By examining the iconised photographs of the COVID-19 pandemic, published under the heading of The Great Empty by the New York Times in March 2020, this article explores the aesthetic operations... Show more By examining the iconised photographs of the COVID-19 pandemic, published under the heading of The Great Empty by the New York Times in March 2020, this article explores the aesthetic operations and ethical implications of representing anxiety through photographing desolate landscapes. To do so, it situates these images within the genre of late photography, also known as aftermath photography, to discuss how emptiness can function as a surrogate for anxiety. First, by foregrounding the unique temporality of the landscape genre in photography, it examines the aesthetic dimension of seeing deserted places in photographs. By shifting its focus from the image to its caption, it then discusses how the caption of such photographs can interpolate an ethical dimension onto them. Finally, by drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of “gesture,” the article puts forward that the combination of aestheticized photographs with ethicised captions in The Great Empty expresses anxiety as a mode of gesturality: a sui generis communicational mode that simultaneously galvanizes and paralyzes the viewer. Show less
The skin is a surface that separates the inside from the outside while belonging to neither of them: it is a sheer instance of liminality where in the impervious borders of things are turned into... Show moreThe skin is a surface that separates the inside from the outside while belonging to neither of them: it is a sheer instance of liminality where in the impervious borders of things are turned into the porous boundaries of beings. The landscape, the skin of the world, is such a leaky boundary, which imbricates and implicates with terrestrial organisms while exceeding any organicity. By examining the recent photograph taken by contemporary Dutch artist Roosmarijn Pallandt (fig.1), this paper reads her representation of the landscape as the terraqueous skin of the world: an organelles organ that conduces the possibility of haptic perception through photography. To do this, it first draws on Tim Ingold’s theory of “surface vision” and then employs Edward S. Casey’s method of “liminology” to eventually apperceive the skin of the landscape as what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “a being-to-itself insofar as it is from side to side outside itself.” Show less
