First day of remorse

VANISHING

BY ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL

NEW YORK: DE.MO, 2005

240. PP./$54.00 (HB)

Vanishing, a new book by Antonin Kratochvil, provides a unique compilation of images by a photographer who is distinguished by his great sensitivity to the plight of human beings and animal species seeking to survive in endangered habitats. The book provides a view into 16 of the most desperate conditions on Earth--"another planet's hell," as the front cover declares. Although dealing with the most extreme forms of social and environmental degradation, Kratochvil spurns the pushiness of news coverage of these same issues, responding instead with images that are ephemeral occurrences he has encountered in everyday events. The stark black and white images never use sensational angles to exploit the pain of others; instead the book is a project in personal subjectivity and understatement. It is minute visual traces that tend to capture Kratochvil's notice: gorilla tracks found in the bush indicating illegal poaching (Congo), the shadow of leafless trees extending crippled limbs over a mining site (Guyana), tank treads and fleeing civilians (Iraq). Vanishing is a dark and forlorn vision of apocalypse, of disaster, of unfathomable dangers, perhaps more evident to a photographer who has lived amid the harsh reality of communist Eastern Europe. The visual elements that prick open an entry point into these other worlds are oftentimes small gestures: an outstretched palm that contains small white diamonds (Africa), hands raised in a game of basketball alongside a Dow Chemical Plant (Louisiana), a gesturing hand that points to a landscape painting (Czech Republic). The devastation is caused by the invisible forces that can never come completely into focus; so too Kratochvil's photographs are grainy, blurry and difficult to pin down. Depriving the camera of its claim to truth, clarity and singular vision, Kratochvil breaks down the photographer's claim to truth, clarity and singular vision and supplants it with his own slanted, obscured vision, revealing a fragile human being behind the recording device, incapable of complete objectivity. He communicates this by destabilizing the horizon line, skewing the view either left or right, suggesting a haphazard traveler, an interlocutor caught up in an event rather than a detached spectator. He enters into another's dilemma so that we as viewers also long for redemption faced with the privilege of our own comparatively subdued lives.

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Vanishing signals from its first pages that it is an altogether different kind of book through a layout that references spatial systems that might be termed "book space." In fact, the black lines of varying widths that flow down both pages set a tone for the entire book that is at once spacious and contained. The factual text that accompanies each photo essay reads almost as verse due to its sparse layout along the wide left-hand margin. This clean matrix allows the reader a maximum amount of breadth to freely roam through the book, with the ability to retrace one's steps back to the introductory text in each section before moving forward once again to look through the photo essays more closely. This format allows a sifting through images amid one's own private thoughts, with rooms for reflection found in the full pages left open opposite each photograph. The overall effect is one of perceptual drift, a space to consider and also question. The speed is one of a slowmoving train that allows for stepping off onto individual platforms, a break from the daily barrage of media and news images. The pace is the journey of the photographer's momentary encounters with ruined landscapes, workers and criminals, fistfuls of grief, personal glimpses into the visual unconscious of forgotten places far off the radar screen of world news coverage.

These waking dreams sometimes condense into dreary nightmares, such as an indigenous population decimated through a Texaco-sponsored oil operation (Ecuador). These extreme conditions at first appear to have nothing to do with our own lives, yet Kratochvil shows us that these stories live very close by. The world's resources are everyone's business; the fate of our planet is caught up in these stories of injustice. They are told by a string of reference points that crisscross over nationalisms, local culture, personal memoir, facts from world environmental atlases and vital statistics, together pointing to fragmented information systems that are our primary means of understanding global events.

The photography of Kratochvil, a founding member of the photo agency VII, was also included in the 415-page book entitled War that was released in conjunction with "The War in Iraq: Coordinates of Conflict, Photographs by VII" exhibition at the International Center of Photography in March, 2004 In that show and publication Kratochvil's work offered a unique and personal vision of the landscapes of war. Kratochvil's photographs find their substance in the drift of places and landscapes, resting in a great conundrum of what we don't know. A master of photographing besieged landscapes, Kratochvil's vistas hint at the picturesque, but they are always marked by devastation: a quiet river is polluted (Guyana) or arrested mineral thieves marched through pointed rocky slopes, appearing small and vulnerable in comparison to the harsh terrain (Bolivia). The book's final story is New York City, the site that has set up new terms by which Americans comprehend global forces of war and hostility. These photos are more distorted than any in the book, showing security forces patrolling city landmarks. It is implied in these scenes of the financial capital of the United States that the eyes of Americans have opened wider to the rest of the world's suffering through their own growing fears and insecurities.

Kratochvil's work is striking for his deliberate search for clues that reveal an acute subjectivity toward the local populations under his investigation. He refrains from interjecting his lens into the personal suffering of the injured, yet we will not forget Kratochvil's images and the stories they tell. The secrets contained in his photos are revealed in the subtle glimpses into localized ordeals that reference larger social and economic forces, making visible power and politics that exploit and do not care to protect.

SARAH STANLEY is the founder and director of Kleinblue Productions, a company that organizes conceptual photography projects with internationally exhibited photographers.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group