The Middle of Nowhere: The Photographic Search for an Unknown Landscape

Brandy Dahrouge 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... 2

ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ...... 3

COPYRIGHT STATEMENT ...... 4

AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT ...... 4

INTRODUCTION ...... 5

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC SEARCH FOR AN UNKNOWN LANDSCAPE ..5 RESEARCH INFLUENCES...... 5 WHERE IS “THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE”? ...... 5 CHAPTER ONE: FINDING YOUR BEARINGS...... 8

BEING IN PLACE ...... 8 NON-PLACE ...... 9 LANDSCAPE AS PLACE...... 11 ‘NOWHERE’ IN LITERATURE...... 12 Utopia...... 12 Escape to Nature ...... 13 ‘NOWHERE’ IN VISUAL CULTURE ...... 14 A Place of No One ...... 15 WHEN “THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE” IS “THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE” ...... 17 CHAPTER TWO: LOSING YOURSELF...... 19

FEELING IN “THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE” ...... 19 BREAD CRUMBS ...... 20 LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY ...... 22 A PLACE WITH NO NAME ...... 24 VISUAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NOWHERE ...... 25 NARRATIVE AND EXPERIENCE...... 26 PHOTOGRAPHING EVERYWHERE ...... 27 FROM NOWHERE TO SOMEWHERE . . . AND BACK AGAIN ...... 27 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY AND MEANING...... 29

PHOTOGRAPHIC RESEARCH ...... 29 CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSIONS...... 36

A WORLD OF NO ONE...... 36 SEARCH FOR THE UNKNOWN...... 37

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Rotary International for their support in the form of an Ambassadorial Scholarship, without which I could not have moved to Australia to further my education. I am thankful to the countless Rotarians I have met in both Canada and Australia who encouraged and supported me, and welcomed me into their clubs and lives. I am continually inspired by their generosity and commitment to community service.

I am also thankful to the University of New South Wales for a University International Postgraduate Research Award. This award made it possible for me to complete my degree.

I also want to thank my supervisors Gabrielle Finnane and Dr. Ross Harley for their insight, patience, and encouragement.

If you have found this thesis useful, have comments, or would like to share ideas please do not hesitate to contact me.

Brandy Dahrouge #9 Ray Avenue Red Deer, Alberta Canada T2P3B9 Email: [email protected] Website: www.brandydahrouge.com

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ORIGINALITY STATEMENT

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

Signed ……………………………………………......

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COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT

‘I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.’

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Introduction

The Middle of Nowhere: The Photographic Search for an Unknown Landscape

Nowhere: a space without determinacy, a place that lacks a location, a destination that is not anywhere. The idea itself is disorienting and confusing; a conundrum of opposites that are difficult to reconcile. Where then is “the middle of nowhere” and how can we find ourselves in the centre of a place that cannot be found? How is it possible to be in “nowhere”; to exist in space and time unrelated to place? Why do we use the phrase “the middle of nowhere” to describe how we feel in certain locations? Why does society (myself included) continue to look for new worlds and seemingly unexplored landscapes? Furthermore, what is the role of photography in helping us understand our relationship to the landscape and creating a connection to the unknown?

Research Influences

These are a few of the questions directing this research. My first impressions of the landscape around me formed while growing up on the prairies of Alberta in Canada. The land here seems to stretch to infinity with 180 degrees of sky blanketing its perfectly flat surface. I feel an inherent connection to this vast expanse of land, which can seem both harsh and alienating. I am drawn towards landscapes where there appears to be no one, and could be labeled as “the middle of nowhere”. It is here that I feel inspired to draw my camera. This research is an extension of my “Western” view (literally and figuratively) on the world and an examination of my response to the landscape of Canada and Australia. The search for “the middle of nowhere” and the identification as landscape being separate from ourselves, is typically the view from a fully industrialized nation.

Where is “the middle of nowhere”?

People regularly drop the phrase “the middle of nowhere” in everyday speech, in conversations that are invariably about travel. Semantically when dissected, the words “no+where” cannot be a place or a destination. Might they then refer to the space between places? “Nowhere” could refer to the journey itself: the gap between ports of

The Middle of Nowhere 6 call on the traveler’s itinerary. We might say, “I got off the train in ‘the middle of nowhere’”. However, what we mean is: “I found myself in a place I did not recognize, far from where I intended to be. I am somewhere in-between my point of origin and my destination, in an unknown spot where there appears to be no one.” In this state, we literally feel out-of-place, confused, ungrounded, and lost. This sensation may be similar to what sociologist and theorist Edward Casey terms “displacement”. Casey holds that “ . . . displacement is a disconnection from the place you are in possibly through the physical act of moving between places”.i As a global society, we are constantly mobile and no longer feel connected to place and landscape in the same way that our ancestors did. These instances of displacement are increasing in spite of our continual exploration and increasing knowledge of the planet. We still experience “the middle of nowhere” although we have discovered and mapped everywhere.

Theorist Marc Augé differentiates between two types of spaces - place and non-place – and posits: “A space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place”.ii While he is referring to airports and other transportation hubs, the same principles may apply to landscapes. In modern society, the function of landscape is one of utility; it is that space through which you must transit to get to where you need to go. As society becomes increasingly urban centered, landscapes are perceived in opposition to place. The spot where your car ran out of gas on a lonely stretch of road may not be relational, historical, or reference the identity of you the stranded driver. To you, it feels like a non-place, a nowhere.

Sometimes we use the phrase “the middle of nowhere” to describe a place that we do know and a place where people clearly do live (as in the case of suburbia or a small town). We can exclaim, “Moose Jaw is really in ‘the middle of nowhere’!” What we mean by that statement is: “I feel disconnected from civilization as I know it; from the lifestyle and people that I identify with.” In this instance, we treat certain known places as “non-place”. So, is “nowhere” simply the opposite of the place we call home?

Conversely, “nowhere” can be the destination we strive to arrive at, attain, or achieve. It can symbolize a lost paradise, or a utopia. Utopias are places set in nowhere; they contain a collection of society’s desires for the future and an escape from the present. Commonly conceived of in literature examples include: Thomas More’s classic Utopiaiii and Samuel Butler’s Erehwoniv (which is “nowhere” spelled backwards). However, utopia narratives also exist in visual culture, photography and advertising. The visualization of “nowhere” as a utopian paradise and the suggestion that we can still get there, permeates the genre of travel photography and the adventure travel/tourism industry. This desire to discover a location where there is no one, where you can start over, reveals a longing to escape from the constraints of society.

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It may also symbolize our triumph over nature, each other, and ourselves. Arriving in “the middle of nowhere” can be an exclamation of discovery and victory; the conquering of a landscape that no one may have explored before, standing alone in a place that appears uninhabitable. This impulse derives from the age-old quest to discover “new worlds” and is the force behind empire expansion and colonial conquest. It is the reason we build rockets and send astronauts into space. Reaching this “nowhere” is the goal in the contest of man versus nature. Extreme adventurers, climbers, and arctic explorers test human limits against the forces of nature in an attempt to achieve this type of “nowhere”. Photography is often a witness to these types of exploration.

Where then is “the middle of nowhere” and how do we find ourselves there? In an age where we have explored everywhere, why is it important that the unknown still exists? “Nowhere” reveals itself when we step outside our daily experience and come face to face with ourselves in our surroundings: an expansive void or inaccessible wild place, a seemingly deserted town, a lonely stretch of road where there appears to be no one, an empty city street when the day’s business is done. It is in this state that we are physically and philosophically, challenged to evaluate our relationship to the landscape. The unknown location is a place without a name. In order to comprehend it, we must admit a relationship with this land, and incorporate it into our history and identity. One of the ways we can do this is through photography. By photographing nowhere, it becomes somewhere: we can name it and place it on our own map, and in our own timeline.

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Chapter One: Finding your Bearings

Being in Place

“ . . . to be in the world, to be situated at all, is to be in place”.v

“Place belongs to the very concept of existence” vi

- Edward Casey

What differentiates somewhere from nowhere? How do we know when we are in either? Our minds can conceive of entirely empty spaces, but we reserve within those spaces the possibility of inhabitation. We imagine the outer space surrounding our planet as an empty vacuous void, a real nowhere. However, society is continually searching for evidence of life within this void: the potential for beings (extraterrestrial and eventually, ourselves) living within it. Humans need to create place from space in order to comprehend it. One of the ways we do that is to find the potential for people and events to exist within it.

Place is where the people are. It is where events occur and lives are lived. According to sociologist William Casey, the existence of place is contingent upon its “implacement”; meaning people must live within it.vii Places “serve to implace you, to anchor and orient you, finally becoming an integral part of your identity.”viii The experiences that happen in place cause it to be intrinsically linked to our beliefs about ourselves. Place shapes perception and vice versa, informing our experience of reality.

Philosopher Marc Augé explains how humans traditional connection to place was anthropological; defined by ethnologists as a location occupied by the indigenous peoples who discovered and cultivated it, and whose cosmology is based upon it.ix Place used to be a reciprocal relationship between location, identity, culture, and spirituality. However, the contemporary relationship to place has shifted from the anthropological towards one of utility in which we stamp our ideas, culture, and industry upon the landscape. Previously, one of the first questions we asked someone upon meeting them was, “Where are you from?” Today we are more apt to ask “What do you do?”

The lifestyle in industrialized societies is one of travel, resulting in multiple locations to which individuals can develop a sense of place. Paradoxically, this arrangement can result in a profound dislocation from all places, and the loss of a sense of home. The sheer volume of information that exists about places (on the internet, in the media, through photography), can allow us to develop an artificial connection to locations we

The Middle of Nowhere 9 have never been. Additionally, this excess information and travel can desensitize us to the new. As global citizens, we belong to every place, and no place, at the same time.

To be, is to exist within place. Or, even better, the place exists because you are in it. You are your own place. Your body is a container for place, your mind is place, your thoughts are place. Place is the vessel in which events occur and life is experienced. Therefore, you are always in place. “Nowhere” is an uncanny instant of feeling dislocated from the place you are in; a moment where you step outside yourself and contemplate your unknown location and presence. It is existentially impossible to be in “nowhere”. Place is everywhere that you are.

Non-place

“If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.”

- Marc Augéx

The spectacular acceleration of life in the past one hundred years is due mainly to technological advances in transportation and communication. People are trotting the globe like never before, and spending more time in airports, bus, and train stations: in transit. These hubs of transportation are what philosopher Marc Augé identifies as “non-places”. These spaces say nothing about our culture, identity and history (in fact, they are designed to empty us of that baggage).xi I propose that the experience of non- place can be transported out of the airport, and into to the destination. “The middle of nowhere” is a similar response to a foreign landscape to which we cannot identify. This landscape seems to say nothing about our history or identity; we do not consider it a place. Our increased movements and urban lifestyles create chronic sense of place-less-ness, making it more difficult to form a relationship with the landscape.

The human animal is innately mobile. “We are beings of the between, always on the move between places.” xii While this nomadic requirement originated in our basic need to find food, now it manifests as a restless malaise: a sense of tedium as the aura of place wears off, it becomes uninteresting, no longer satisfying, and empty. Our continual movement results in this “displacement” or disconnection from all places from manmade to the natural world.xiii It is even possible to experience this sense of place-less-ness when we are in the location we usually call home.

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Displacement and desolation are often mutually exclusive. Where as displacement is a catalyst for feelings of desolation, the recognition of desolation in a landscape (and reflectively, in us) instigates our displacement. Speaking of a childhood experience at a summer camp in central Kansas, Casey reveals: “It was not accidental that I found myself feeling forsaken in an arid and brittle landscape. That landscape embodied my own existential desolation, reflecting it back to me with augmented force.”xiv Landscape itself is not desolate; we merely project our feelings of despair upon it. “The middle of nowhere” is a reflection of our own feelings of being out-of-place.

The experience of “nowhere” is similar to both Augé’s definition of non-place and Casey’s description of “displacement”. The foreign landscape is perceived as a non- place because the traveler has not personally experienced it before; they are displaced in it and from it. “Nowhere”, “non-place”, and “displacement” are all states of mind, and instances of projecting our feelings of separateness into the landscape. Society has become afflicted with the postmodern malaise of displacement. Its symptoms include acute nostalgia for the places of our past, the “grass is greener on the other side” mentality, and a desire to search for utopia and “lost places”.

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Landscape as Place

“Infinity always gives me vertigo, and fills me up with grace”

-Bruce Cockburn xv

How do we create a sense of place within the landscape? Landscapes are perceived as borderless, indeterminate, and infinite - comprising that area encompassing all known places. For urban dwellers, landscape is the opposite of the place they call home: the non-place surrounding the city or the town. Jean-François Lyotard explains, “There would appear to be a landscape whenever the mind is transported from one sensible matter to another, but retains the sensorial organization appropriate to the first, or at least, a memory of it . . . The countryside for the townsman; the city for the farmer.” xvi Landscape becomes relative to your point of origin and where you live.

Edward Casey takes this definition a step further implying that landscape is everywhere, including all “space” inside and outside of you. He believes you form the inner boundary of the exterior landscape, and the outer boundary of your inner landscape. Between the inner and outer exists a filter of culture and identity.xvii This membrane is permeable; landscape can influence us as much we can impose our ideas upon it. Humans have physically and philosophically left our cultural imprint on the landscape (in the structures we build, in landscape’s role in our folklore, art, economy, and everyday lives). Conversely, landscape determines how culture develops. Its terrain separates and creates different communities; its features determine our food sources; its resources determine how (and what) technologies we develop. It is really only since the Industrial Revolution that we have determined what the landscape will do for us.

Place is created through the interaction between landscape, body, identity, and culture. Casey believes, “Place is what takes place between body and landscape”.xviii Therefore, we must recognize our connection to the landscape in order to consider it place in the philosophical sense. Culture and identity filter our response to land and direct our interaction with it. The camera is another filter through which body and landscape must pass; it becomes an extension of your cultural filter and the medium through which you interact with your surroundings. What you choose to look at (and photograph) speaks volumes about who you are, what you think, and where you grew up. The photograph serves to emplace you in the landscape, and can thus facilitate the transition to perceiving it as place. Paradoxically, photography may also form a barrier that further separates you from experiencing place, by representing it as some “other” existing outside of yourself.

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‘Nowhere’ in Literature

Utopia

The word “utopia” is derived from the Greek outopos meaning “no place”, and eutopia meaning “good place”.xix A utopia, therefore, is a good place set in nowhere; an ideal land located somewhere at the edge of our imagination. Utopias are built on aspirations for a better world - a desire to exploit the best of human nature and eliminate the less desirable elements.

The idea of utopia, and the search for it, are as old as human society itself. Historian John Carey believes the first paradise narrative to be the Ancient Egyptian poem The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, dating from 1940-1640 B.C..xx The Greeks and the Romans fantasized about perfect worlds and attempted to locate them. Plato’s Republic and The Laws (c360 B.C.) outline the features of ideal society, and the model citizens that would live within it. After Columbus discovered the New World in 1492 (a search for a British colonial Arcadia of sorts), Sir Thomas More imagines there is yet another “new world” out there: the land of Utopia. More is credited with introducing the word “utopia” into the English language with his book of the same name (1516). In 1872, while living in New Zealand, Samuel Butler wrote the fictional and satirical tale about a utopian country called Erewhon (‘Nowhere’ spelled backwards). And in 1891, Englishman William Morris penned News From Nowhere: a utopia narrative pondering the benefits of a classless society.

More’s Utopia is a place where civilization aspires to a higher moral code of conduct: crime is almost non-existent, poverty seems to be eliminated, and there is greater equality in wealth distribution and work-load.xxi The social hierarchy is less oppressive and more inclusive.xxii Utopia narratives are an expression of the time, arising out of displeasure with the injustices and inequality in present society. What does our twenty-first century Utopia look like? Certainly, we still desire to live in a place where social, financial, and political equality reign, where human rights are respected and everyone has everything they need. However, are we also aching to get to some place simpler; where life is slower, the people scarce, and the landscape unspoiled? This is “the middle of nowhere” that we believe still exists and we strive to escape to.

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Escape to Nature

Organized society has fostered in us the desire to arrive at “ . . . some other place, remote in space or time or both . . . where something can be learned about how life should be lived.”xxiii Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan believes this desire to escape to nature goes back to ancient Sumer and the epic poems of Gilgamesh (2000 BC).xxiv After exploiting his subjects and building magnificent temples and grand cities, King Gilgamesh escapes to nature to learn about the Gods. Henry Thoreau’s reaction to contemporary life in nineteenth century New England is detailed in his book (and experiment) Walden. His personal utopia consisted of a hand-built cabin in the woods and a self-sustaining lifestyle. An example of modernity inspiring a prison break of sorts is the story of Chris McCandless, recounted in the book “Into the Wild”.xxv In 1992, Chris sold or gave away all his possessions and started out on foot to Alaska. His physical journey to “the middle of nowhere” was a quest for self-discovery, one that ultimately claimed his life. The examples above reveal how “getting away from it all”, is really an attempt to get back to ourselves.

We must first escape from nature in order to escape back to it. If humans had remained nomadic and not organized themselves into societies, towns, and cities, there would be no “nature” to flee to. Where then are we trying to go, what are we running away from, and why? Yi-Fu Tuan believes, “What we wish to escape to is not “nature” but an alluring conception of it, and this conception is necessarily a product of a people’s experience and history – their culture.”xxvi If our idea of what constitutes nature is culturally derived, and formed in opposition to the place where we live, then we are attempting to escape from our culture and concept of self.

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‘Nowhere’ in Visual Culture

The tourism industry thrives on the environmental utopia mythology, and is abound with images of idyllic landscapes and “middle of nowhere” photographs. Travel guides such as The Lonely Planet promise to deliver the map to paradise. One such publication, The Lonely Plane Guide to the Middle of Nowhere, declares “the truth that our well-trodden world is still full of places untouched and untrampled - they're all around us, they just need to be xxvii found.” They dare you to “throw away the 1. Lonely Planet , 2006 map, head out and find your own Nowhere”, but purchase their guide first! xxviii

For most of us, escaping modernity requires that we take full advantage of the products of a modern lifestyle. Trains, planes, and automobiles have become essential for “getting away from it all”. This cover of Air Canada’s in- flight magazine enRoute, entices the traveler with the headline ‘Exploring the Middle of Nowhere’. Editor Arjun Basu acknowledges that technology has rendered “nowhere” an obsolete destination: “There is no such thing as the ‘middle of nowhere.’ Not anymore . . . In an age where communications and travel can take us around the world quicker than ever . . . The idea of the ‘middle of nowhere’ has lost all meaning.”xxix However, it is the idea of 2. enRoute Magazine, 2006 discovering “nowhere” (a place that was previously unknown to us) that fuels our desire to travel and explore. This is exactly what the magazine (and the industry) is banking on. The modern traveler can still experience the same sense of discovery in any number of out-of-the-way-nowhere-type-places that Air Canada flies (such as Bartlesville Oklahoma and St. Johns Newfoundland).xxx It is ironic how technology and travel make “nowhere” an impossible destination, yet inspire and contribute to the search for it.

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There is a whole industry of clothing and equipment that you will need to survive “out there”. The travel gear company Black Wolf beckons “Welcome to the Middle of Nowhere” xxxi on the cover of their product catalogue. Images of baron ice-scapes, white sand encircled archipelagos, pristine mountain lakes, and horizonless expanses exist along side the current season of backpacks, ultra-lightweight tents, and Gortex jackets. “Nowhere” is indeed out there, and an entire trade of consumer products and technology (the very things you 3. Black Wolf Product Catalogue, 2006 may be trying to escape) exist to help you find it.

A Place of No One

The images from Black Wolf and Lonely Planet reveal seemingly uninhabited landscapes and suggest that you can be the first person to arrive there - you can discover it yourself! Vast deserts and vacant tundra provide proof that we can get away from modernity, and from each other. The inhospitable climate (intense heat of the desert and the frigid temperatures of the Arctic) presents a challenge; a contest between nature and ourselves.

The Arctic is the final frontier of the twenty-first century: the last place on Earth where we have not built cities, attempted to domesticate the land, or inhabit en masse. Inuit peoples have lived there for centuries, adapting to and thriving in the bitter climate. However for most of us, the Arctic truly is “the middle of nowhere”. This environment presents a challenge for survival to extreme explorers seeking to test the limits of what is humanly possible. One such adventurer/photographer is Jerry Kobalenko. The press release from his 2005 exhibition of Arctic photographs reveals how the triumph over nature theme is an impetus for exploring and image making:

Imagine being dropped off by a helicopter to the middle of nowhere in bone-chilling cold, then hauling 275 pounds of gear in a sled over 600 kilometers of barren tundra by snowshoe, skis and on foot . . . The only shelter you have is what you can haul, and there won’t be another human being in sight for 39 days. Jerry Kobalenko doesn’t endure such expeditions, he revels in them. After his first taste of the Arctic 20 years ago, he was drawn into the elite circle of explorers and adventurers whose passion lies in icy landscapes. xxxii

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An image of “the middle of nowhere” as an icy landscape void of people, presents a contradiction. The very fact that the photograph exists means someone (the photographer) must have been there to take it! On a trip to Antarctica, photographer Anne Noble embraced the evidence that people are everywhere, including on this remote southern continent. Her images comment on the impossibility of “nowhere” and document the human presence (of herself and others) in a landscape where she did not expect to find it.

Photographer Murray Fredericks documents landscapes in remote places. His latest project titled “Salt” consists of a series of horizons photographed over Lake Eyre in South Australia (coincidentally, Lake Eyre is on Lonely Planet’s 4. Anne Noble Goal Post, Antarctica list of “Nowhere” locations).xxxiii This image in 2002 particular exposes his presence within the landscape by revealing the equipment needed to travel to, and survive on, this arid salt lake. The juxtaposition of the signs of humanity within an empty and remote landscape dispels the myth of “nowhere”.

What is the force that drives us to look for “nowhere” and relish in achieving it? We travel across the globe in ships, on trains, and airplanes to discover “new worlds” and uncover the utopias that we believe exist outside our lives. The “greener grass” syndrome fuels our belief in a paradise existing as separate from ourselves (and our society), in some remote and unexplored location. 5. Murray Fredericks Salt, Exhibition invitation Shangri La may be just on the other side 2006 of the fence, across the bridge, or around the bend; but it always past the boundary of the known. The search for “nowhere” represents the alluring seductiveness of starting over in idealized wilderness - the opportunity to uncover the primordial garden. “Nowhere” may be a natural utopia on which we cultivate and create the ideal society we desire. As well, it may be a place to hide away from our present civilization.

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When “The Middle of Nowhere” is “The Centre of The Universe”

The incessant pursuit to discover and create a reality where the grass is indeed greener is the human condition. However, the idea that landscape exists separate from ourselves (as in opposition to place) is the product of a culture whose relationship to the landscape is no longer anthropological. In so-called “Western” societies, landscape does not play a major role in developing a cosmology or understanding of reality. Modernity and travel have intensified this alienation from the landscape and conversely, increased the desire to reconnect with it.

Not all cultures see the landscape as separate from who they are. Some, like the Australian Aboriginals, Canadian First Nations, and Inuit peoples, are intrinsically linked to the land for their identity, spirituality, and basic survival. The landscape is never “nowhere” to them: it is Place. The search for “the middle of nowhere” as a utopic uninhabited land, has deep rooted historical and colonial connotations. It is this desire that spurred Columbus to seek out the “New World”, and is responsible for displacing the many indigenous communities that already lived within it. I have had to consider this aspect of utopia searching as my images are located in Canada and Australia; countries born from a colonial conquest that robbed the indigenous inhabitants of their land and culture. In Canada, the early British explorers traded peacefully with First Nations people at first, and drew up trade and land treaties (in their own favour of course). However, Australia was predetermined by its colonial occupiers to be uninhabited, and this became grounds for a legal tort known as Terra Nullius. Terra Nullius, meaning “land belonging to no one”xxxiv , informed the reasoning upon which the colonizers justified their thievery of aboriginal lands.

Judy Annear, in her article Photography and Place, discusses the lack of landscape photography in Australia explaining that it is politically incorrect to photograph the land "given the still unresolved issues with ownership and access to country across the continent - because, whose country are we talking about? And by photographing it, what are we claiming to do with it?". xxxv The term "landscape" is a European one; reminiscent of pastoral spaces of domestication and wild places of potential conquest. It is tied to notions of the picturesque: the idealized representation of landscape by eighteenth century painters that was favored by the British public and popular around the time photography was developed (1826).xxxvi An image of the Australia landscape in the style of a Victorian pastoral landscape (rolling hills, fertile ground for faming, sheep grazing), or in the genre of the picturesque (rugged wilderness that is yet tamable), can be interpreted as a kind of colonization through representation. These are purely “Western” views of the landscape that ignore its function and importance to the original inhabitants. While photography did not go hand in hand with the opening

The Middle of Nowhere 18 of the Australian "frontier" in the same way it did in the United States, it is still a tool associated with claiming land.xxxvii

While it is possible to experience “the middle of nowhere” in locations where there appears to be no one, it does not necessarily follow that the landscape is void of significance or ownership. There is not a landscape that does not in one way or another, speak to someone's identity, culture, or our global human identity as residents of this planet. Additionally, there is no “where” left untouched by human presence (either directly in the form of traces we have left behind, or indirectly in the form of global environmental impact). In today’s’ world, where every place has been discovered and imaged, looking for “nowhere” is a metaphorical exercise that is more about self-discovery than longitude and latitude. This thesis and photographic research strive to dispel the myth of “the middle of nowhere” as a location, and understand it as a philosophical and psychological place within ourselves. Place exists where “there is an interaction between nature and culture regardless of which culture".xxxviii Through the medium of photography I acknowledge place within the landscape, and in so doing, reconnect with my cultural identity and myself.

The images resulting from this research recognize human presence existing within the landscape. I use photography as a tool to build my personal connection to the land. The experience of “nowhere” (disconnection and subsequent self realization) can happen in any place and at any time. By photographing these instances of feeling in “nowhere”, I am not claiming the land as my own, rather I am recognizing my own presence (and the presence of others) within the landscape, in an attempt to reconnect with nature.

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Chapter Two: Losing Yourself

Feeling in “The Middle of Nowhere”

“No matter where you go, there you are.”

- Confucius (551-479 BC)

Reality is a result of the collision between our physical world and our perception of it. How we interpret what we see determines our experience, and ultimately, our state of mind. The feeling of “being in nowhere” arises when there is disconnect between the landscape we see and our understanding of it.

There exists a subtle pull of opposites in “nowhere”: paradise and desolation, Shangri- La and the abyss, infinity and the void, utopia and dystopia, desire and indifference. While we often crave to escape the trappings of modernity and discover the unknown, we are equally intimidated by what we may find there. This conflict between aversion and longing, absence and presence, nowhere and somewhere, strands the viewer between two psychological states - identifying with both but not fully with either - a literal “nowhere” state of mind.

Strangeness inspires a longing for home and a search for elements of the familiar. The sensation you experience when in “the middle of nowhere” might be described as an unsettling familiarity amidst an unfamiliar landscape. We can find ourselves in a location we have no previous association with, and yet experience an uncanny interconnection to it. This haunting déja vu could be a result of the overabundance of images and information our society has amassed regarding place. It is highly possible we have unconsciously heard, read, or seen something about the landscape we are encountering. Additionally, the awareness we experience can be drawn from the traces of other people found within the landscape. A dirt road stretching into an infinite horizon, some writing found in the desert, an “Exit” sign on a empty beach; these all provide proof that someone was here before us. It is the human element that connects you to the landscape: allowing you to contemplate your place within it and others presence and absence. You realize the possibility of this land to sustain human life.

“Nowhere” is sensed when we recognize the unfamiliar within the familiar. While it is difficult to rid ourselves of preconceived notions of place, it is still possible to experience the unknown in spite of all that we do. We can be familiar with the features and function of a landscape, and yet surprised by something we failed to

The Middle of Nowhere 20 consider. In this instance, we feel disoriented and even lost: jolted out of the everyday and challenged to reconsider our perceptions. ”Nowhere” is unveiled in that instant of discovery, revelation, and wonder.

Is the feeling of “being in the middle of nowhere” a longing for dislocation as much as it is a response to it? “Nowhere” is the accomplishment of the abandonment of place; the desire to escape and the realization that it is still possible. By getting to “nowhere” we’ve arrived somewhere; a place where simplicity and nature still reign supreme, where we can meet ourselves without the distractions of modern life. By becoming lost, we can find ourselves.

Ultimately, “nowhere” is experienced when you are challenged to contemplate your existence. It is not only our perceptions about the landscape we must reconsider, but ourselves and our place in the world. In this state, we confront the vastness of our own inner space projected into the unknown landscape. It is this inner landscape that has no boarder; it is as infinite the Universe. We cannot pinpoint our exact location within it as we have not mapped it. This is the true unknown. In “nowhere”, we must ask ourselves not only “Where am I?” but “Who am I?”.

Bread Crumbs . . .

“The presence of written inscriptions in the landscape is also a phenomenon characteristic of the West. Since people were not really able to live there, it is my impression that they started to write things so as to feel less alone and to prove that they had conquered this landscape. It's almost as if you had arrived at the North Pole and found twenty or so notices set up by those who had already been there, to prove that they had reached it.”

- Wim Wenders xxxix

Engravings in rocks, flags on mountain tops, initials carved in trees, scrawl on park benches, scribbles in the sand - these all form the bread crumb trail that reads, “I was here”. They serve as markers, not only of our triumph over nature, but as a fingerprint of our presence. We leave remnants of our journey in an attempt to outlive ourselves; to declare our presence in an impermanent existence. This physical evidence left in the world around us, is all that will remain after we are gone. The photograph is another means by which we mark our place (and progress) in the world. It is our flag,

The Middle of Nowhere 21 our token, our souvenir, our badge of honor, our scar, our evidence. Through the act of photography, we can later exclaim “I was there” and “I lived”.

Photographic images themselves are proof that we cannot escape ourselves: our culture, identity, or the physical evidence of our society. As we can only really understand the landscape in relation to ourselves, photography is a means through which we can interpret our position in the world. We can identify with these trace elements in the landscape and create a connection to place through the photographs we take. Furthermore, the photograph itself is the trace that connects us to “nowhere”.

There is no location on Earth where humanity has not left its fingerprint; either directly through utopia building (industry and cities) or indirectly through climate change. Observing the remnants of human influence can remind us of our impact, and inspire us to re-evaluate our relationship with the environment. When witnessing the evidence of civilization in remote places, we are struck by the prospect that we may be responsible for the demise of both.

Wherever we go there we are, as evidenced by the photographs we take.

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Landscape Photography

“Much of landscape photography is bound by this search for an ideal representation. Whereas, when Talbot photographed a tree, it remained a tree, failing to expand into a larger symbol of significance precisely because it had no context other than its literal presence, landscape photography on the other hand, is framed within its own conventions and its own codes. It declares, in whatever terms, a pre-determined aesthetic and philosophy of the way we read the land and invest it with meaning”.

- Graham Clarke xl

The genre of landscape photography grew out of the conventions, traditions, and demands of eighteenth century landscape painting. The camera’s origins can be traced back to the device through which painters created sketches for their work: the Camera Obscura (used during the Renaissance) and later, the Camera Lucida (1807).xli By focusing light through a small hole and projecting it onto the opposite wall of a darkened room (or through a box), artists could trace the inverted outline of the scene in front of them. The invention of the camera was another tool to aid the aspiring landscape painter. The cultural and compositional ideas surrounding landscape painting in the eighteenth century guided the direction in which the camera lens pointed, and informed the development of landscape photography.

Historian Graham Clarke discusses how the invention of the photograph arrived at the same time as the notion of the picturesque took hold in European painting.xlii The conventions of the picturesque dictated the characteristics of a “beautiful” landscape: rugged coastlines, rolling hills, quaint ruins, to name a few. The genre was a means for organizing the natural world. Tourists in eighteenth century Britain sought out picturesque locations and sketched them: creating the original postcard image. Art collectors and critics debated it many features, virtues, and incarnations. “As a cultural index, the picturesque thus sought visual confirmation of a timeless Arcadia.” xliii Photography developed at a time when the landscape was represented as a wild utopia existing outside of organized society.

The photograph is another method by which humans can organize and categorize the world. Through framing, the landscape photographer chooses a slice of the natural environment that appeals to their ideal, and imposes the guiding principles of photographic compositional onto it. The “rule of thirds” divides the rectangular frame

The Middle of Nowhere 23 into three equal vertical sections. Additionally, a horizontal division of thirds occurs between the fore, mid, and backgrounds, creating a perfectly balanced image.

Photographs provide the opportunity to view a landscape from a safe distance. The landscape is “made safe according to established terms of reference reflected in the photograph’s composition and treatment of subject.” xliv Images of the unknown landscape conform to the predetermined organizational principles stated above, making it less frightening and easier to comprehend. The “wilderness” is tamed through the conventions of landscape photography; presented in a way that is highly structured, organized and balanced, where light and dark tones are measured in degrees. The photographic frame is a method by which the chaos of nature is domesticated.

6. Brandy Dahrouge Picnic Island, 2008

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A Place With No Name

“The space could be to the place what the word becomes when it is spoken: grasped in the ambiguity of being accomplished, changed into a term stemming from multiple conventions, uttered as the act of one present (or one time), and modified by the transformations resulting from successive influences . . . “

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty xlv

When an idea is named, spoken out-loud, it is made visible and can be communicated with others. A transaction takes place between receiver and sender in which the word is defined and understood in the mind’s eye of both participants. Since we do not name landscapes, how do we understand them? The landscape photograph operates as a word in this exchange: it is an attempt to name a space.

Photography is a system of classification similar to naming. By putting a frame around some place we do not recognize, we attempt to contain it within four sides; creating a slice of infinity that we can contemplate. Where we point the camera (what we include in the frame, and what we leave out) essentially says “this is how I understand this space”. Our experiences within the landscape also help us to define it, and determine which parts of it we will include in our definition. Each individual experiences landscape differently, based on their unique past, culture, and perspective on reality. Two photographs may appear the same, but like a word, their interpretation (and misinterpretation) will differ based on the bias of the individual.

For Merleau-Ponty, naming constitutes place; allowing it to be fully realized. We give names to the things that are important to us, in an attempt to understand and communicate. Naming may also acknowledge that an event has occurred. Likewise, photographs serve as recognition of events. The reasons leading up to you taking a photograph and the feeling you are experiencing in that moment, are what you want to capture, remember. The event could be that you made it to a remote location with only your own feet to guide you, or that you stopped the car on an open road to admire the landscape in awesome wonder. Or, that you found yourself lost. The key is you had an experience (felt something) within a landscape that you want to understand, remember, or communicate.

“Nowhere” is a place with no name. When photographed, you label it “somewhere”.

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Visual Characteristics of Nowhere

“Documentary photographs saturate the photograph with human figures, landscape images empty the land of human presence. Landscape photographers choose those areas beyond human habitation, extreme borderlands and national parks: pristine environments with as little evidence of human settlement as possible. In that sense they construct their own Arcadia . . . They seek an ideal image in an ideal land.”

- Graham Clarke xlvi

This idea of “nowhere” can be illustrated through certain visual characteristics: nondescript landscape features that resist our ability to precisely locate the space, perspective that stretches into an infinite void, or a sense that the photographer (and us as the viewer) are standing on the precipice of the unknown. In all “nowhere” type images, there appears to be no one. The lack of human presence (except for the obvious presence of the photographer) is a predominant theme of landscape photography in general. An image of a deserted town is as much about “nowhere” as an uninhabited “wild” landscape. “Nowhere” equally reveals itself in a place whose function has expired - an abandoned house, a dusty vacant town, the ruins of an ancient city, or an empty city street after the day’s business is done. A contemporary interpretation of “nowhere” might be a cul de sac in the suburbs; a road that returns into itself, literally going nowhere. Visually, the suburb appears not to be located anywhere specific, but everywhere: in the ubiquitous modern city.

7. Wim Wenders Dust Road in West Australia, 1988

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The car and the camera seem to go hand in hand. There exists an entire genre of road trip images, especially of the American West, where “the middle of nowhere” is a predominant theme. The classic “nowhere” image is one of an open road, stretching into infinity, usually taken somewhere in between your starting point and your destination (for an example see

8. Joel Lleugh Sign to the Middle of Nowhere, the Wim Wenders image on the previous page). Lleugh’s Photostream, Flickr A simple search of the Internet will turn up thousands of photographs with the title “middle of nowhere”. From the photo-sharing website Flickr to stock photography sites, the prevailing visual metaphor is a journey down an open road snapped from the window of your car.

Narrative and Experience

Travel creates a narrative connecting us to places that were previously only points on our itinerary. It is this narrative that transforms landscape into place; providing meaning and creating a relationship between it and us. The photographs we take on this journey are a central part of maintaining this relationship. They become the touch stones of memory; eliciting the experience and emotions we felt in that landscape. Experience is critical for the realization of landscape as place to occur.

However, travel can also serve to further displace us. When driving down the highway at one hundred kilometers an hour (watching the landscape fly by your window), it difficult to feel connected to the landscape. Movement can encourage feelings of dislocation and detachment. Marc Augé describes this phenomenon as “a double movement: the traveler’s movement, of course, but also a parallel movement of the landscapes which he catches only in partial glimpses, a series of ‘snapshots’ piled hurriedly into his memory and, literally, recomposed in the account he gives of them . . . Travel constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape”.xlvii

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Photographing Everywhere

“[Photography is] . . . A bit like a car or a plane, which takes you somewhere. A camera takes you somewhere.”

- Wim Wendersxlviii

Every corner of our world has been explored, mapped, and photographed. With the aid of satellites, global positioning systems, the Internet, closed circuit television, tourists with cameras and mobile camera phones, we have virtually (if not physically) been, seen, and recorded everywhere. However, the sheer volume of images that exist regarding place do not diminish our curiosity about them. Rather, they inspire a desire for our own authentic (a priori) experience with the landscape. We do not wish to duplicate the same lonely desert road postcard picture we have seen hundreds of times; we crave for the experience that inspired the taking of that image. Seeing is not the same as knowing. In searching for “nowhere” we are not looking for a place that has never been photographed before, we are seeking an experience that only we can have - the emptying of our mind in the face of the unknown - discovering a personal “middle of nowhere”.

Undiscovered landscapes no longer exist. The abundance of images we are exposed to regarding place, and the mass of information we have gathered about our planet, only serve to intensify this utopia myth. Advertising images from the travel industry encourage us to search further - to go somewhere we have never been and experience the elation of discovery. Seeing can inspire us to do.

From Nowhere to Somewhere . . . and Back Again

The promise of “nowhere” still exists as a means to escape modernity. However, we must make use of the products of modernity (air travel, cars, trains, tents, outdoor gear) in order to get away from it all. Once there, we employ another invention of the “modern age”, the camera, to document the experience.

Through the act of photography “nowhere”, becomes “somewhere”. Photography changes our relationship to place and creates a historical link between us (as photographer and viewer) and the land. The photographed landscape is now a part of your history; it occupies a slice of your past. You can identify with the image (and the

The Middle of Nowhere 28 location) as you recount being there: where you were standing, what you were thinking, how the air smelled, the temperature, the circumstances that brought you to that spot and inspired you to take the picture. The photograph serves to remind you of the experience. It is evidence of your presence at that specific location, and can encourage reflection upon your connection to the landscape.

However, photography can further displace us from our surroundings. It can become a barrier, preventing us from experiencing the landscape in the moment. The eager tourist often snaps a photograph as their first act of arriving in a location. The landscape is captured and the photograph taken away, to experience later in the comfort of their home. In this instance, the photograph operates as a stand-in for the experience, rather than as a reminder.

The snapshot literally becomes displaced when removed from the location where it was taken. Time and travel further separate us from a landscape, and the memories we associate with the image change. Our feelings about the land transmute based on the new coordinates from which we now find ourselves. Eventually, we romanticize the scene in the photograph: it becomes a utopia of our past.

“The middle of nowhere” is an authentic experience that forces you to see the place you are in, in a different way. It is the accomplishment of feeling affected by the landscape, not by the photograph of it. It is a moment where you reflect on yourself and your place in the cosmos; the realization that the world is indeed bigger that you are, and you can still become lost in it. You feel the wonder of discovering somewhere new, despite all that you have seen in the past. It is about finding the extraordinary within the ordinary, wherever your “ordinary” is located.

Can a two dimensional document encompass and contain the complexity of this experience? Of course, it cannot. A photograph is a literal record of a physical space and the objects within it. It contains only the meaning, symbolism, and significance that we give to it. It is the experiences we have within the landscape that gives the photographs we take, and view, meaning.

Photographs are only temporary proof of our existence. They, like everything will fade. An image cannot immortalize human experience or accomplishment. It is as impermanent as we are.

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Chapter Three: Methodology and Meaning

Photographic Research

“Something, some connection with the whole, has pressed itself to your senses. In that moment, there’s the tiniest little change - so tiny, it’s been smothered by all the energy around you - at that moment you stop, and say, “What’s here? Why here?”. It doesn’t require your eyes, it requires your sense . . . All you have to have is the courage to say, “This is the place.”

- Joel Meyerowitzxlix

“The middle of nowhere” is discovered through an awareness of your presence within a landscape of apparent absence. In the photographic research accompanying this thesis, I have attempted to capture those instances where I experienced that feeling: the moment (and location) of simultaneous affect and dislocation. This experience is a precursor to taking the photograph. I responded intuitively to the landscapes around me in order to record this sensation. “Nowhere” is elusive and you do not realize it is where you are headed until you arrive there. Once you recognize it and name it, it is gone. I needed to feel my way around and “see” it without my eyes.

Australia and Canada are similar in terms of distance and space: vast tracks of flat land with very few inhabitants. In both countries, it is easy to feel lost and alone even when you know where you are. While the physical features of these countries are quite different, it is this same sense of space and distance that connected both landscapes for me. Visually, I experienced the Australian landscape as foreign, but felt at home with the sensation of vastness. Traveling back to Canada after living in Australia for a year, I recognized the Canadian landscape as 9. Brandy Dahrouge Car Park for Pharaohs, familiar, but felt that I was now foreign to it. 2007 These images were shot in both Canada and Australia and articulate my feelings of dislocation in both countries.

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The conventions of traditional landscape photography recommend a rectangular frame enclosing equal vertical and horizontal sections of thirds. My images deviate from this system in an attempt to get away from some of the ideas associated with the traditional format, such as: colonial exploration and claiming, surveying, postcard landscape photography, and picturesque interpretations. These images, captured on film in a square format, place the subject firmly in the centre or lead your eyes in that direction. This research is about finding 10. Brandy Dahrouge Over the Hill, 2008 yourself in the middle of somewhere. The square format, with equidistant sides, makes is easier for the eye to precisely locate the centre. Additionally, the square border suggests the space outside the photograph expands equally in all directions. A rectangular frame, indicates the horizontal movement of time - stretching out in both directions - past and future. The square resists this movement by emphasizing the primacy of the present. The photographer, the viewer, and the subject are placed directly in the centre of space and time.

Landscape photography is always concerned with location or place. One of the first thing anyone asks of a photograph is, ”Where was it taken?” The image exists because the location existed. The medium is tied to physical reality and it is impossible to record the abstract. A thought, idea, or feeling: these are too intangible for the camera to capture. I cannot photograph the state of mind that is “nowhere”, only the physical details that I identify as belonging to it. As photographer Joel Meyerowitz explains, “Photographs describe 11. Brandy Dahrouge Trigg Station, 2007 what awareness perceives: it’s a photograph of one’s awareness. It just looks like the objects in the photograph”.l The visual characteristics and objects contained in these images, contribute to my experience of “nowhere”.

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The human-made objects present in these landscapes aid in connecting myself and the viewer to the location. These trace elements provide some companionship and proof that the space is not a void. Of course, the very fact that I photographed this location implicates my own presence in the landscape, objects or no objects. Although these spaces are visually unfamiliar to me, I form a bond with them through the marks of other human beings. It is through these traces that I find my connection; drawing a narrative of life (and death) through 12. Brandy Dahrouge Rhinoceros, 2009 the transformation of non-place into place.

The images “Grid” and “Exit” reveal the way humans attempt to impose order on the land. A grid is the driving organizational matrix of modern cities. We use the grid as a system to divide the land for agriculture and ownership. Finally, a grid is a row of bars that limit the movement of stock. The juxtaposition of the “Grid” sign in front of the tree comments on society’s obsessive need to organize the natural world. The sign states, “This is not a tree. It is an object that has potential to become part of 13. Brandy Dahrouge Grid, 2009 the ‘grid’”.

The “Exit” sign refers to the linear way we emboss the landscape with roads. It also suggests a way out; an escape from order. These objects form the “punctum” of my images.li They are the impetus of the photograph and stimulate the viewer to examine the human presence (and ultimately, their own) within the landscape. Other people have come here before, and will continue to do so again. These traces remind me of my own mortality, and the impermanence of existence. 14. Brandy Dahrouge Exit, 2007

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There are few landscapes without evidence of human presence; found through the objects and structures we build, the markings we make on the surface of the earth (footprints, roads, excavation), the traces we leave behind to mark our arrival (flags, signs, words written in the sand), or the obvious attendance of the photographer. These images articulate the presence of humanity in “remote” places, and demonstrate that it is not possible to get away from ourselves. Moreover, our global trace and impact is obvious through climate change and 15. Brandy Dahrouge Which Way to Nowhere? 2009 its effect on the landscape.

These images reflect upon our desire for permanence and an attempt to out-live ourselves through trace elements left in the landscape. The photograph as an object operates in much the same way through linking me to these places. The image becomes my own personal evidence that I existed and experienced the land. They are my flag on the mountain-top, my writing in the desert, my foot prints in the sand.

16. Brandy Dahrouge Ciao, 2009 Wim Wenders comments on the profuse evidence of human presence within the landscape and photography stating:

“There are very few photographs in which there is no man-made object. In most of them, there is always something which, some day, will not be there any more, and which is perhaps no longer there at this very moment when we are talking about it. Or in ten years or a hundred years from now.”lii

These photographs not only document my arrival and departure, but comment on the impermanence of human society. Despite all that we build, leave behind, and photograph, the earth will eventually reclaim the land from us.

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The photograph “Kelowna Beach Resort” illustrates a constructed Utopia within a natural setting. This defunct resort allowed tourists to experience the beauty of the natural landscape, without leaving the comforts of modernity behind. From the safety of the dock, visitors can contemplate the possibility of “the middle of nowhere” as if watching an animal in the zoo. They do not have to get their feet dirty - the price of exploring. “To get away from it all” is to escape from the stress of modern life, yet often we do not want to leave the comforts of that 17. Brandy Dahrouge Kelowna Beach Resort, lifestyle behind. 2008

The image “Drive In” is another example of escapism that relies upon the products of modernity: motion pictures. In an empty field, on the outskirts of a small rural town, just past the edge of the known (settled) world, lies this screen. Within a natural setting of farmland and forest, viewers can momentarily escape their reality and contemplate some other. The movie screen serves as a metaphor for Utopia.

18. Brandy Dahrouge Drive-in Paradise, “Menindee Lake Holiday” suggests how the 2008 demands of the modern world destroy the natural utopia we wish to find and create. The dock sits in front of an abandoned holiday home, stretching out into a lake that has been dry for years. The “lake” is rimmed with empty cottages - a dystopia of sorts - revealing a literally dried-up resort community. The Menindee lakes, fed by the Darling River, have become a victim of increased demands for water and climate change. liii

19. Brandy Dahrouge Menindee Lake Vacation 2007

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The images in which human-made objects are not present, reveal a more concrete impact on the environment. In the absence of signs, is evidence of the ways we physically alter the planet. “Coober Pedy Mountains” describes a landscape reshaped through excavation (mining). The silhouette of this landscape is reminiscent of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. While the outline of the horizon in this image is very familiar to me, the materials which form it (the rubble from Opal exploration) are foreign. A conflict arises when the world we wish to 20. Brandy Dahrouge Coober Mountains, create (and the resources we exploit to sustain 2009 it) alter the very thing we want to preserve and escape to: an untouched landscape.

The image “Dunes: 4WD Beach” speaks of how we change the landscape when we do get away from it all. These sand dunes have formed naturally over millions of years. However, they now make up part of an obstacle course for tourists: a four-wheel-drive theme park of dune buggies, monster trucks, and all terrain vehicles. These dunes are continually being re-shaped and carved out by the tires of motorized vehicles. 21. Brandy Dahrouge Dunes: 4WD Beach, 2007

In the photograph “Lake Eyre”, the human effect on the landscape is less direct. The lake resembles a moonscape: a celestial body where water (and life) cannot exist. The “nowhere” I experienced here, is similar to what I imagine it would feel like to be in outer space - the ultimate void. Evidence of our impact on the planet is revealed in the existence of this 1.2 million square kilometer liv dried-up lake. The industrialization of the modern age and the resource-based economy needed to support it, has changed the climate of our planet. There is 22. Brandy Dahrouge Lake Eyre, 2009

The Middle of Nowhere 35 a distinct sense of arriving too late – after humanity has wiped itself out, leaving Earth unable to support life.

The photographs “Cross City Tunnel” and “Ghost House” reference utopia as well as dystopia. Silverton was a mining town: a ghost of the silver rush of the late nineteenth century in the remote outback of New South Wales. The house seen here was likely built on dreams of riches and a better life. It symbolizes the quest for 23. Brandy Dahrouge Ghost House, 2007 a personal (and financial) utopia. However, its ruins reveal a failed attempt at accomplishing this new life. The abandoned town-site alludes to the bankrupt desires of an entire community.

“Cross City Tunnel” is an example of an urban experience of “nowhere”. The road pictured here is the main artery into, and out of, the heart of downtown Sydney. A freakish lull in human activity resulted in a moment of suspended time - and an awareness that one could be completely alone in the midst of all that we have created. In this moment, I could contemplate the possibility of a city, and a world, without people. 24. Brandy Dahrouge Cross City Tunnel, 2007

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Chapter Four: Conclusions

A World of No One

“Nature is what remains or what can recuperate over time when all humans and their works are removed.”

- Yi-Fu Tuanlv

The World Without Us is the title of a book by Alan Weisman. The premise of the book asks us to imagine a world where all human life vanishes suddenly. Weisman wonders how quickly would nature reclaim the land: how soon would species flourish, animal populations multiply, the ozone layer repair itself, and our waste biodegrade? My photographic search for “the middle of nowhere” reveals the traces left behind by humanity through our modification of the landscape. These images are reminiscent of a world after we have gone from it. What trace elements remain to suggest our effect on the planet, the role of landscape in our lives, and our respect (or lack thereof) for it? What objects will outlive us and stand as proof of our existence?

Look around you, at today’s world. Your house, your city. The surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out, and see what’s left. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines?lvi “Nowhere” is a land without people. This concept is utopic and dystopic; good for the planet but bad for us. The paradox is that human survival depends upon modification of nature in some way. We survive as a species because we learned to harness the tools of fire, build shelters, and secure our sources of food (either through domestication or hunting and gathering). Our basic existence will always bite the hand that feeds it. Our increasing industrialization has shifted the balance towards a constructed utopia, in opposition to a natural one. However, as stated earlier, we must move away from nature in order to return to it. Paradise may be a world where we have not polluted the water, poisoned the air, or cut down the trees. The utopia of the twenty first century should constitute a world where we can regain the “sacred balance”lvii between us and the environment.

The search for “the middle of nowhere” reveals our nostalgia for a lost place. There is no sphere where humanity has not exerted its influence. We pine for the “many now inaccessible or despoiled places, often in consequence of ecological damage or

The Middle of Nowhere 37 negligence.”lviii Modern society must change its relationship to nature and recognize it as the force that sustains our very existence. Nature is a priori: the very fabric of all we have built and achieved. Everything we have, including ourselves, is born from nature.

These instances of “unknowing” and discovering “nowhere” are very important; they relegate us to a state of wonder and awe at the world around us. We begin to look at nature with new eyes, rather than from the perspective of a culture that attempts to be its master.

Search for the Unknown

“Nowhere” is a quest for the unknown. It is a location with no longitude or latitude; a sensation that has more to do with where we are in our heads than where we are on a map. Discovering “the middle of nowhere” is the recognition of presence felt in absence, and the realization that the presence is your own. “Nowhere” is not about getting lost “out there”, rather becoming lost “in here”; not knowing where we are on our internal map but confronting this unknown with wonder. It is the relinquishment of self (ego) that we achieve through the abandonment of place. In “nowhere” we gain an opportunity for self-discovery.

Once there we can experience the landscape in a way that empties us of all previous notions. We step outside of our everyday reality and discover something new about the world around us. Despite everything we know about the planet, finding ourselves in the “middle of nowhere” is the recognition that wonder and surprise are still possible. Despite the wealth of information, and images we are bombarded with every day, it is still possible to experience affect.

When we experience that moment of infancy, there is an opportunity to rewrite the past and the possibility for reinvention of the future. “Nowhere” affords us the clarity to observe our lives “back there”, and meet ourselves without the filters that determine who we should be. It also allows us to examine our relationship with, and impact on, the environment. Arriving in “nowhere” is the realization of an uncharted relationship with the planet and ourselves.

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References i Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. Xiv. ii Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 77-78. iii Thomas Moore, Utopia, trans. by Ralph Robynson (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s Press, 1999). iv Samuel Butler, Erewhon (New York: Airmont Publishing, 1967). v Ibid, p. 23. vi Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 15. vii Ibid, pp. 3-4. viii Ibid, p. 23. ix Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), p. 42. x Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 77-78. xi Ibid, p. 34. xii Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. xii. xiii Ibid, p. Xiv. xiv Ibid, p. 192. xv Bruce Cockburn, ‘Mystery’ from Life Short, Call Now (Canada: Golden Mountain Music Corporation, 2006). xvi Jean François Lyotard, quoted in Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.24. xvii Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 29-30. xviii Ibid, p.29. xix The Faber Book of Utopias, ed. by John Carey (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999), p. xi. xx Ibid, p. 1.

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xxi Thomas Moore, Utopia, trans. by Ralph Robynson (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 148-153. xxii Ibid, pp. 134-135. xxiii The Faber Book of Utopias, ed. by John Carey (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999), p. 1. xxiv Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), p.18. xxv Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York, Random House Inc, 1996). xxvi Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 19. xxvii The Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd, 2006), front inside jacket cover. xxviii Ibid, front inside jacket cover. xxix Arjun Basu, ‘Where is the Middle of Nowhere?’, enRoute, August 2006, p. 19. xxx enRoute, August 2006, pp. 39-49. xxxi Welcome to the Middle of Nowhere, Product Catalogue by Black Wolf (A division of Phoenix Leisure Group Pty Limited), 2006-7. xxxii The Banff Centre, Media Release 2005 Mountain Speaker Series: The Iceman Returns (February 22nd, 2005), http://www.banffcentre.ca/MountainCulture/media/2005/20050309_theiceman.asp [accessed 19 May 2009}. xxxiii The Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd, 2006), p. 230. xxxiv Encyclopaedic Australian Legal Dictionary, entry ‘Terra nullius: Latin words and phrases’ (hosted by LexisNexis) http://www.lexisnexis.com.viviena.library.unsw.edu.au [accessed 27 June, 2009]. xxxv Judy Annear, ‘Photography and Place’, Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Art + Culture, vol. 37 no. 3 (2008) http://www.cacsa.org.au/archives/index_frames.html [accessed 12 January 2009], p 202. xxxvi Graham Clarke, Oxford History of Art: The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 12. xxxvii Judy Annear referring to a quote by Helen Ennis, ‘Photography and Place’, Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Art + Culture, vol. 37 no. 3 (2008) http://www.cacsa.org.au/archives/index_frames.html [accessed 12 January 2009], p 202. xxxviii Ibid, p. 202. xxxix Wim Wenders quoted in Alain Bergala, ‘A Photographer’s Viewpoint: an interview with Wim Wenders’. UNESCO Courier, April (1998)

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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1988_April/ai_6354146 [accessed 21 January 2009] p. 2. xl Graham Clarke, Oxford History of Art: The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 73. xli Ibid, p. 12. xlii Ibid, p. 55. xliii Ibid, p. 55. xliv Ibid, p.58. xlv Maurice Merleau-Ponty from Phénoménologie de la perception, quoted in Marc Augé Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), p. 73. xlvi Graham Clarke, Oxford History of Art: The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 64-5. xlvii xlvii Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), p. 85-86. xlviii Wim Wenders quoted in Alain Bergala, ‘A Photographer’s Viewpoint: an interview with Wim Wenders’. UNESCO Courier, April 1998 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1988_April/ai_6354146 [accessed 21 January 2009] p. 1. xlix Joel Meyerowitz, Creating a Sense of Place: Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz, ed. by Constance Sullivan and Susan Weiley (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), p. 11. l Ibid, p. 10. li Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 2000), p.42. lii Wim Wenders quoted in Alain Bergala, ‘A Photographer’s Viewpoint: an interview with Wim Wenders’. UNESCO Courier, April (1998) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1988_April/ai_6354146 [accessed 21 January 2009] p. 2. liii For more information, please see ‘Menindee Lakes Project’, Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage, and the Arts website http://www.environment.gov.au/water/policy-programs/srwui/menindee- lakes/index.html liv ‘About the Basin’, Lake Eyre Basin Organization web site http://www.lakeeyrebasin.org.au/archive/pages/page03.html [accessed 19 July 2009]. lv Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 20.

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lvi Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), p. 4. lvii This phrase is taken from the title of David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver: Greystone Books,1997). lviii Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.38.

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Images

1. The Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd, 2006), cover image by Ann Johansson, Corbis Images. 2. enRoute, August 2006, cover image by Matthias Clarner, Corbis Images. 3. Welcome to the Middle of Nowhere, Product Catalogue by Black Wolf (A division of Phoenix Leisure Group Pty Limited), 2006-7, cover image not attributed. 4. Anne Noble ‘Goal Post Antarctica 2002’ from the series Antarctica: from place to place 2002-05 printed in Photofile (issue 76, summer 2006), p. 41. 5. Murray Fredericks, image ‘Salt 300’, exhibition invitation from the series Salt (Melbourne: Arc One Gallery, February 2009). 6. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Tasmania’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2008. 7. Wim Wenders ‘Dust Road in West Australia, 1988’ from Wim Wenders Pictures from the Surface of the Earth (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2003), Plate 21. 8. Joel Lleugh Sign to the Middle of Nowhere, Lleugh’s photostream hosted by Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/lleugh/506158434/ [accessed 4 August 2009]. 9. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Car Park on the Beach’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2007. 10. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Over the Hill’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2008. 11. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Reaching the Top’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2007. 12. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Rhino’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2009. 13. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Grid’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2009. 14. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Exit’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2009. 15. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Which Way to Nowhere?’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2009. 16. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Ciao’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2009. 17. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Kelowna Beach Resort’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2008. 18. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Drive-in Paradise’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2008. 19. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Menindee Lake Holiday’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2007. 20. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Coober Pedy Mountains’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2009. 21. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘4WD Beach’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2007. 22. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Lake Eyre’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2009.

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23. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Silverton’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2007. 24. Brandy Dahrouge, ‘Cross City Tunnel’ from the series Where is the Middle of Nowhere?, Colour Photograph, 20 x 20 inches, 2007.

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Bibliography

Annear, Judy, ‘Photography and Place’, Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Art + Culture, vol. 37 no. 3, 2008 http://www.cacsa.org.au/archives/index_frames.html [accessed 12 January 2009].

Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, London, 1995.

Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 2000).

Basu, Arjun ed., ‘Where is the Middle of Nowhere?’ EnRoute August 2006, 19.

Bergala, Alain, ‘A Photographer’s Viewpoint: an interview with Wim Wenders’. UNESCO Courier, April 1998, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1988_April/ai_6354146. [accessed 21 January 2009].

Black Wolf, Welcome to the Middle of Nowhere (Product Catalogue, 2006-7).

Carey, John ed., The Faber Book of Utopias (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999).

Casey, Edward S, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

Clarke, Graham, The Photograph: Oxford History of Art Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Cockburn, Bruce, ‘Mystery’ from Life Short, Call Now (Canada: Golden Mountain Music Corporation, 2006).

Encyclopaedic Australian Legal Dictionary, hosted by LexisNexis http://www.lexisnexis.com.viviena.library.unsw.edu.au [accessed 27 June, 2009].

Krakauer, Jon, Into the Wild (New York, Random House Inc, 1996). Lonely Planet, The Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd, 2006).

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Meyerowitz, Joel, Creating a Sense of Place: Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz. Constance Sullivan and Susan Weiley ed. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

Moore, Sir Thomas, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robynson (Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 1999).

Mossman, Danae ‘Anne Noble: From Place to Place’ Photofile vol. 76 summer 2006, 39-41.

Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd revised edition (London: Penguin, 1974).

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (New York: Airmont Publishing, 1967).

Suzuki, David with Amanda McConnell, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 1997).

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, or Life in the Woods; and ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience’ (New York, Signet Classics, 2004).

Tuan, Yi-Fu, Escapism (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Weisman, Alan, The World Without Us (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2007).

Wenders, Wim, Pictures from the Surface of the Earth (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2003).

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