Practice-based PhD thesis
Brussels, Belgium, 2012-2018
Paysage : De démarche en (dé)construction photographique is a practice-based PhD thesis carried out between October 2012 and November 2018 at ENSAV La Cambre and Université libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium). It was one of the first practice-based PhDs to be delivered by the aforementioned institutions.
My thesis is simple: photography has been instrumental in pushing us into the geological picture of the Anthropocene.
By exploring how photography’s birth is intrinsic to the industrial acceleration of the 1840s, that is, to the growing use of energy and our subsequent capacity to alter the physical world, I argue that little of what made photography so central in the West since the 1850s can be described as neutral or detached. To the contrary, photography catalyzed the rapid expansion of the West’s radius of action, while solidifying a transformative–and downright predatory–attitude towards the far-flung places, peoples, and resources it depicted.
The landscape of SW Iceland–and more specifically the Reykjanes peninsula–served as a photographic proving ground. Reykjanes is where about two thirds of the Icelandic population live. It is also the main point of entry for millions of tourists every year.
Off the beaten tracks and behind the scenes of “nature-based tourism”1, industrial expansions, powerlines, quarries, new developments and heavy machinery, offered the inevitable–and somewhat tragic–spectacle of the sweeping transformations brought about by mass tourism on the primal, volcanic landscape. And of course, all tourists, myself included, had been attracted to Iceland by photographs of pristine nature.
The manuscript became an editorial project that aimed to shift the accepted boundaries of an academic thesis, both in its content and form. It was bound by hand by Trois Studio in Brussels in September 2018 in a limited edition.
(1) Án Áfangastaðar, that is, without destination as a group of Icelandic artists suggested back in 2011 in an eponymous exhibition. See the Listasafn Reykjavíkur website.
