BY STEVE BISSON
The weight of things. A critical response to Douglas Ljungkvist’s book ‘Ocean Beach’
When looking at the images that complete the series ‘Ocean Beach’ by photographer Douglas Ljungkvist is easy to find myself in these thoughts: the fall of the American dream, the natural world has recovered its spaces, or the humanist utopia of control over the earths forces. All these considerations are inevitabile but not decisive.
© Douglas Ljungkvist, book ‘Ocean Beach’
Firstly, it is interesting to recall the differences with the ‘Pre-Hurricane’ series which is certainly more descriptive. A more empathic choice of colors reflects a deliberately darker mood. Even more significant is the decision to show, as a juxtaposition the housing wreckage, natural elements of the landscape: the beach, the sky and the sea. A contrast that is unseen, however, when the photographer is inside the remains of houses. It is here that the observer, with no way to escape, is forced to confront the inner dimension of destruction. Here, in these shots I feel all the uncertainty and the fear of post-modern man.
© Douglas Ljungkvist, book ‘Ocean Beach’
In truth, when I see these images I am projected far beyond a possible commentary on the medium and classification with respect to categories of discourse on photography. I see rather in this second part of the Douglas Ljungkvist’s work a centrifugal force that pushes the gaze out of the aesthetic dimension. In this sense, I do not think useful to recall ideas that surround “New Topographics”. Instead, I find it useful to turn my thoughts to the deconstruction axioms or to the “building cuts” by Gordon Matta-Clark. This series of images is a real détournement, a state that is antithetical to a thought of origin, as a recycling of pre-existing artistic elements into a new form. The photographer works, more or less consciously, on a re-contextualization. It is no longer important to point out which elements are in opposition and why. We need to understand what new meanings emerge from these realities because their future exists in their irreducible and irremediable coexistence.
© Douglas Ljungkvist, book ‘Ocean Beach’
I get the impression that this work effectively places in the face of a spectacle of the illusory and comfort fetishism of the modern age. In the words of Guy Debord “everything directly lived has receded into representation”. Ljungkvist inevitably prompts us to question our notions of the real and not so much on the role of the photographer. From this point of view I appreciate the photographer’s detachment from the implied compassion that often hovers around these situations. The decision to not include human beings gives this work the distance necessary to prevent the process of identification with this place and instead feed a sense of alienation.
© Douglas Ljungkvist, book ‘Ocean Beach’
We can not conclude this brief critical reading without expressing the need to present a dualistic semiotics reading of the images in order to grasp those signs that express cultural phenomena. In this sense, Douglas Ljungkvist is skilled in returning to the careful viewer, without prejudice, a useful anthropological summary on Western consumer society; throughout we see its fragile precariousness and all its apparent fun. From this perspective, can what we see also be a symbolic reaction to the continued expansion of the world based on the exploitation of resources? In other words, have these homes been destroyed by a natural disaster or by their own weight? Steve Bisson
© Douglas Ljungkvist, book ‘Ocean Beach’
info:
Designed by Kehrer Design
Hardcover
24 x 20 cm
108 pages
92 color ills.
English
available here
ISBN 978-3-86828-403-4
2013