Narrating Visual Landscapes: Towards a New Approach for the Industrial and Post-Industrial Calder Valley
2010; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1836-6600
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Industries and Urban Development
ResumoThis article examines various landmarks and work spaces in and around the Calder Valley, on the Lancashire and Yorkshire border, as well as an archive of photography relating to them, which are central to the author's research for the Visual Sociology department at Goldsmiths College. Historically, this location is assumed to have moved out of the feudal era, from pre-modernism into modernism - rapid industrialisation - and then on into the post-industrial, post-modern era, via a series of politically-driven industrial retreats. In one sense, this paper sides with 'multiple modernity' thinkers such as Latour and Blumenberg, who outline how 'pre-modern' and 'modern' spaces have previously been thought through in misleading ways. Traces of the 'pre-modern' and 'industrial' remain, and banner headings such as 'post-industrial' are in one sense an attempt to maintain tidy theory. Yet in another sense, a huge question mark still hangs over the entire area due to its undeniable move away from industrial capital into 'post-modern' service economies, economies which themselves have recently been called into question. Further, recent theories of community in a global world, now open to flows of people and information, have made difficult any bounded notion of identity, belonging and place. This paper works through the ways in which identity, community, place and belonging are performative, malleable and constructed. It then asks wider questions about the ways in which both visual practitioners and writers might move towards a new kind of formalism which begins to address some of these very big issues and questions. Between May and June 2001, Walsden Print Co. was finally closed by its owner, the Leeds Group. It opened in 1935. My father and I visited the site over the summer of 2001. He had worked there, full-time, for many years. The place ran twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, apart from a brief summer maintenance period. It used to make me tired just thinking about it thundering away all night, all year, decade after decade, through the relentless efforts of rotating groups of men, and they were all men, on the shop floor. Yet in a single day, the oppression had been inverted into a silence just as constant, and in some ways just as oppressive, as the noise. The workers hated it when it was there and hated it when it was gone. We sneaked into the building after the roof was taken off and the builders had left, in the late afternoon sun, to photograph the walls, which were covered in traces of work, slasher-flick splatters of industrial dye, unrepeatable slogans, testimonies to the uneasy relationship between the management and workers, and to the welfare state which they were about to engage with, probably just as uneasily. All this was mixed up with non-sequiturs, pornographic doodles, hundreds of stickers from apples, pin-up girls and industry calendars. This queasy mishmash of meaning wasn't an anomaly, a 'do not adjust your set' moment, its illogical juxtapositions were a true picture of the world, begging to be captured (see Figures 1-3). The cameras and tripods we used were paid for by my father's work in unhealthy and sometimes hazardous conditions, within the factory walls, which were being etched onto the light-sensitive film. He bought himself a decent camera, and then got me one for my birthday, after I experimented with his. The factory had indirectly produced the cameras, and now it was vanishing into them forever. There was an unspoken sense that things would never be the same, and we wanted to preserve something of the site, but there was an equally unspoken sense of doing something together, which transcended the act of photography, and the ruin, which was about getting over loss, and getting on with each other. My PhD research focuses on Todmorden, a small town in the Calder Valley, on the Lancashire and Yorkshire border. Part of this involves trawling collections of images relating to the area. …
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