On The Line
Alan McFetridge
Here Sue Books (2019)

The Holding
Allan McDonald
Rim Books (2020)

Reviewed by Michael Steven for PhotoForum, 19 April 2021

My whole life has been spent in Aotearoa New Zealand. I have visited many countries, but never lived abroad. Here it is easy to feel as if our lives play out with a varying degree of obliviousness, inside an environmental safe zone. Certainly, our natural environment has been compromised by natural disasters. I’m thinking here of the 2011 Ōtautahi Christchurch earthquake and its sister quake, the one that reconfigured the Kaikoura coastline and seabeds in 2016. Both of these events, if not directly caused by, are indeed related to human consumption. Offshore oil drilling, fracking, our dependence on soft plastics, the erasure of our urban social and commercial areas by gentrification - all of these practices contribute to geological, ecological and cultural erasure. In their respective and singular ways, photographers Alan McFetridge and Allan McDonald have documented aspects of this erasure.

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Sadly in the arts it has become something of a trope or conceit to pay lip service to the current environmental catastrophe. That said, there are artists who are genuine in their approach, who work tirelessly - almost to the point of obsession - in the hope of bringing about awareness and activating change. New Zealand-born photographer Alan McFetridge, now based in London, is one such artist. His recent photobook On the Line, published by Here Sue Books, gathers eleven photographs taken after the Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016. He writes, “These pictures were made during autumn, six months after the event. The trauma was still in people’s voices, their movements hurried as they rushed to prepare themselves to face winter. In some cases home became a modified recreational vehicle, adapted to withstand the coming cold. That January, temperatures dropped to -40 Celsius.”

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In what is ostensibly a series of tree portraits, McFetridge makes monuments from the lone willowy sprigs, arterial networks of cindered branches, firs with contorted, leafless boughs and apical disfigurement that rise out of the charred landscape. Trees are the tragedy’s voiceless survivors and these portraits, their unsung testaments. Russets, ochre yellows, burnt oranges - the colours and shadings we associate with the autumnal fade - are, paradoxically, brightened and intensified against the scorched and blackened trees. The scale of damage is almost unfathomable, especially when we consider that where these disparate, maimed and skeletal trees stand was once a densely canopied woodland. In the accompanying notes McFetridge reminds us, “this change is likely to have a rapid, profound and irreversible effect.”

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There is a strange, melancholic grace in these images; one whose power contains multiplicities. Not only are each of these photos a spectacle of nature’s waning resilience, they reiterate our implication in the destruction of the natural world. But we are also complicit in our own destruction. Ultimately what these images bring to us is our culpability, our vulnerability and fragility as a species. Human presence in these landscapes is minimal, fleeting. It is limited to blurred glimpses of SUVs rushing through intersections, long-haul rigs pulling freight containers, catenaried power and telephone lines carrying voltage and signals across. The aura or trace left by these objects is, as McFetridge points out, one of hurry or panic - further proof of the fire’s enduring trauma. It is in the last image of On the Line where McFetridge shows us the human cost of the fire. While it is miraculous no lives were lost, this picture of a caravan in an empty lot, ringed by blackened scrub, windows and air vents blocked from the extremes of the approaching winter gestures to how powerless and helpless we are as a species.

The poet Robinson Jeffers was among the first 20th Century writers to practice what today has been pigeon-holed by academics and labelled as eco-poetics. In his later works particularly, Jeffers (whose stoicism at times bordered on pessimism) pointed his vitriol against humanity’s blind and seemingly unstoppable need to consume. His austerely beautiful lines caution of the irreparable damage these drives could cause to the natural world, and our ignorant ambivalence towards ‘the beauty of transhuman things,/Without which we are all lost.’ Seventy years after his death, Jeffers’ prophecies have become our waking reality.

What risk do these same drives that bring about environmental catastrophe present to the socio-cultural precincts of our urban environments - particularly arcades and alleyways and the disappearing paperback exchanges, second-hand bookstores and record stores they were once home to? The images in Auckland photographer and arts educator Allan McDonald’s The Holding question the rapidity of human information consumption and the threat digital archiving poses to these storehouses and catchments - sites where the second life and rag-and-bone trade of cultural and artistic accomplishment have historically played out. What McDonald’s eye takes in is the territory of the flâneur on his daily constitutional, the cultural storehouses wherein the messianic poet finds and unravels codices, the sites where obsessive collectors feed and augment their fetishes and esoteric connections come to the psychogeographer.

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In The Holding these districts of a city where the second-hand trade of culture occurs - arcades, record and paperback exchanges - can be seen as libraries, repositories, or caches of living texts risking an extinction that, thanks to gentrification and exorbitant leases and the radically evolving means we consume information, is analogous to the erasure of our natural environments. Time inside these spaces is not so much halted or paused as it is dilated. Here annuals, cookbooks, novels, car repair manuals, sporting biographies, records with foxed and battered sleeves of forgotten music icons await in slipshod piles and stacks to be given their next term of life, to be re-functioned.

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We live in the era of mass online storage, where accessing a song, recipe, story or poem, is as easy as entering a Google search, who but collectors, completionists object fetishists will these objects be desired by again? The welter and rush of the urban world goes on outside store windows, at the street end of dim arcades. It reflected back in the darkened or newspapered windows of commercial spaces being transitioned into their next iteration. It is filtered through shabby, sepia coloured shear curtains, or else fractured by the lateral slats of venetian blinds. We see the signifiers of capital and its progress: shiny cars, parking signs and meters, real estate advertisements for renovated villas. Allan McDonald, like Baudelaire or Benjamin, is a bricoleur who illuminates the secret and non-linear palimpsest layers of urban socio-cultural history.

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In a poem called ‘San Francisco/New York’ the pugilist poet and literary critic August Kleinzahler writes, “We pass the shop of used mystery books/with its ferrety customers and proprietress/behind her desk, a swollen arachnid/surrounded by murder and the dried-out glue/of old paperback bindings./What is more touching/than a used-book store on Saturday night,//dowdy clientele haunting the aisles:/the girl with bad skin, the man with a tic,/some chronic ass at the counter giving his art speech?” With the disappearance of an object, the culture and rituals of its exchange disappear too. Books and records, I believe, choose their readers and listeners, and not the other way round, as it is hammered into us at schools and universities. My education as a poet (and the same goes I’m sure for any number of artists) began in earnest in places like these. So it is perhaps to my sense of gratitude and nostalgia that McDonald’s photographs attach to.

Michael Steven is the author of two poetry collections published by Otago University Press, Walking to Jutland Street (2018) and The Lifers (2020). Recent poems appear in the 2020 Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and Ōrongohau: Best New Zealand Poems 2020. He is interested in social photography and painting, and has written on the work of artists such as Emma Smith, Kristy Gorman, Stephen Piper, Amy Blinkhorne and Garth Steeper.