Kay Orchison

Atopia
Photography

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“Nowhere is a place.” – Paul Theroux

Atopia is a series of 30 colour photographic Gicleé prints on Hanemuhle etching paper at full sheet size, 76x108 cm. Some are in square format at 76cm2. The printing technique was chosen for its archival qualities, vivid colour and hallucinatory dot gain effects. The works are atopic – being of no place – in a number of ways.

Firstly the series is an exploration of artificial inhospitable environments: places which are utilitarian rather than welcoming, and are usually unpeopled. Seldom visited and little cared for, such sites can often foster entropy on a grander scale than is generally tolerated in more populous environments – thus they are atopic again in the sense of being disregarded.

These spaces are a product of the 20th Century’s abundance of cheap fossil fuels. As many independant experts agree that oil production has peaked or will peak between 2000 and 2010, it may be reasonably assumed that it will become gradually more and more expensive from this year. The coming century will therefore see these places fall further into disrepair as the transport and chemicals which maintain them disappear, and perhaps many of them will be abandoned altogether as the true meaning of the word “unsustainable” becomes clear to industry and agriculture. Thus they may be atopic in a third sense, that of being doomed to abandonment.

Some are already abandoned and are yet to be re-used, making them atopic in the sense of being unpurposed, unclassified space. Many are legally or politically contested, making them atopic in the sense of being no-man’s-land.

Many of them are also geographically isolated, making them atopic in the sense of being in the middle of nowhere.

Finally, they are atopic in that an uncaptioned photograph of an empty, anonymous space lacking easily recognisable landmarks seems as if it could be almost anywhere. This subverts the traditional project of landscape photography: instead of an elegaic exposition of the beauty of a particular place in a particular light, these are terse, even critical remarks on generic kinds of spaces.

The photographs were taken many hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of kilometers apart. They are united only by absences and aporias of the Australian landscape. In a nation which so often culturally defines itself by landscape, these culturally created landscapes define blank spots in our national consciousness.