Memory and Place. Chapter 5 extract from Drawing Parallels: Architecture Observed

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
Walter Benjamin

A place is not a conglomeration of functional structures. Where we live, visit or observe, and the images we form and receive of it, gains its real nature from the feelings identified with it. An empty brutalist cityscape and an abandoned school gym, can speak of a more tragic dimension to our lives that is somehow inscribed in the very essence of a place. The way that vanished cultures persist in traces of their legacy, that nature reclaims vast human endeavours, that modern cruelty and power leave an aura or a sense of their very character in an ambience, is something that the photographer can capture. There are deeper, almost intangible remnants, some hauntingly sad, some joyful, that emerge as visual shocks or surprises, to be seen in the frozen image of a photograph. The chilling catastrophe of an abandoned city bereft of humanity clashes, paradoxically, with the defiant optimism of resurgent nature.

Reclamation

left: A doorway in Ta Prohm to a temple built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries as a monastery and university. The door is surrounded by silk cotton tree roots encased by strangler figs roots, which develop their own underground root
system. They then grow quickly, often strangling the host tree, which in time dies and rots away. The strangler fig continues to exist as a hollow tubular lattice that provides shelter for many forest animals. Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2003

right: A silver birch tree growing through the floor on the terrace of the Hotel Polissia 21 years after the Chernobyl disaster. Pripiat, Ukraine, 2007

Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here

Palimpsest