Transitions: Extinction | Dorothea Lange and Vanessa Winship

The cover image for Extinction (Extinção), a film by Salomé Lamas (2018), is a black and white still of a man climbing up the stairs of a concrete brutalist relic, an enormous rotunda supported by a tall, curving high wall. The film is an exploration of Eastern European border politics, focusing on Transnistria, the break-away, unrecognised state claimed by the Republic of Moldova since the dissolution of the USSR , operating as an autonomous territorial unit. The film speaks to the region’s militarisation and border conflicts, in a former Soviet-ruled area with conflicting ethnic, national, cultural and socio-political identities.

Despite its timid unpacking of the complex histories of the region and its shifting territorial autonomies and relationships to Russia, the film has a nostalgic desire for finding hope where communist politics failed, aestheticising this by means of a return to the Soviet relic. The film is all drizzling rain, sparse landscape, cheap motels with flickering lights — a kind of social aridity. Watching the film, I was struck by this desire to return to the cultural and political category of Soviet and post-Soviet, when migration, displacement and territorial conflict (which often separates families by means of shifting delineations that render them as occupying different national sovereignties) enter in a curious relationship to the vestiges of a recent traumatic past. The interventions (aesthetic, urban, social, cultural) of a brutal capitalism in this transition are often excluded from this ecology of Soviet ruins, even when it’s searching for the agency of a place collapsing under multiple, conflicting transitions.

I keep thinking about the aesthetics of transition: movement from and away, but also stillness that is nevertheless gripped by change; if you are still, regimes might collapse over you; if you move, you are carrying with you something that has already changed at the point of exit, even when it is unclear what territory you are leaving, and what you are carrying with you.

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There is a photograph (an image, though) in the Dorothea Lange exhibition at the Barbican of the Dust Bowl era that shows a grain elevator in Everett Texas, in 1938. The black and white image shows the side of the grain elevator drenched in dry desert sun, a high contrast, compositional arrangement: railroad tracks pass in front of the building, parallel to metal protrusions that provide shade-lines. I was struck by how similar these images were; but where Extinction looks for loss, Lange looks for presence. Whilst no one appears in the image, there is a sense of life that is accounted for.

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Susan Sontag thought of photography as disclosure, as a form of presence and of absence. In some ways, there is nothing poetic about Lange’s work, because it exposes the politics of the gaze as much as it reveals its concealment: slave labourers, migrants, refugees, displaced families, lonely travellers. Whilst Extinction incurs the same aesthetic journey into a landscape in which internal tumult becomes the tundra of day to day political manoeuvrings, Lange’s work travels differently to the East. It exposes the freedom of battles concealed in and by the body and it amplifies the structural frames that silence it.

The thing is, with a photograph, you can change your mind; you can keep coming back to it, and find something else there, but it will always pull you elsewhere, no matter where you find yourself.

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On the door of my daughter’s room there is a Vanessa Winship black and white photograph of three Turkish young schoolgirls holding hands, standing against a rocky landscape, each gazing in a slightly different direction; they are somewhat giddy, enthusiastic even, but restrained too. My daughter is two and a half years old, and she let this image drown her, standing in front of it, arrested by it in the exhibition. I recognised the school uniform that the girls have under their thick jumper vests, because it is the same one as I had before I entered high school. I wonder how I wore that uniform. I wonder what it looks like to her. The series, Sweet Nothings (2007), has this playfulness to it, a strange informality of tone.

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In Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction (2002–2006), Winship follows the coastline of the Black Sea across multiple territories; ‘for me’, Winship says, ‘the only natural border is the sea.’ The black and white series follows the edges where land meets water; former and current industrial ports, loose gates, old breakwaters, slipways and causeways; the atmosphere is striking, block grey clouds and broken up monuments, empty billboards and rusty ships. It’s a different Black Sea to the one from my own childhood, but here they are, overlapping in the multiple realities that photograph sometimes invites. I wonder what my daughter makes of these images; she has walked some of those causeways with me, not long ago. History lingers there even when you want to unsee it, or to be able to see it anew.

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When we travelled to the exhibition, the heat was rising, and you could see it wave above the pavement. The high contrast of light and shade followed us in, like we followed the cool air, but the heat struck again, in the sparsity of the Dust Bowl desert, the ruins of the Black Sea, dry plantation soil, the wildness of Jackson. I thought, what a moment to encounter these photographic journeys — when plastic floats across the sea, when migration is shifting the geopolitical order, when destitution is a familiar condition, when ruins are overcome with graffiti and vines and children’s games in landscapes of my own childhood. What a thing, to see these images from our own, different kind of displacement.

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I was holding her small body next to mine, leaning on my hips, arms wrapped behind her knees. There was sweat dripping from the points where skin was touching skin. We were looking through a hollowed out frame in the wall, which framed a photograph at the far end of the exhibition; a deep turquoise, then a white edge, then a black and white photograph. Visitors would pass by in front of the frame, and they would see us, at the other end, a different kind of tableau, and I wondered what they saw.