annul any hope of escaping violence. They render conflict the only ontological condition of our time, and us complicit with its emergence. This is the reason for which Lesdema’s work has stirred so much interest in terms of thinking, observation and analysis, as this volume attests (see also Hall and Sealy 2001). In this introduction to the volume, I would like to single out and focus on six themes that appear in the texts of the contributions and the images of the series. At points, there might be an impression of other themes, other interpretations and meanings, indeed other ways of looking at the photographs and the texts, even meanings that might contradict the choice of these six properties as the main or even the main properties of the series. This may undoubtedly be true – or at least a true and necessary illusion that covers up the violence of selection. But whatever meaning we extract, there is one property that indisputably oozes out of both the images and the texts written on them: we, the viewers, the readers, the frames, the bodies in the frame, the bodies outside the frame, the objects and surfaces passing through the frame, are all complicit with the emergence of violence.
Anterior
This complicity extends in time. Lesdema’s methodology, the ‘ant-optik’, anticipates the future of conflict by rooting it into the banal every day, itself always in the forgettable past or the unobservable present. ‘Ant-optik’ is anterior to the conflict. It is also oblique to it. It looks to the future askance, leaving it outside the frame. The images wallow in distraction, obsession, lethargy – all conditions of forgetting that the future is already here. Anteriority is always obliqueness: there is no other way of looking at the future and not being subsumed to it. For this very reason of anteriority, the future is captured. These photographic images ‘anticipate’. We do not know what, but it feels inescapable. We do not know when, but it has already begun – or rather, it has always been here. Our complicity with the conflict ensures it. We anticipate future sadness, solitary death, ecological disaster, resource depletion; we anticipate violence, war, conflict; we have always been complicit with the waves of refugees, the unequal power distribution, the unjust emplacement of human and non-human bodies. Future itself is made complicit to the conflict.
Lesdema employs various modes of future-capturing. One of the most irreverent ones is the way he challenges the traditional belief, as Jan Baetens puts it, that photographs are traces of what has already been. Here instead we have the traces of what is to come, a future anterior that never exhausts itself in production but hovers, perennially peripheral, above the present. These traces open up fractally to capture the multiplicity of the future, leaving no space devoid of conflict. Jane Tormey compares Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project with Fortunes of War, resemiologizing the photographic production process. Quoting from Benjamin, Tormey writes: ‘in an assemblage of small constituent parts, each “individual moment” has the potential to gather “temporal momentum” in its confrontation with other concepts. In the course of that process a conception of history is constructed – it isn’t fixed or conclusive’. Each piece of matter in the series is a piece that fractally opens, a fan-like gaping awning, funnelling a history yet to happen, reinstating a history that has never stopped happening. The temporal momentum is paralysing in its banality, irresistible in its familiarity and atrocious in its relentlessly repeated resolution.
Oblique
What anterior is to time, oblique is to space. The Elsewhere is central in the series, while the centre remains decidedly off-focus. Not unlike the Renaissance painting technique of mixing the sublime with the quotidian, where the main story of a crucifixion would play second fiddle to the labours of a farmer clearing his stable, Lesdema’s imagery veils the sublime spectacle of violence behind the quotidian detail of the seemingly insignificant. But, just like a Renaissance painting, Fortunes of War opens up the possibility of a ubiquity that transcends habitual spatial boundaries. It shows how all bodies, human and non-human, animate and inanimat