Places, though, also have the capacity to tell us their own stories, and we can use photography to let those places take on a more vivid visibility and reveal to us the traces of moments that have marked them, left them with scars. Photography provides us with one of those selective portals through which the object world can really speak back to us. Pixie Bowles has developed a body of work in Kesennuma (気 仙沼市) in Japan, one of the sites of the devastating 2011 tsunami – a landscape that literally bears its recent trauma on the surface of the land and on the broken walls of buildings, but which also can be urged, gently, through a variety of subtle interventions and moments of recording, to yield more. Anita Mecseki‘s work involves a constant revisiting of sites of trauma – whether the site of a drowning or the memory of immolation in a fire. Her sensual black and white images literally sear themselves into your imagination. Lauren Shields explores the sedimented
memories of abandoned buildings, using them also like cameras in their own right to illuminate another more secret life. These are places where objects we once thought we owned and knew well reveal an uncanny underside. This strategy of finding ways to let the material world tell its own story is one also employed by Richard Boll who struggles with the natural elements and sails out to tie his pinhole camera onto buoys floating in the estuary waters of the Solent, letting them reveal to us a set of eerie seascapes of a more elusive other world. Peter Thornton’s strange studies of domestic plant life can also be seen as messages from a natural world that does not sit easily within the space of culture – their hallucinatory jungle forms reminding us that nature at least is never really within our control. Sam Threadgill’s studies of animal life are also an attempt to recognize the void that constantly threatens to open up between the human and the animal – the point at which language ceases