Documentary Landscape - Morgain Bailey and Stella Kalinina
During October and November of 2020, an international group of photographers from diverse backgrounds came together as a Six Feet hosted peer group to work for six weeks on documentary landscape practice and theory. The following images have been curated by the group’s moderators, Morgain Bailey and Stella Kalinina, from submissions made by the group’s members.
Note from Morgain: As artists, we all benefit from working together cooperatively. It has been my great privilege to be connected to these photographers through the hub provided by sixfeet.photography. Each person has a unique perspective and location. It is my hope that by taking the time to look at the work of these photographers, you will learn something about their part of the universe and perhaps take a minute to contemplate your own relationship to the places you inhabit.
Note from Stella: For six weeks, we walked and visually excavated the places we live in search for clues left behind by those before us and our contemporaries. We sought to connect emotionally and cognitively to the land and to understand our place on it. We surveyed New Topographics and contemporary work as we formed our responses. The work we made as a group feels personal, poetic, and fragile.
Krishna Goswami
Kolkata, India
Discordant Buzz; Vibrating Silence
This ongoing project is the documentation of the changing landscape of the area near the metropolis city of Kolkata where a new “smart green city” of New Town is in the making. For the New Town project, around 6000-7000 hectares of land have been acquired by the Housing Development Board of West Bengal (HIDCO) of Kolkata. This area was a rural settlement comprising rich agricultural farmland, water bodies and swamp. After the acquisition there has been a drastic transformation of the land use. The farmlands and swamps have vanished, the water bodies depleted. The construction work for different infrastructure development projects are in full swing. One experiences the metal skeletons of industrial and housing centres. Moving between different sites one can encounter a water body, vacant quiet land of dry grass and kash flowers, a cow on the road. These provide some insight into how the land was inhabited and worked before the acquisition. At present, New Town thrusts upon some whimsical installations on the roadsides which infuses tension between the natural and the artificial. The complexity and discordance of the landscape is visually appalling with simultaneous density of activity sites and hesitant gaps of silent vacant lands. Just 500 metres away from the border of New Town, a rural landscape still exists. This dichotomy opens up more questions than answers; yet this becomes an inseparable feature of urbanization.
Rita Kovtun
Asheville, North Carolina
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the idea of reciprocity with nature. How do we have a reciprocal exchange with the land? How do we keep from being too greedy? How do we give back to the land, especially after we have taken so much?
I recently began renting a house in a newer neighborhood in Leicester, a rural/suburban community just outside of Asheville, North Carolina. There are more new housing developments underway and the main road from Asheville to Leicester is being widened, paving the way for even more development in future years. The new houses are a stark contrast to the older, more rustic structures in surrounding neighborhoods.
I’m exploring how to have a reciprocal relationship to my surrounding landscape while living in a homeowner’s association neighborhood, which has many rules about how to treat land and property. My exploration comes alongside living into how a house becomes a home.
Virginie Kippelen
Atlanta, Georgia
Peavine Creek: The Head of the Shed
This project documents the humble beginning of a waterway which runs close to my home in Atlanta, Georgia. At first sight, it is an inconspicuous stream, an often-hidden feature in the urban landscape. But Peavine Creek, as well as other tributaries to the Chattahoochee River, sit on a defining ridgeline - that is the highest point that divides different watersheds. It is the Eastern Sub-Continental Divide that runs in a line from the New York-Pennsylvania border along the Appalachian Mountains to the tip of Florida.
In other words, Peavine creek is a “headwater”, a local watershed that journeys some 300 miles south all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. You would expect that, as such, it would be celebrated, or at least protected. The reality is that it is most often buried under the asphalt and tight culverts, polluted and all together ignored. This series of photographs attempts to restore its visual identity and ultimately to bring awareness to its importance.
Stella Kalinina
Los Angeles, California
During this practice group, I was interested in investigating the present day edges in Southern California: where Joshua trees with an average lifespan of 150 years meet the electric grid during the worst wildfire season on record in California; where new big box stores at the edge of a megapolis speak to the ways we’ve chosen to live; where seismically shifting land on a fault line holds housing only a few decades old; and where home, leisure, and commerce meet in the physical landscape.
Jesse Barber
Boone, North Carolina
“A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place… it is a form of contact with a known landscape” - Wendell Berry
Rivers carry local knowledge and human interaction along their banks as they snake their way through the mountains as a sort of “path” making. The path that a river takes—much like the path that animals and humans make to access the river—are winding, curved, and for the river, this path is ancient compared to the human endeavour.
Pathmaking through geographic interactions can help us understand a culture; it can inform the viewer of belief systems, economic activity, and travel patterns. The building of fence systems and barns might indicate farming as a sole source of income, a side venture for more cash flow, or a hobby. The number of churches and the roads that lead deep into the hollars can inform the type of belief systems the people hold.
Photographing along the New River was a search for how human activity intersects with this ecosystem. For me, the process for this project became an act of meandering: the driving and walking, the processing of place, history, and culture, all the while chasing a river. I could not access the river in a vacuum, separate from the many human, historical, development, and cultural factors that shape the river and surrounding landscape.
Interacting with local people was the key, as my understanding of the land was founded in relation to the people I met. I not only knew the name of the road I was driving and the river I was following, but also the names of those who lived in the adjacent homes. Being able to name our surroundings allows us to familiarize ourselves to where we are and our place in it, as Robin Wall Kimmerer eloquently states, “to be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.”
Morgain Bailey
Kingfield, Maine
In the state of Maine, the impact of colonialism and settler culture is deeply woven into the landscape. As a photographer, I utilize the camera as a method for understanding and exploring my own relationship to places. I hope that the viewer will bring their unique perspectives to the images, expanding my viewpoint into their own. These four images were made in a place that was the site of a massacre of the local Abenaki tribe by English soldiers. The survivors escaped to what is now Quebec and the soldiers turned around and left because they did not have the skills to survive in this place. Currently, the site is a memorial, provides river access and seems to be mostly abandoned. The only witnesses standing guard are the older trees remaining in place. As an outsider to this area and a descendent of European settler immigrant culture, I see myself collecting clues to regional history and ancestral trauma by making photographs of and witnessing what is standing there now. My hope for the future is that site-specific memorials will become more sophisticated and appropriate, honoring living people as well as their ancestors, in ways that are both collaborative and respectful.
Morgain Bailey is an artist-photographer from California who lives in rural Maine. Her work focuses on environmental portraiture, documentary landscape and still-life. She is interested in investigative and research-based photography that looks deeper into our relationship with the land and our chosen homes. @bailey_photo
Stella Kalinina is a Russian-Ukrainian American photographer based in Los Angeles working on contemplative stories about human connections, personal and communal histories, and the places we inhabit. She brings empathy, curiosity, and a collaborative approach to portrait-based stories that are firmly rooted in a sense of place. @stella_kalinina
Learn more about the artists:
Krishna Goswami - @krishna_goswami_