Tāmaki Makaurau-based, interdisciplinary artist Joyce Campbell is known for her extensive photographic practice. Spanning nearly three decades, Campbell’s research-driven practice employs both historical and contemporary methods of image-making to explore the intersection of natural and human systems, often in states of transition or flux. Her work offers insight into complex environments and ecologies that are often ordinarily unseen, with her use of cameraless photography[1] disrupting hierarchical conventions found in Western landscape painting traditions and the viewing of ecological subjects within Anthropocentric society.
The publication On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell discusses Campbell's practice and her 2019 exhibition of the same name at Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, which presented an extensive mid-career survey of her work.[2] Comprised of a collection of edited essays, the book offers an in-depth discussion of the methods, philosophies, histories, and connections that are explored and illustrated throughout Campbell’s practice. This essay serves as a discussion of Campbell’s use of historic and analogue photographic methods, with particular focus on the chapter “Nothing to Photograph” by art historian Geoffrey Batchen.
While Campbell's work spans various mediums, she has become known for her use of 19th century daguerreotype and ambrotype techniques. For Campbell, the daguerreotype is “a technology whose invention marked the beginning of the modern era,” its invention coinciding with the Industrial Revolution and expansion of globalization.[3] In 2006, Campbell’s expedition to the Ross Sea in Antarctica marked the first instance of daguerreotypes to be made on the continent. The resulting series of images, titled Last Light: Antarctica, records the fragility and expansiveness of the continent as imaged through the physical interaction of light and silver.
In contrast to more contemporary techniques such as digital photography, the daguerreotype process requires the photographer to be patient in the imaging process – relying on their own assessment of time and lighting in the capturing of the image. In essence, the image of the landscape is in the hands of the landscape itself rather than its viewer. Rather than being able to capture its scenery instantaneously, the daguerreotype’s making relies on the viewer’s temporal commitment to the imaging process - exposing the plate to light as determined by the site’s environment, and developing the fragile image through an intricate chemical process. This aleatory imaging process results in an image dictated by the both subject and photographer.
Figure 1: Joyce Campbell, Ice Ghoul, 2006. Daguerreotype 12.7 x 17.8 cm.
Figure 2: Joyce Campbell, Heap of Snow, 2006, Daguerreotype 12.7 x 17.8 cm.
Figure 3: Joyce Campbell, Erebus, 2006, Daguerreotype 12.7 x 17.8 cm.
Campbell states the series was in part a response to the experience of living in America in a time when climate change denial was prevalent, stating “I wanted to capture how angry and disgusted the land must be at us by now.”[4]
Engagement with politics and history is a theme that flows throughout Campbell’s methodology and practice, with her projects often connecting site-specific works to broader themes of environmental fragility and the impact of industrial human activity on a global scale.
The connection between photography and Antarctica is well entrenched, with Campbell’s journey mirroring that of mariner James Clark Ross on his scientific expedition in 1839. That same year, William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre announced their respective developments of the Talbotype and Daguerreotype; several glaciers in Antarctica are now named after these photographers to honour their contributions to the medium.[5]Last Light: Antarctica connects both in path and process to these histories, situating itself within an ongoing dialogue between the location and its image.
Regarding the Antarctic landscape, Ross is said to have stated that “there would be nothing to photograph but the level plain of boundless, featureless ice.”[6] This comment raises the question of how one deems something worthy of imaging, the conventions that sit behind such decisions, and in turn the impact of Western ideologies on our relationship to the environment through landscape imagery. This in turn mirrors the writing of ecologist Geoff Park, whose book Theatre Country outlines how landscape is conceptualised as commodity under colonial thought.[7]
Batchen writes that “in refusing to provide any traditional viewing position [or] place us in relation to that landscape, [Campbell’s] pictures present nature not as inherently sublime, but as “simply indifferent” to our gaze.”[8] While the concept of landscape within Western ideology and art has historically prioritised the beauty or readability of the image, the ambiguity of Campbell’s daguerreotypes acts not to convey the human perception of a space but the truth of it as captured through the physical interaction of materials present - “a chemical inscription of a physical phenomenon.”[9] In visualizing ‘nothing’, the work asks the viewer to consider the act of looking.
The material process Campbell undertakes in the creation of Last Light: Antarctica could be considered an example of what author Lauren Greyson describes as “reenchantment”,[10] a concept that proposes the languages of science and technology - often portrayed as sterile and anthropocentric methods of exploring the natural world - can by harnessed to foster a sense of curiosity and connection between humanity and wider existence. Writer and art historian Christina Barton reflects:
[By] choosing to use photographic processes that originated in the nineteenth century, [Campbell’s] daguerreotypes, collodion wet plates, and gelatin silver prints serve less as ripostes to the omissions and insensitivities of the past than as their restaging by another historical mode of representation, [delivering] images not by human hand but by the reaction of light and chemicals [that reinscribe] what was already there.[11]
By involving the environment in the process of image making, these complex, slow-working material processes stand in contrast to more recent digital techniques, grounding the image in the temporal experience of its making while at the same time highlighting its ephemerality. In turn, these works reject the common subject-object relationship and aesthetic conventions found in 19th century pastoral landscape painting by centring non-human subjects in ways that honour their integrity over the idealisation of the image.
In these ways, Campbell seeks to investigate the honesty of the world, capturing it beyond human expectation through methods that remind us of the subjectivity and complexity of “what we don’t or cannot know of this or any place”.[12]
Despite the reenchanting qualities of Campbell’s images, their creation was driven in part by a wish to resist the continued extractivism and ecological objectification that drives climate change - what she summarises as "the global techno-capitalist hegemony that underpins the exponential collapse of biodiversity… spirit and mutual understanding in the contemporary world.”[13] In creating these works within the context of photography’s history, and with reference to the impacts of globalization, industrialisation, capitalism and Anthropocentric ideology – the results of which have resulted in and continue to drive environmental destruction -, Campbell's daguerreotypes explore how complex biological systems and relationships can be represented via a photographic medium and processes. In doing so, Campbell creates an opportunity for viewers to engage with the myriad of thoughts and emotions experienced around the topic of industrial society’s dominion over the natural world for Anthropocentric interest. In turn, this body of work offers us the chance to reflect on anthropocentric humanity’s impact of industrialization on the planet, the fragile nature of existence.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
1. Joyce Campbell, Ice Ghoul 1, 2006. Becquerel daguerreotype 12.7 x 17.8 cm. Two Rooms, Auckland, New Zealand. Accessed May 29th 2023, https://ocula.com/art-galleries/two-rooms/artworks/joyce-campbell/ice-ghoul/.
2. Joyce Campbell, Heap of Snow, 2006. Becquerel daguerreotype 12.7 x 17.8 cm. Two Rooms, Auckland, New Zealand. Accessed May 29th 2023, https://cdags.org/galleries/daguerreotypes-joyce-campbell/.
3. Joyce Campbell, Erebus, 2006. Becquerel daguerreotype 12.7 x 17.8 cm. Accessed May 29th 2023, https://cdags.org/galleries/daguerreotypes-joyce-campbell/.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell. Ed. John C. Welchman. Sternberg Press & Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaki Toi, 2019.
Greyson, Lauren. Vital reenchantments: Biophilia, Gaia, cosmos, and the affectively ecological. punctum books, 2019
White, Rebekah. ”Profile: Joyce Campbell,” New Zealand Geographic, https://www.nzgeo.com/photography/joyce-campbell/.
[1] Christina Barton, “Foreword”, in On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell, ed. John C. Welchman, Sternberg Press & Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaki Toi (2019): 35. [2] John C. Welchman, “On the Last Afternoon”, in On the Last Afternoon, 55. [3] Geoffrey Batchen, “Nothing to Photograph”, in On the Last Afternoon, 97. [4] Rebekah White, ”Profile: Joyce Campbell,” New Zealand Geographic, https://www.nzgeo.com/photography/joyce-campbell/ [5] Batchen, 97. [6] Ibid., 95. [7] Geoff Park, Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua, Victoria University Press (2006): 116. [8] Batchen, 102. [9] Ibid. [10] Lauren Greyson, Vital reenchantments: Biophilia, Gaia, cosmos, and the affectively ecological. punctum books, 2019. [11] Barton, On The Last Afternoon, 35. [12] Batchen, On the Last Afternoon, 102. [13] Ibid., 100.
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