These are images of a fundamentally disrupted landscape. Several waves of slum clearance over the last century have led to the total effacement of an entire district. The archive photographs appropriated in these new works were taken by Leeds Corporation c. 1900, to make the case for mass demolition of these ‘unhealthy areas’ of the city. Very few of the photographs depict Quarry Hill’s residents at the time, who were not consulted about the plans to destroy their homes. The same set of images were investigated by John Tagg in his seminal work, The Burden of Representation (1988), where he questioned the evidential power of the photograph, and the powers that utilise it. On Quarry Hill the community and the streets they lived on were eventually erased and an entirely new ‘slum’ built in their place - the largest social housing complex in the United Kingdom was finally erected in 1938, the infamous Quarry Hill flats. These in turn were demolished 40 years later.
The urban landscape today offers few clues. Any sense of place or historical continuity has been erased on the ground, making rephotography of the area in the normal mode virtually impossible. It was this very impossibility that drew me to these spaces in the first place, however. As a visual artist and postgraduate researcher investigating the hauntology of photography, I was interested in the notion of pushing the medium – the set of rules, technologies and practices – to breaking point, in order to better understand how they work. The resulting deconstructed rephotography also questions the evidential power of the photograph. While it does have the power to evoke absence, and these seismic changes in our surroundings, what happened is not evidenced by the image – then and now can no longer be reconciled.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)