Songs of the Dead | Peer Reviewed in Sophia Journal
Exploring the Aftermath: Landscape Meets Theory
As an artist and photographer, I am fascinated by the interplay between life and death and how the rest of the natural world bears witness to our existence. So, I am thrilled to announce that a section of our Catastrophic Fire project based on the 2016 Fort McMurray burn has been published in the peer-reviewed Sophia Journal. Our visual essay, Song of the Dead, is a poetic meditation on living with fire and the resilience of communities emerging from post-catastrophic fires.
As a visual essay in Sophia Journal, Song of the Dead reflects a firey aftermath. A landscape jolted violently into a renewal cycle, leaving behind a wake of destruction with glimmers of renewal. The photographs capture a landscape and geography visibly disturbed by the fire.
The story I found was not as straightforward as research suggested - aftermath of Fort McMurray, as it stands today, includes a violent colonial history and was built to export synthetic crude oil; therefore, the complicit use of billions of barrels of oil exported to users must be considered part of the fabric of the event. In addition to what the landscape tells me, the academic paper calls for theoretical placement. To do this, we worked with David Campany's excellent Late Photography essay, which refers to photographers arriving deliberately late - after the event after the moving images for social and news media. We also explore the ethics of imagery and how Aftermath, once described as an agricultural landscape, is more commonly used as the unsteady, shaken landscape impacted by human war or conflict and confusingly with climate events.
As an auto-didactic learner, I hope this story is particularly inspiring for those who have struggled with traditional education systems or have not had access to them. I hope others see that there are alternative paths to raising awareness and that they can achieve their goals with by focus, dedication and have moments of peace that this brings.