The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece of spirituality and prophetic ruin, the Stalker of the film’s title furtively negotiates a seemingly vacant toxic wasteland, guiding his clients through the Zone to a mysterious Room whose promise of absolute fulfilment carries salvationist and edenic overtones. Tarkovsky shot on location around Russian chemical factories and operating power plants; many of the crew were poisoned by their long exposure to these noxious industrial landscapes during the film’s production. The science fiction epic is notorious for uncannily prophesising the meltdown and subsequent abandonment of Chernobyl only seven years later.
Stalker relied on specific locations, cloaking these sites in the alterity of the science fiction genre; the film’s mise-en-scène ironically depicts an industrial wasteland of neglect and ruin that was the near future. It is this alignment of proximity and poetic distance that permeates the photographic works of Auckland-based Lisa Crowley. Her industrial spaces and economic landscapes evoke the mood of transience and the mid-ground vistas—views around factory walls and through overgrown fields—that Tarkovsky’s protagonists negotiate in their pilgrimage through the Zone. Crowley’s images establish a relationship between science fiction’s awe-inspiring promise and the mundane reality of the film’s laborious production.
Crowley’s titling plays with this duality, her work is a kind of location scouting: on the one hand, her photographs originate from somewhere; on the other, she denies this specificity of place by refusing to title images, instead sending us back for contextual clues to the epic themes suggested by the names of her photographic series: Garden City (2004), Country (2005), City of Earth (2008) and most recently, National Projects (2009–). Referencing both the global and the nation-state, these titles allude to questions of borders... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline