Order and Chaos – Charting Change in the Work of Doc Ross

An essay by Sally Blundell for PhotoForum, 30 July 2020

Born in 1955 in Eketahuna, photographer Doc Ross has spent the last two decades recording urban landscapes in all their changing situations. Since moving to Christchurch in 1998, he has been described as one of the city’s “most intimate biographers”, tracking the changing city before and after the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. He has exhibited throughout New Zealand and Australia. His work and photo-books are held in the collections of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and private and corporate collections worldwide. In 2000 his work was shown at the New Zealand Ambassador’s residence in Tehran and in 2002 his work was included in an exhibition of contemporary Australian and New Zealand photography at Sotheby's New York.

The bronze bulk of Queen Victoria faces down a city – once her city – now in ruins. The folds of her cloak fall in monochrome affinity with the rubble at her royal feet, the lace imprint of her shawl melds into the detail of shadow and line, the tip of her crown mirrors the stark geometry of a built skyline beneath the ghostly form of a crane’s hook. In Lost City # 4 photographer Doc Ross holds the monarch’s gaze, and that of the viewer, to the experience of Christchurch in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake – broken, melancholic, haunting.

In other works in Unearthed, a joint exhibition by Ross and jeweller Elfi Spiewack shown at The National over June/July 2020, in Christchurch, stacks of shipping containers shore up the walls of heritage buildings; street names point to carnage; shafts of light soften the stark grey of deserted buildings; the Citizen’s War Memorial rises ghostlike, its stance of victory literally and allegorically blurred, within the damaged frame of Cathedral Square.

Looming over the figure of the stoic monarch, rearing above the cenotaph, a barely visible wall of a half-destroyed building dominates the horizon.

“If it was just a clear sky you could look through to that clear sky and your mind could wander off and you are out of this moment,” says Ross, “but the fact this is there in the back stops that. Like the earthquake, it just hits you, you can't get away.”

Shadow upon shadow, layer upon layer. These are constructed works. Photographs built from an archive of images taken by Ross before and since the earthquakes cohere into single images of lost history, chaotic change and personal experience. In Crania (2020), an amalgam of three photographs, Ross draws together the startling blueness of the sky, the latticed form of the crane’s reach – a skeletal proxy for what could be a church steeple – and the flash of white wings of a flock of pigeons circling within the circle of the edge of the photograph.

The round and square formats of many of these works pull the eye in. “In a rectangular image your eyes tend to look along – in a really long panoramic image you can spend your whole time scanning from one side to the other – but if you have a tondo or square image, there are not so many places for your eye to disappear to, there is nowhere to go.”

But there is something else going on. Layered into some of these works are reproduced prints of etchings by Giovanni Piranesi. In his depictions of the classical ruins of Rome, the eighteenth-century Italian artist revealed his extraordinary understanding of perspective, using the position of the eye, the distance from the eye to the picture plane, the horizon line and ground line to convey the real shape of structures in space. Within Ross’ scenes of devastation, Piranesi’s tiny figures go about their historic work, vines and branches stretch their fingers into ravaged spaces, the geometry of ancient ruins section the pictorial space into a fine but discernible portrait of decay.

This pictorial scaffolding is eerily in line with that of the photographer over half a century later. Using a Sigma DP2 Quattro camera and the equivalent of a 40mm lens on a 35mm camera, Ross renders images that closely match the perspective of the human eye – the same perspective identified by Piranesi. “The first time I layered the two together I noticed how well the perspective thing worked. If you look at the structures in the Piranesi etching, you can see how the perspective of his drawings line up with the perspective in my photographs. If his perspective had been different from mine, the lines would be diverging away.” Embedded within Ross’ photographic prints, these historic images provoke a new perspective on ruins – the relics of Rome still visible to the tourist today, juxtaposed with the fleeting nature of Christchurch’s largely demolished ruins. “This city has been through a lot, especially in recent times, and there are very few ruins that tell the story of our history. Having lived through the earthquake, I would love to have a ruin in the city. Right now would be a good place to start.”

This sense of ephemeral transience is evident in the photographs from Ross’ 2015 Earthquake Gardens series, sepia-toned works revealing remnants of a driveway, a tilting yew tree, falling gateposts, a lone cabbage tree in a halo of cloud and birds in what would have been once a domestic garden. Together they form an atmospheric chronicle of erasure, lost history, nature’s persistent return. Even without the inference of the earthquakes, says Ross, “People would know something has gone. They remind me of some of the old photos of the southern states of the United States, with the cottonfields and plantations and so many of those old grandiose old homes that didn’t survive.”

(All images above: Doc Ross Untitled from The Earthquake Gardens)

Ross is a peripatetic artist, moving through the landscape both geographically and in his practice. After two decades in Queenstown, working as a commercial photographer and exhibiting artist, Ross moved to Christchurch in 1998, buying a small two-storey house/studio on the edge of the inner city where he lives with his wife Liz and a three-year-old Maltese shih tzu. From that time he largely abandoned commissioned work to focus on his own arts practice, using his camera to record and respond to the urban streetscape. Between 1999 and 2001 he created a series of atmospheric silver gelatin photographs of the empty city at night, human presence evident only in the rectangles of illuminated shop frontages and lit office windows. In the wake of the 2011 earthquake, his home suddenly relegated to the inner city red zone, he began a daily record of the city, walking the perimeter of the cordoned city to create a visual archive of empty streets, vacant lots, familiar landmarks made inexplicably strange, capturing not the predictable high vis vests and dramatically collapsed buildings but the sudden expanses of sky, the cranes, the people caught in the bewildering glare of an alien city-scape.

“When you are photographing people in the street everything is fleeting – you don't have time to be considerate in the creating. You have to capture a moment exactly where it happens, otherwise it doesn’t exist. These were not about me, but where the camera was pointing. It was a total aside of anything I have ever done and I will never do it again, but I knew that no one was going to spend five years wandering the city every day taking photographs of people – I did.”

Then, three years ago, he stopped. “One day I was walking around and I thought, this city is back. No more transition, this is it. There are still a few gaps to be filled but anything I do from now on would have no purpose.”

Ross donated the resulting 17,000 photographs to the city’s public library but he continues to plumb this pictorial archive to create new works. “I have always been that type of photographer,” he wrote for his 2016 exhibition Walking with eyes open at PG gallery 192, “who walks and collects images randomly, somewhat in the tradition of American photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. Sometimes I have built individual series of work from these, but in general I have just observed and recorded whatever interested me.” [1]

(All images above: Doc Ross, from Walking with eyes open)

Such works earned Ross the sobriquet of a flâneur, the term adopted by Charles Baudelaire to describe someone who “walks the city in order to experience it” and now widely used as a referent for urban modernity and, in its depiction of a detached but aesthetically attuned attentiveness, street photography. In her 1977 essay On Photography Susan Sontag described the photographer as “an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.”

Ross’ attentiveness however, falls outside the disengaged observation associated with the street photographer, gazing on other people’s lives, as Sontag wrote, “with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism.” [2] In Unearthed, his photographic works evoke not detachment but a mood embedded in the artist’s personal experience of place. As he wrote in 2018, after travelling to China, “There are two types of travel pictures, ones that show what places and people look like, usually made over and over by all photographers who visit a place, usually beautiful, colourful, vibrant and slightly clichéd… And then there are ones that speak about [being] in a place, an individual who opens their mind to the obscure and closes their mind to the obvious.” [3]

That sense of embeddedness, of being in a place, is more akin to the observational writings of Wendell Berry. In his account of an old tobacco barn in rural Kentucky where he now lives, the US novelist, essayist, critic and environmental activist describes the relic as “a fragment of another time, strayed out of its meaning… to here, my walk has had insistent overtones of memory and history. It has been a movement of consciousness through knowledge, eroding and shaping, adding and wearing away.”[4]

Ross’ use of visual layering to evoke the memory, history and experience evident in many of the works in Unearthed was made possible by his purchase of first an Epson 7800 then a Canon IPF8300 printer, capable of constructing and printing much larger format images. “That allows a freedom that was never allowed in my darkroom days, unless you had a lot of money to pay someone to do it for you. That was the real turning point in my work. Prior to that, my photos were pretty much all straight photographs and nothing more, but when I’m working in multiple layers, each one of those photographs is still a pure photograph. I am not a photographer that manipulates photographs, taking a tree here and putting it there or Photoshopping in a nicer sky, as much as an artist that utilises photographs in my print-making, putting something together to create something new.”

(Fantasyland series. For individual captions enlarge images and hover, on mobile devices, enlarge images and press white dot at bottom right)

This use of fragmented facts to convey a new significance is closer to the “compelling clarity” identified by John Szarkowski, late director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, that allows photography “to find meaning in otherwise trivial subjects.” Photography, he wrote, “has shown us pictures that give the sense of the scene, while withholding its narrative meaning’. (5) In his exhibition Fantasyland (2019) at Chambers gallery in Christchurch, Ross placed the black void of human silhouettes against a vivid, Hockney-inspired, identifiably Christchurch background in a collation of colour, form and gesture. The result was visually dramatic, thematically pertinent. “It was like everyone was in this fantasy land – the city is all good, we have a beautiful city, isn’t it fantastic? The fact the city is back gave people these rose-tinted fantasy glasses that we have a beautiful city when in fact it is just a bunch of glass boxes with not a lot of redeeming qualities.”

Rather than explicating this idea, the works in this exhibition elected a shared sense of simulation and delusion. Again, he says, “it was me interpreting how I think we all feel.”

For Ross, all these different series of work evolve from his attempt to “express those things that I feel or am thinking about at a certain time. It’s a subconscious kind of thing and I think that’s where the vastly changing work comes from. I never really liked doing one thing – I could never be one of those artists doing the same thing over and over or always referencing something you have done prior. I don't go about making a work that I think will sell. I don't like expectations.”

In 2020, the complexity of structure and chaos of Ross’ work caught the attention of jeweller Elfi Spiewack. His layered prints related to the Christchurch earthquake, she says, communicate ideas about turning points, lives brought to a standstill, a mess that you can’t make sense of and a situation “that repels you while at the same time exerting a certain lure or fascination.”

“The layering and complexity of his photographs – that is what spoke to me and fascinated me. I have lived the earthquakes and even if I have not been in that particular spot in town, I still get all these memories of that desperation and the chaos and not knowing where the future will go. But despite all that there is beauty. He captures or creates that really well. The stillness of the pictures draws you in.”

Born and trained in Germany, Spiewack has built a unique practice combining the clean, simple lines of contemporary European jewellery and precious stones with the raw vitality of natural found objects – pebbles, flower pods, fruit pips, sponges and, more recently, the cleaned and finely cut bones of rabbits, possums, deer and cows, so blurring the boundaries between high and low materials to inspire new understandings of art. “All I do is I lift those non-precious materials into another context,” she says. “I see the beauty in the structure and colour and complexity of nature.” In Splendour Moot, Adornment Re-Framed (2017-2019), curated and toured by Ashburton Art Gallery, she created new brooches and necklaces made from these materials as adornments for the subjects of portraits from the Renaissance and the Baroque and Victorian period, inviting questions around concepts of beauty and preciousness.

Would Ross give her the opportunity to respond to some of his work through jewellery? she asked. He would.

(Elfi Spiewack images. For individual captions enlarge images and hover, on mobile devices, enlarge images and press white dot at bottom right)

Where Ross uses his own photographic archive as source material, Spiewack turned to her collection of found and bought materials. The resulting necklaces and brooches use a combination of precious materials – pearl, opal, amethyst, sterling silver and gold – alongside bones and bark in response to Ross’ crumbling architecture, wilding gardens, scenes of construction and demolition. In her response to Lost City # 4, for example, she crafted a necklace of industrial looking oxidised sterling silver and Victorian-inspired citrine beads. For Ross’ photograph of a lone, limbless tree in the centre of an abandoned garden, she presented an opal set in 22 carat gold within a brooch of bark. For Untitled (Lost City), she crafted a brooch of copper and smoky quartz crystal. “The chaos I see in this rock is actually a perfect piece of nature – this is how it grows.” Such pairings, she hopes, will create new meanings, new associations, new questions.

“That is what we as artists do – tell the story to capture a moment in time, and that can be done in different media.”

Footnotes

1 – Doc Ross, Walking with Eyes Open (PG Galley 192, 2016).

2 – Susan Sontag, “On Photography” (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p55.

3 – Doc Ross, email to Tony Bridges.

4 – Ed. Paul Kingsnorth, The World-ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (California, Counterpoint, 2017), p28.

5 – John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (London, Secker & Warburg, 1966), p11.

Sally Blundell is a freelance journalist / writer / editor from Ōtautahi/Christchurch.

Review supported by funding from Creative New Zealand.