A Critical Analysis of “Disaster Topographics” by Blake Fitzpatrick “Disaster Topographics” by Blake Fitzpatrick is an article published in “Image and Inscription: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Photography”, compiled and edited by Robert Bean in commemoration of Gallery 44’s 25th anniversary in 2006 (Bean 11). The editor Robert Bean describes the book as a "photo album," a "compilation of photographs, captions, narratives and explanations", proposing a mixed, different and subjective set of histories rather than a solely authored, linear one (Bean 10). “Disaster Topographics” thus serves as one of the anthology’s different approaches to photography and photographic interpretation in Canada, in examination of the photographic representation
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The intended audience for this essay may be researchers, art historians, gallery curators, writers, art critics, photographers and other specialists in the fields of art, history, culture and photography. Through its “exploration of temporality, history, narrative, memory and forgetting, situated identity, contemporary technology”, Bean’s collection interrogates what roles photography currently plays and what roles it will be playing in the future, by emphasizing on “the temporal experience of the photographic object in relation to contemporary photo-based art in Canada” (Bean 11). Through discussing “the use of the before-and-after photograph in the representation of technological catastrophe and change” (Fitzpatrick 53), Fitzpatrick answers Bean’s question by arguing that photography plays three roles, post documentations, palimpsests of oblivion, …show more content…
Fitzpatrick sees such photograph as a post documentation and a response to the unseen narrative behind the photos. Then, Fitzpatrick analyzes Burtynsky’s photographs that “depict the forced destruction and abandonment of communities” due to the construction of Three Gorges Dam Project in China (57), and David McMillan’s before-and-after work that shows a classroom with a bas-relief of Lenin after Chernobyl nuclear disaster (58). Fitzpatrick indicates another role of photography as palimpsests of oblivion by looking at the interrelation between the before-and-after image and the actual disaster in a chronological order. Fitzpatrick highlights the retrospective effect of the before-and-after photograph, and its palimpsests documentation of “increasingly invisible objects in an incremental slide toward oblivion” (62). At last, Fitzpatrick examines the empty frames represented in Hiromi Tsuchida’s Cherry Tree. Fitzpatrick sees the failure of the after-image to recuperate the trace in as an attempt to “acknowledge a history that is beyond representation, unfinished, and thus open to the critical engagement of the present and the future”
The intended audience for this essay may be researchers, art historians, gallery curators, writers, art critics, photographers and other specialists in the fields of art, history, culture and photography. Through its “exploration of temporality, history, narrative, memory and forgetting, situated identity, contemporary technology”, Bean’s collection interrogates what roles photography currently plays and what roles it will be playing in the future, by emphasizing on “the temporal experience of the photographic object in relation to contemporary photo-based art in Canada” (Bean 11). Through discussing “the use of the before-and-after photograph in the representation of technological catastrophe and change” (Fitzpatrick 53), Fitzpatrick answers Bean’s question by arguing that photography plays three roles, post documentations, palimpsests of oblivion, …show more content…
Fitzpatrick sees such photograph as a post documentation and a response to the unseen narrative behind the photos. Then, Fitzpatrick analyzes Burtynsky’s photographs that “depict the forced destruction and abandonment of communities” due to the construction of Three Gorges Dam Project in China (57), and David McMillan’s before-and-after work that shows a classroom with a bas-relief of Lenin after Chernobyl nuclear disaster (58). Fitzpatrick indicates another role of photography as palimpsests of oblivion by looking at the interrelation between the before-and-after image and the actual disaster in a chronological order. Fitzpatrick highlights the retrospective effect of the before-and-after photograph, and its palimpsests documentation of “increasingly invisible objects in an incremental slide toward oblivion” (62). At last, Fitzpatrick examines the empty frames represented in Hiromi Tsuchida’s Cherry Tree. Fitzpatrick sees the failure of the after-image to recuperate the trace in as an attempt to “acknowledge a history that is beyond representation, unfinished, and thus open to the critical engagement of the present and the future”