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Artifacts: Trevor Paglen's Frontier Photography

  • Brooke Belisle (author)
Chapter of: Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life(pp. 145–149)

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Metadata
TitleArtifacts
SubtitleTrevor Paglen's Frontier Photography
ContributorBrooke Belisle (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0014.1.23
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/making-the-geologic-now/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightBelisle, Brooke
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-12-04
Long abstractThe first photograph of Trevor Paglen’s 2010 diptych, Artifacts, is familiar. Picturing ancient ruins nestled in the cliffs of Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly, it echoes a 1873 photograph by Timo-thy O’Sullivan and a 1941 photograph by Ansel Adams. Paglen’s photograph, like its anteced-ents, is rendered in sharp-focus, without color, dominated by dramatic, diagonal striations of the cliff face. It frames the archeological history of the ruin within the geological history of the canyon within the cultural history of photography.Canyon de Chelly is actually the intersection of several canyons, formed by slow erosion over thirty million years ago. The angled striations seen in the photograph expose even older geo-logical processes, layers of sediment compressing into strata then shifting, rising, and tilting. Between the 1st and 4th century, people now called the Anasazi settled in the canyon. They built the structure in this photograph around the year 1000, and, 300 years later, they had disappeared. Navajo tribes spreading across the Southwest discovered the ruins already 500 years old. In the 18th century, Spanish colonists ventured into the canyon and soon they were converting and killing Navajos who lived there
Page rangepp. 145–149
Print length5 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Brooke Belisle

(author)