“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former…..” George, who is from Wellington, is quoting Albert Einstein as we’re looking at Andrej Krementschouk’s photo essay on Pripyat, the abandoned and still radioactive city built for Chernobyl workers. Of the 21 other photo essays in The City exhibition, George says this one is “particularly stark, it’s a shocker really”.
The photographer notes how former residents are allowed to return once a year and, despite the huge health risks, they do - to collect small reminders from their homes, memories of their former lives.
George’s reaction was typical of many at the opening. Both the scale of the exhibition – with around 200 large format images – and the stacked hanging, reinforces their emotional impact. The cities shown here are either toxic, rampantly overgrown, imploding from within or – as in the cases of Thomas Meyer’s Dubai and Pepa Hristova’s Tokyo - materially wealthy but seemingly soulless.
Helen Sellwood had travelled from Christchurch for the weekend and singled out Heinrich Volkel’s images of Gaza: “The randomness of the destruction and the physical look of the ruined buildings immediately made me think of Christchurch.” But we both agreed the relentlessness of the destruction must make it, in the words of the photographer, a truly ‘terrible city’.
Julia Brooke White, herself a photographer and in Masterton to cover the Golden Shears competition, was struck by Julian Roder’s series on Lagos. “It doesn’t look African, there is no colour, it is all sombre, there is a sameness,” she said. It’s true, the land is beige, stripped bare of plant life. Carparks are full, shanty towns stretch to the horizon and acres of dirt lie ready for ‘development’.
Is this where globalisation is leading us.... to slums that - except for a few local differences - look like every other slum around the world?
“In the past, cities weren’t created on a whim like this,” says Julia, “they were there for a reason. Now in places like China, it’s decided that ‘we want a city of 50,000 or one million’ and it happens.”
She also connected to Jorg Bruggemann’s images of Ushuaia, in Argentina. Long known as the southern most city in the world, it is also a departure point for trips to Antarctica: “It’s a place I’ve long wanted to go to but have never seen any images of before,” she said. The youth captured here congregate listlessly in parks or look out with blank looks and downcast faces.
The City left me wondering whether maybe the 22 photographers had too readily embraced the formula of ‘bleak, alienated, impoverished city’, finding places and images to fit that brief. The only vaguely positive series comes from Anne Schonharting who reveals the life of Auroville, southern India, an international, humanistic township founded in 1968 to reflect the spiritual beliefs of Sri Aurobindo. At last some greenery, vaguely contented looking people and benign, colourful dwellings!
This mode of living would be seen as too ‘way out’ for many, but perhaps this is really what is needed in the future - a radically different format for towns and cities, and a radically different way of living together. Based on the images in this show, following the status quo is an empty and frightening option.
Wairarapa Museum of Art and History