The Imperfect Atlas
Archive
The book “The Imperfect Atlas” is published by TBW Books & V1 Gallery
Peter Funch and William Pym in conversation, Berlin / London, via email, October 8-14 2019.
WP:
A practical question: How does the separation of the colors—the RGB flare—work mechanically? What is performed with the camera at the site, and what happens in the darkroom or on the computer screen afterward?
PF:
All the images are done with RGB separation in a traditional sense. I shoot three images, manually holding up the different-colored filters in front of the digital camera—one red filter, one green, and one blue. On the computer, the red filter goes to the red channel and so on. This creates a photo file in the final full-color spectrum. From the computer file, I make three negatives from the three colored channels. I use these three negatives in the darkroom to make a C-print, which gives the final print an analog, mechanical (rather than digital) feel. It is an elaborate and technical process, more complicated than it needs to be in 2019. But I wanted to operate in the tradition of color photography from the days of its invention during the Industrial Revolution.
WP:
When do the images reveal themselves to you? How much control do you have? How much control do you want?
PF:
It is a fascinating technique because it should be so precise, yet there is so much mismatch in the separation. When people and objects move, there’s a colored ghost in the picture because each image is made from three separate images. When clouds move and the light changes, this murky, uncanny look appears. So it was, certainly, a way of making images where I had less control. I understood of course what the technique gave me, but I was searching for all the possibilities of mistakes that would create images that were either dystopian or tingling with pain—never the perfect beautiful postcard. I set out to locate the positions where the original postcard images were made so as to recapture the mountain’s glaciers from the same positions and create comparisons of then and now. Using the RGB filters adds a human influence where we would otherwise not clearly notice one, provoking a dialogue about our impact on nature.
WP:
Seeing the image of downtown Seattle, as if civilization suddenly appeared as you crested a peak, is a shock. The city looks contrived, out of place, alien to itself. We realize how isolated you have been on this journey and wonder, suddenly, if nature is the norm and the built environment is the anomaly—not the other way around. Before, you’ve staked out urban corners for weeks to make your work; for this project you staked out the landscape. What is your natural habitat? Where are you “supposed” to be? And where are we, humans, supposed to best locate ourselves in the world?
PF:
In Seattle, you look up and see the big mountain right in your face. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mountains were still perceived as very frightening and overbearing. Raw and untouched. When the Industrial Revolution kicked in, machines, mass transport, and industrialization also helped make faraway nature in the mountains more accessible. As we approached them, the mountains changed from distant and mysterious to immediate and beautiful.
In the din of industry, other extremely significant changes began occurring, unnoticed, for instance a monumental shift in the temperature of the globe. Today we see entire ecosystems collapsing, clearly signaling the beginning of mass extinction. The mountains and nature more broadly have become fragile. Mountaintops are crumbling, and icy summits and glaciers are melting at an increasingly accelerated rate around the world.
Over two hundred years, humans’ perception of nature has undergone a major transition: from something seemingly unreachable, commanding awe, to a site for meditation, for considering beauty alongside the vulnerability and evident deterioration. We can see it all with our own eyes. I believe it is fundamental to ask yourself where you are in this relationship between humans and nature.
WP:
What is it like when you go out there?
PF:
To walk in the landscape is to be reminded of what the relation between humans and nature has been and should be. I appreciate the sounds and smells and the scale of nature, and how it connects us to the past, what we come from. The Nisqually Glacier of Mount Rainier becomes the Nisqually River, which ends in the Puget Sound, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean. It is a relatively short journey, but it traverses the length of the story from nature into civilization, and from the past to the present. It is a journey into complexity, into civilization. This also works as a journey through time.
WP:
What is it like when you come back?
PF:
I appreciate the convenience of the normalities, but I really enjoy the contrast of being connected versus not connected. The symbolic ritual of the shower and clean clothing after a few days is also a pleasure.
WP:
You’re in the business of a kind of cool research and precision. You accumulate information to make pictures, although the source material does not necessarily define the creation of your images. I say “cool” because the information you accumulate seems of impossibly high quality, precious or hard to find, yet you aren’t ostentatious about it. Where do you find your source material? When is it most valuable to you—when does it push the project the most? How do you honor it? What role does it play once you’re looking into the viewfinder with the mountain in front of you?
PF:
I discovered the pleasure of researching, finding stories and connections, when I studied journalism in Denmark. But I wasn’t good at linear connections. I gravitated toward the more coincidental connections between people and places that I was drawn to. All the research for The Imperfect Atlas was done online using the Library of Congress, local libraries, emails with local people, buying images on eBay. Then I put it on the wall to try to connect the dots. Find local visual connections, or poetic connections.
I was fascinated for a long time with the story about Mount Rainier being named after Peter Rainier, who never saw the mountain. Later I found a mural of Mount Rainier in a restaurant, painted by cowboy artist Fred Oldfield. I emailed a few restaurants in the area because I couldn’t remember exactly where I had photographed this mural, and an old friend of Oldfield’s told me that he’d painted it from memory. These two stories say something about perception and relation to place. On a more precise note, many of the works are based on postcards and images from a time when you drove deep into nature to observe and capture it.
WP:
As an archivist and researcher, are you haunted, stressed, or panicked by documenting deterioration and the early warning signs of extinction as you look into precious images of the past? Does it hurt to look back?
PF:
It is a shock to see such radical changes in glaciers and the surrounding nature. And understanding even a little bit about nature makes you realize the snowball effect we have started. The younger generation who are born into climate change, who talk about climate change in the context of human rights—that is a new dimension to this matter.
WP:
Future people will look to your images for clues as they try and understand this moment in our history for themselves, in the same way that you look for clues in the images of the past. What do you think your images will tell them about our moment?PF:
The initial idea for The Imperfect Atlas was to document the retreating glaciers, and the images do indeed do that. The project might come up as romantic and nostalgic. I am sure the question—why we were fantasizing about the wilderness and nature in such an isolated and utopian way—must come up. Today’s talk of losing our way in nature may seem to be from very long ago.
Today we are just a few steps from developing a full AI, which may also change our connection to nature. It might even be that the hyperintelligence emerging from artificial intelligence systems can change the acceleration and direction of climate change.
WP:
This project is unlike your books Babel Tales (2010) or 42nd and Vanderbilt (2017), which are tightly prescribed and obey particular rules, and more like Last Flight (2013), in that you take a panoramic view and let the narrative expand and diffuse, like smoke. In this series, can you break down the relationship between planning and improvisation? What hits you when? Do you know an image belongs in the series when you are shooting? How sure are you? When did you know what this project was supposed to be, destined to be?
PF:
I have gotten used to my projects having a long duration. I research, prepare, photograph, and edit for a year. I redo the same thing again and again over a few years. So many of the links and relations between different postcards and found images come as I keep searching and turning stones for stories, postcards, and found images.
For The Imperfect Atlas, I started out making postcards and photos. Later I did more research and implemented all the small stories and facts to make it, as you say, a smoke of stories. It was important to find enough stories and connections from the time our people entered nature alongside observation and general discovery of nature. This explains why I have included the many images showing roads and cars.
There is a lot more researched material, but this narrative has come together over an edit that developed over three years.
WP:
Tell me about the cairn suite, in which you do seven variations on a shot of a hiker’s tower of rocks.
PF:
This human-made symbol has always fascinated me. It is used as a guide in nature, and it has a ritual aspect, since people make them everywhere there are stones. I recalled the title of Paul Goldberger’s book on architecture, Building Up and Tearing Down (2009), and the cairn works in that same symbolic way.
WP:
Scale screams of its importance in these works. The scale of nature against the scale of humans. The huge scale of nature’s problems against the trivial scale of our problems. What scale, then, should the work take on in the world? Billboards, books, prints, a slide lecture? And then the big question: physical or ephemeral? Does it need to exist in physical form?
PF:
This is also very much about scale and relation.
So it works as a kind of an atlas on change and disappearance. These thoughts were also what led to the title The Imperfect Atlas.
The book and the prints in space work as parallel documents, each with their own path. The scale and format of the works has been very inspired by Hudson River School paintings—a time when artists searched for the sublime. I still believe in the physical print that works as an impressionistic document, a narrative of what we see today.
WP:
Nature at its grandest, most transcendent scale is the magic of the Hudson River painters. They hit that vibration of pure, total, dissociative wonder. Is it reasonable to suggest that the RGB filters on these photographs invite this transcendent effect, a kind of wobbling of reality when the scale of nature is so extreme?
PF:
Yes, very much so. I was looking for a historic tool that symbolizes human interference, and to take a tiny step away from reality. RGB separation did that for me when I placed it next to the postcards and historic images.
WP:
What is the ideal space in which your work could exist? Where will it do its job? And, if you can answer this, what is its job?
PF:
The Imperfect Atlas has been shown via Project Pressure, which is a charity with a mission to visualize climate change. The charity has done group shows in various institutions and media throughout the world, with more exhibitions planned. This is how the whole project started back in 2013, and it is one direction for it.
From there I began developing the book version. Building up the flow and a more complex narrative in a book seems the ideal way of bringing the project together. I did Last Flight in the same way.
The photographs document the landscape so as to provoke a sense of uncertainty and disbelief. It is a project where I try to illustrate our blindness to the consequences of our actions toward nature in the Anthropocene.
WP:
Your work is historically highly consistent in tone, with a certain placid serenity, a resolution, even when it is depicting sites of trauma or charge. This topic, the evaporation of the natural world, is urgent and scary. Do you feel your tone changing, something you can’t control entering this series?
PF:
In the very beginning of this project, I was focused on documenting the retreat of the glaciers. Not that I wanted to take a purely scientific approach, but I did want to somehow provide proof of change in the landscape. And I did do that, but I also started thinking more metaphorically about change, devastation, and perception of nature. It is very urgent that we collectively reconsider the idea of our “lifestyle.”
WP:
We remember Robert Frank, who changed and revealed himself in different ways, at different times, over a lifetime with a sensitive camera. Grief and shock transformed him. What is your state of mind at this point in your practice? How are you?
PF:
Photography is an interesting tool since it is so dependent on the reality in front of us, while at the same time it can be used to describe something so general that everyone can relate to it. After relocating to Europe I have needed to rethink what is next. Right now there is so much interesting to document about humanity and our relation to AI, and I am working on what that looks like through a camera.
