Abstract
How can photography engage forms of violence that leave few visible traces? This project begins from that problem, working with sites where direct evidence has been removed, obscured, or absorbed into the landscape. Rather than seeking narrative clarity, the photographs foreground absence, fragmentation, and material remains, treating the banal as a site of evidentiary potential. The work draws from Jo Ractliffe’s photographs of Vlakplaas, the former headquarters of an apartheid counterinsurgency unit in South Africa. Ractliffe’s images attend to its physical residue, trees, fences, and gravel roads as spatial forms that carry the weight of institutional violence. In dialogue with this, I present my own photographs from Mînî Thnî, a Stoney Nakoda reserve in Alberta, Canada, where a residential school once operated. Here, too, what remains is infrastructural: boundary markers, signage, surveillance systems, and neglected foundations. The method guiding this work, which I term Documentary Abstraction, resists spectacle and explanatory clarity. It treats abstraction not as aesthetic distance but as a photographic strategy for engaging with aftermath—where meaning resides in what is partial, displaced, or difficult to name. Through slow observation and attention to ordinary detail, the photographs trace how land continues to be organized by the afterlife of state violence. This project questions what kinds of photographs are shown, published, or withheld in the face of structural violence. It engages the limits of narrative and the politics of visibility, asking how photography might act through trace, fragmentation, and refusal to resist the demands of conventional documentary form.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Violence, Aftermath, Landscape, Abstraction, Practice-Based Photography, Representation, Documentary, Institutional Memory
