Glass Land - A Place for the Unknowable
A Research MA Thesis consisting of two parts: a written thesis, titled “A Place for the Unknowable - Opacity in Photographic Aesthetics of Environmental Despoliation”, and a visual thesis titled “Glass Land”. Where the written project analyses and compares the work of photographers Edward Burtynsky and Igor Tereshkov, the visual project combines archival research with my own photographic practice to delve into the Dutch Westland region and its many, many greenhouses.
Request either thesis here, available digitally and in print.
The Westland is a region spanning across the area between the Dutch cities of The Hague, Delft and Rotterdam, and the western coastline of the Netherlands. Nicknamed ‘The Glass City’, the region is characterised by the greenhouses of various horticultural industries. Despite its relatively small geographical scale, the Westland produces over 13 billion euros worth of fruit and vegetables that is exported around Europe and beyond.
Whilst significantly marked by these omnipresent industries, the region is further characterised by its urban development, with new houses, streets, and entire neighbourhoods rapidly appearing in the eleven towns that make up the area. In a place where space is valuable and sparse, the dynamics of domestic and industrial life are constantly in flux. Over time, with the combination of ever-developing innovations within greenhouse technologies and increasing scales of production and export, the Westland has transformed from a rural, fragmented, but lively region into a collective municipality, its morphology bound together by an industrial aesthetic and ethics of greenhouse horticulture. With the machinic and mechanical turn that has taken place within the industry over the last century, greenhouse logic now lies centrally to the Westland region at large.
While producing higher yields using less water, pesticides, and soil, greenhouse horticulture is simultaneously marked by increased energy usage, decreased biodiversity and green public space, as well as newer forms of pollution such as light pollution. The use of artificial lights to maximise growth and yield during the night illuminates the dark sky, making Westland clouds shine bright with orange hues as the region goes to sleep. With more and more studies being done on the harmful effects of excessive amounts of anthropogenic light on humans, animals, and the natural environment at large, light pollution is an irrefutable aspect of the contemporary ecological crisis. While we see it all around the world, especially in highly urbanised or industrialised places, light pollution still regularly remains unnoticed.
Glass Land is the result of a visual research project into the ways in which the Westland is marked by a type of pollution that often remains opaque, and departs from the theoretical and conceptual considerations within a second, written thesis that was written alongside the creation of this visual thesis. The written thesis analyses the work of two photographers dealing with the theme of environmental despoliation (literally: ‘plundering’, ‘pillaging’) in radically diverging ways to consider how the notion of opacity marks their photographs. Arguing that opacity can be a critically potent framework in photographic practices that engage with the ecological crisis, it touches upon questions of representation, abstraction, materiality, and more.
Combining my own photographic practice with archival visual research, this project constructs a fragmentary portrait of a place under the veil of a type of pollution that goes unnoticed so often, exploring a range of sites and situations that are related to the historical and cultural embeddedness of the greenhouses and the ways in which they mark the region. In doing so, it compiles images gathered in the extensive online database of Erfgoed Westland (Heritage Westland), a joint effort of the Westland Museum and Historical Archive Westland. Unless specified otherwise, all archival images were found within this database and include their catalogue numbers.
Departing from the observation of more concrete objects, subjects, and places related to greenhouse horticulture, it develops to delve more deeply into broader related conceptual themes such as domesticity, domestication, monoculture, productivity, and regularity. As such, the two theses exist in close proximity and relation to one another, but can equally be viewed, read, or otherwise observed separately.
For a selection of excerpts of the visual thesis, see images on the right.
For a closer view of some of my own photographs, see images below.
