Nigel Green/Photolanguage
Stereo print of Spillepeng, Malmö, 2008
In Malmö, the Stereo Adapter perhaps found its most pertinent use as a response to the landscape of Spillepeng, a new landfill peninsula projecting into the Baltic Sea, created with bagged waste from Malmö. Sections of Spillepeng had been landscaped by a team from the Landscape Laboratory of the Agricultural College at Alnarp. The dual stereo image posed a nexus of critical questions around the notion of new land, amplifying the sense of unease in the navigation of a terrain that was not simply being worked, but in the act of being made anew – its substrata, surface and its animate life all established little more than two years before our visit. Although Spillepeng was too new to be on coastal maps at the time, it was a model extension to the indigenous ecologies and habitats of Southern Sweden. An image of a shallow valley with young willows, with a season of regrowth after pollarding, captures powerfully the newness of the land, one which has not yet completely settled from the industrial processes of its creation. The stereo print amplifies a sense of disjunction in the terrain: on one hand, the photographic image itself could be said to resonate with a history of art of the worked landscape such as Van Gogh’s sketches of Dutch farming landscapes around Nuenen, or Peter Henry Emerson’s documentations of the Norfolk Broads (both from the 1880s), even Rembrandt’s etching St Jerome Beside a Pollard Willow (1648). On the other hand, the effect of the doubled image within the stereo print suggests processes of replication, cloning, the artificial; a terra forma, a sci-fi landscape in which the assumed relationship between the natural and man-made has to be completely reassessed.
A distinctive feature of prints using the Stereo Adapter is the black border in the centre of the dual image, which occurs as a result ofa blind spot between the two mirrors. This is not a crisp demarcation between the two, as with a stereo camera, but an unpredictable void in vision that distorts the inner margins of both. With practice one can mitigate the effects of the blind spot and limit its encroachment on the two halves of the image. However, with our interest in the intermediate phase of the print itself, we embrace the distortions of the central void as a generative zone of interference. It is a central frame that is rogue; that appears as a hostile inversion to the luminosity of the photographic image. It is a third region of image-making within the print, where the indexical realism of the photograph is in fatal dialogue with abyssal depth and obliteration.
on site review 39: tools
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