Photographer Oliver Curtis has been turning his back on famous
monuments, exploring the landscapes that remain forever overlooked
©Oliver Curtis
Taj Mahal, Agra, India
A simple idea that raises interesting questions and leads to
aesthetically successful results: show up at some of the world’s most
visited — and therefore photographed — monuments and sites, turn your
back on the very thing you have come to see, and record the view that no
one else is interested in. It’s not the same as photographing a famous
site from an unexpected angle — from behind the HOLLYWOOD sign, as
Robert Frank did in the 1950s — in order to reveal its local or grubby
underside. Often, in Oliver Curtis’s series of photographs, the
monuments do not even get a look-in. What we get, instead, is an idea of
what they look at.
©Oliver Curtis
Wailing Wall, Jerusalem, Israel
In films, a character’s point of view is often conveyed by showing
that character from behind while looking over his or her shoulder.
Without this bodily reminder we would see without knowing who was doing
the seeing. Once the viewpoint has been fixed — once we have entered the
mind of the looker — these glimpses of the consciousness-bearing body
can be dispensed with as the film unfolds. But what of a photograph
which isolates and is stuck in a single instant of time? A picture by
the Danish photographer Per Bak Jensen shows a statue seen from behind
and slightly to one side. But it also conveys what it is like to be that
statue, to be confronted with the same view, day after day, year after
year. Without the statue the picture would offer a relatively
uninteresting view of landscape. By framing the picture as he does
Jensen introduces the idea — or, even better, induces the feeling — of
unsentient or dormant consciousness.
©Oliver Curtis
Stonehenge, Amesbury, UK
If we saw a single, uncaptioned picture from Curtis’s series, it
could appear quite meaningless or pointless. Once we’ve seen a few, with
the locations indicated, we begin to understand what we are looking for
in each new picture, even if we don’t know exactly what we are looking
at. Even without recourse to the identifying captions we can try to get
our bearings and, if we have visited the place in question, might be
able to work out where we are in spite of the absence of the very thing
that is where we are.
©Oliver Curtis
Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
It depends on the place, though. Some of the most spectacular places
in the world provide a fully immersive experience in that they offer
abundant views of themselves from themselves. Angkor Wat, for example,
is a superb place from which to see Angkor Wat. Perhaps that’s why, in
Curtis’s series, it is nowhere to be seen. Sometimes the site offers a
view of somewhere less famous, less historically freighted with meaning,
but still quite pleasing. Elsewhere we are confronted, in exalted form,
with what might be called the non-reciprocity of real estate.
©Oliver Curtis
Parthenon, Athens, Greece
A house is on the market for a price well in excess of £2m: a
fabulous place with gorgeous rooms, perfectly designed and maintained
exterior, and enormous windows. These windows afford unobstructed views
of the building opposite: a social housing block, covered in satellite
dishes, entirely functional, done on the cheap and devoid of any
visually pleasing features. The rooms are small and the ceilings low but
it has one great thing going for it: the windows, though small, are
filled with the sight of the splendid house opposite.
©Oliver Curtis
Statue of Liberty, New York, US
With their views from — but not of — sites of world-heritage
splendour, these photographs take the side of the large house described
in that vernacular dilemma or relationship. That they are about looking
is slyly suggested by the way that quite a few of them seem to contain a
symbolic eye — or pair of eyes — that returns our gaze. Once we notice
the staring floodlights under the grating at the Statue of Liberty
gazing at us, wide-eyed, then the circles formed by other technological
or architectural features double as a discreet chorus of passively
inquisitive eyes. Look at that cartoonish fire hydrant (if that is
indeed what it is) with eyes and ears cheekily eavesdropping on the
Wailing Wall from its perch by the steel fence. Then there are all those
windows — etymologically “wind-eyes” — offering their own form of blank
surveillance. But mainly, of course, it’s people who are looking.
©Oliver Curtis
Reichstag, Berlin, Germany
In their way, these destinations are monumental equivalents of Sylvia
Plath’s poem “Mirror” (“Most of the time I meditate on the opposite
wall”) but instead of a solitary viewer occasionally coming into view
they are each day treated to an international cast of thousands turning
up to relieve the long monotony of time. Often the view includes a road
leading out of shot, back into the city from which these pilgrims and
visitors have trudged and swarmed. They come to see, to pay their
respects and to make and take souvenirs of their seeing in the form of
photographs.
©Oliver Curtis
'Mona Lisa', Louvre, Paris, France
Magnificent in themselves and, for many centuries, content to bask in
the sunlight and rain of their mythic renown, these monuments have in
the past century and a half become increasingly dependent on the
tributes paid to them in the form and currency of photographs. (If
Martin Parr, in his 1995 book
Small World, showed this global
tourism economy in action, then in a perfect world — a perfect small
world, as it were — one of Curtis’s pictures would show Parr in the
process of snapping a grinning group of Chinese or a couple of earnest
Scandinavians. That would circle the photographic square, so to speak.)
Without the daily and annual testimony of photographs, monuments would
crumble in the sense that they would disappear from tourists’
itineraries — how could a place be worth visiting if no one had bothered
photographing it? Effectively, it would cease to exist. And so, in a
sense, views of rubble- and garbage-strewn emptiness at Giza or
Hollywood are prophetic glimpses of what such places — sites of eroded
or vacated meaning — might look like when that has come to pass. In this
light they are photographs showing a world in which there is no reason
to go somewhere and nothing to see when you get there. In such a world
there are only photographs and — look behind you! — people looking at
them.
‘Volte Face’, by Oliver Curtis, is published next month by Dewi Lewis, £30; dewilewis.com.
An exhibition of the photographs is at the Pavilion Gallery, Royal
Geographical Society, London SW7, September 19-October 14. Geoff Dyer’s
most recent book, ‘White Sands’, is published by Canongate
Photographs: Oliver Curtis
