Dursey Island 🌞❤️🫏
The right choice, and perfect weather for it. The ocean sparkled. An absolute classic of a day. Though a Buddhist would probably say I spent the whole experience extracting, rather than just sitting, listening to my within and gazing upon the beauty. And it’s true that I took a lot of photos. I’d like to find a moment before I leave Ireland just to meditate.
Trip log, Google Keep, 3.9.23.
A recently abandoned cottage overlooking the Atlantic on a blazing day in early September; Dursey Island, Beara
In the final part of his great survey Britannia (1586), William Camden described five ‘armes of the sea’ jutting out into the Atlantic. These are the jagged fingers of south-west Ireland - geological hazard, yet mentally encoded as integral features of the island’s iconic shape. As Camden indicated, the peninsulas of Dingle, Iveragh, Beara, Mizen Head and Sheep’s Head, with their ‘crooked and winding shoares’, are strikingly rugged. Yet, viewed on satellite mode, they soften into a gentle terminus, where Ireland seems to crumble into the expectant ocean.
I arrived in merry Killarney on the penultimate day of August, with the intention of cycling Iveragh. But the night before picking up the bike, I had a change of heart. Realising jut how many others thronging the pubs had come to experience the Ring of Kerry, I followed my gut: instead of turning right at Kenmare towards Sneem, I crossed the bridge and followed the R571 west into Beara, the second of Camden’s ‘armes’, which is nestled between the Kenmare River (really an estuary), and Bantry Bay.
‘Beare’, Camden wrote in his necessarily aloof and cursory way, stands for the most part ‘upon hungrie gravell and a leane stony soile.’ Dominated by mountains thrown up in the same orogeny that created Carrauntoohil, Ireland’s highest peak, which can be glimpsed across the ‘River’, Beara is certainly a craggy, unforgiving land. Looming over much of the route are austere outcrops and brooding mountains whose appearance occasionally verges on the sinister - as at Hungry Hill, the peninsula’s own highest point, whose sharp, striated surfaces seem to bode the traveller ill.
Yet, cast in the glow of a late-summer heatwave, the flatter land by the coast appeared gloriously verdant. The region’s climate is strongly influenced by the Gulf Stream, which carries warm air thousands of miles across the ocean from the Tropics, ensuring mild winters and abundant rainfall. On the initial stretch, I cycled past beautiful meadows ending at the shore, sometimes graced by a lone Sessile oak, and alongside hedgerows bedecked with ripening blackberries. Every now and again, I passed into the relative gloom of a tree tunnel, their canopies enclosing a road whose steep banks were vibrant with ferns. It was exhilarating to finally be there, and I made good progress along the coast road, my spirits high.
The roads are simply too narrow for tourist coaches here, and so Beara is peaceful, devoid of official photo spots, and often beyond the reach of cell masts - making it easy to romanticise as a remnant of a bygone Ireland. Especially towards the rugged western tip, though, reminders of its more frenzied past abound. In Allihies, where a rich copper deposit was discovered in 1812, the surest sign is a Cornish-style engine house, which stands sentry on a rough hill outside the village. For the best part of a century, the area reverberated with the sound of machinery crushing ore-bearing quartz, which was then sent off across the Sea to Swansea to be smelted into ingots for export around the world. But with the onset of the Great Famine, Beara’s population plummeted, leaving behind a landscape studded with crumbling cottages.
The central menhir of Uragh
After about an hour cycling along the Ring Road, I made my first detour inland. A few kilometres in, the undulating lane I was following gave way to a rough track. Leaving the bike near a ruined famine house, I made my way, with bated breath, to the Circle of Uragh. The megaliths stand solitary on a knoll between two loughs, the solemn Caha Mountains looming beyond. Cascading from one precipice is the silvery thread of a waterfall. The circle consists of five small stones facing one another, and an imposing menhir, three-metres tall, covered in bright moss and lichen.
It was a truly awe-inspiring place, exuding a sense of ancient Earth wisdom. I wasn’t far from the Kenmare River, but it felt like I could be deep within the interior. It seemed obvious, in the moment, why Bronze Age people had chosen this site. It was perfect for a ritual monument - numinous, probably, even subtracting the fruit of their labour. Still, the stones radiated a kind of energy which enveloped the entire landscape, infusing it with a mystery that similarly secluded ‘wild’ places lack.
The sky was heavy with clouds tinted a deep purple, but as I stood there, it began to clear, casting the stones in sunlight and somehow lessening their charisma. It’s strange, I thought to myself back on the road, that we seem to prefer these monuments set against a moody backdrop. Is it simply memetic desire, shaped by atmospheric images imbibed from Instagram or Oxfam finds, or something deeper, more fundamental? Devotional rites and their associated iconography are often steeped in blinding light. Yet stone circles tend to look better in shadow - and in monochrome for that matter.
Ireland has two major clusters of megalithic stone circles. One spans the counties of Cork and Kerry, whose border runs through Beara; the other is in Ulster, at the far end of the isle. Earlier that day, I’d visited a smaller site with a ticket booth on the edge of Kenmare, manned by a cheery teenager. The low stones, speckled with crustose lichen, were enclosed by a thick wall of vegetation, the grass neatly mown. Yet even in its manicured state, I was absorbed by the congregation, paying my respects to each delegate in turn. It had been years since I’d been somewhere similar. I was taken to the Callanish stones on Lewis as a child but hadn’t given prehistory much thought since. Perhaps it takes a certain maturity of mind to open up to the uncanny power of these monuments - to feel the weight of time pressing through their silent, overdetermined forms.
Sometimes, when immersed in places like Beara, it’s possible, just about, to imagine you’re inhabiting a totality. To grasp, however fleetingly, the sense of inhabiting a limitless land. But this requires bracketing prior knowledge of its history and geography - much of what you learned, actually, in primary school. Thanks to geospatial tools like Google Earth, we’ve become accustomed to visualising the world on the grandest of scales, as a spinning orb in space, but also as somehow interactive - scalable.
Yet, for the people who roamed Beara during the two-thousand year span of the Bronze Age, these same valleys, crags, and beaches were everything. With the peninsula now threaded together with roads converging into colourful villages where it’s possible to fill up with fuel brought from distant seas and pay via Mastercard for a Red Bull, it takes some effort to imagine. But I tried to access this thought, of Beara as the world.
My experience on the promontory followed a pleasing arc, with the drama of the landscape heightening as I peddled towards the western tip. The sense of remoteness grew stronger with every mile. Villages and farms cluster mostly along the Ring, while the peninsula’s interior, as I gleaned from Google Earth, is predominantly stark and treeless - what we tend to think of as ‘wild.’ But how far the baseline has shifted!
By some definitions, ‘wilderness’ refers to provinces of the uninhabited and uninhabitable, areas uninfluenced by humans and without vestiges of domesticity, culture or civilisation. Antarctica or the Kamchatka Peninsula, perhaps. But certainly not Beara in the twenty-first century. Not so long ago, things were different. Much of the land was cloaked in dense temperate rainforest. But from Elizabethan times on, reckless deforestation by English settlers set in motion a destructive slide towards shallower, more acidic soils that, despite the Gulf Stream’s blessings, could no longer support such a riot of life.
Seen in a different light, then, much of Beara has been rendered a wasteland by humans and their animals - an ecological desert, to use a phrase favoured by Eoghan Daltun. On 73 acres of fenced-off land near the village of Eyeries, Daltun is privilege to an ongoing process of localised redemption: the gradual recovery of a species-rich Atlantic rainforest. In his 2022 book, he vividly captures the shifting rhythms of fauna in his woods, Bofickil: wrens, hares, lizards, dragonflies, and damselflies in summer; jays in autumn; and in winter, a 'multispecies horde' of small passerines - tits, goldcrests, and perhaps treecreepers - scouring the branches for invertebrate snacks.
‘There is true liberation and healing in forsaking the worry and discord of the human sphere for a while, before re-enganging with renewed energy, and clarity around what really matters, and what doesn’t’, he writes (p.86). Daltun’s passionate rewilding efforts lend yet another layer of significance to this already richly textured place.
A patch of domestication by Kenmare River, Beara
My adventure climaxed on Beara’s western extremity, a narrow, double-humped chunk of land cut off by meltwater at the end of the last Ice Age: Dursey Island. It is today accessed by Ireland’s only cable car, a slightly worn-out contraption in which I didn’t feel completely secure. In the early eighth century, Viking raiders seized Dursey and used it as a depot for keeping slaves. They renamed it ‘Tor Iy’ (Island of the god Tur); when English filtered in, it became Tur’s Iy, and, later, Dursey.
I walked the loop on what felt like a blazingly hot day for Ireland in September. At the top of the first rise, coloured rust by bracken and dead ferns, a wonderful view opened up over a distant dry-stone patchwork and ramshackle cottages. Dursey was once home to three villages or ‘townlands’: Ballynacallagh, Kilmichael, and Tilickafinna. Today, only a handful of houses are cared for.
From there, I traversed a saddle before ascending to the island’s highest point, where a squat signal tower built by British forces during the Napoleonic Wars stands - one in a chain of lookout posts designed to monitor maritime activities. After the Irish Rebellion of 1798, many revolutionaries hoped that Bonaparte would use Ireland as a staging ground for an audacious invasion of Britain. But, of course, he had other ideas. I sat on the grass nearby and had lunch. The jagged fins of the Skelligs were visible rising from the sparkling Ocean, the mainland coast snaking round behind. A spectacular 360 degree panorama.
At the island's furthest tip, Dursey’s own offspring came into view: two rocky islets known as the Bull and the Calf. At the base of a cliff was a towering sea stack, echoed the monolith at Uragh. As I turned back towards the island's sole inhabited hamlet, I was surprised to come across a donkey standing in the middle of the road. We seized each other up for a moment, before the donkey lost interest and moseyed away before I’d managed to take a photo.
‘Is he smiling for you?’, I heard someone say. An old man emerged from a whitewashed cottage. It turned out he was born in that very house. Although now living in Blackburn, he returns to Dursey every summer to catch lobsters. Much has changed since his childhood, when Dursey was seldom visited by outsiders: just a couple of weeks ago, there was a two-hour wait for the cable car. We fed the donkey a couple of apples, which were eagerly munched into a kind of viscous soup, and I was on my way.
Dursey Island, Beara’s western extremity
Los Angeles County's display at the National Orange Show in San Bernardino, 1936: a fusion of Roman grandeur and Hollywood glamour.
The goddess Pomona stands watch over the inner sanctum, her arms outstretched in welcome. Though the temple is laden with ripe fruit, visitors to the shrine are left in no doubt: the oranges are not for taking. Or so we might assume. But, in truth, it’s quite possible that the whole display was put together primarily for the photograph, or, rather, for its dissemination in the press. Perhaps, once the exposure had been made, people could simply help themselves. Either way, the structure is pure theatre, a disposable monument to youth and fecundity that from today’s perspective appears decidedly eccentric.
We can better make sense of the extravaganza when we recognise its disingenuous character. It isn’t, of course, an offering to the goddess of fruit trees and orchards, or even really a celebration of the orange as such, as pure gift of nature. Rather, it is a kind of triumphal paean to the orange as commodity. The particular cultivar that underpinned the rise of southern California’s mighty citrus industry, the ‘Orange Empire’, was the Washington Navel, brought to California from a monastery in Bahia, Brazil. It was this which fuelled the transformation of the dusty L.A. basin into a picturesque sea of aromatic groves.
On the level of theatre or metaphor, the luminous structure stands as an ornamental repository for something more significant: whatever lies within. But it is, of course, a facade, a Potemkin shrine - a Hollywood set like any other.
We can discern something similar operating on the level of political economy. Although the words on the pediment, and the overall excess of the scene, are apparently suggestive of a state of rivalry between various orange-producing counties, this too is something of a front: the assertion of local pride belies a longstanding situation of strategic coordination. In 1893, a powerful growers’ collective, the Southern California Fruit Exchange, was founded. It worked to create a unified image for California citrus, and enjoyed a virtual monopoly for decades. Its great clout was not enough, however, to prevent the systematic destruction of the groves in the postwar period. By the year of this photograph, the heyday of citrus in the L.A. basin was almost over.
The archive of the California Historical Society Collection is home to an extraordinary array of photographs taken between 1860-1960. Browsing the collection one day, I became curious about the large number of records testifying to the Orange Empire. They opened my eyes to a whole period in the economic and cultural history of this region, a crucial but lesser-known stage in the development of one of the world’s most influential megacities.
Why, out of a trove of more than 25,000 records, did I find this theme so compelling? In part due to the vital role that images played in luring would-be workers from the East. Boosters presented the state as the nation’s garden, an ‘Eden’ famed for its Mediterranean airs. But also because some appear to bear witness to a gentler, softer form of enterprise that is not generally associated with California.
The longer you spend with the archive, though, the more the romantic impression conveyed by certain images (of snow-capped peaks, abundant harvests, manual labour) is complicated. These are not windows onto a lost horticultural idyll, but rather documentary evidence of a sprawling plantation economy, factories in the field. Every stage of the production process is represented: seeding, picking, grading and packing. There are sweeping aerial overviews, making clear the regimentation of trees into orderly rows, and close-ups of the fruit as they’re swept along conveyor belts.
Occasionally, such disenchantment is intrinsic, self-contained. It’s all too easy to project onto this gorgeous photogram, for instance. The man kneeling before us, canvas bag slung casually round his waist, stands in for the Gatherer, a representative of the Jeffersonian ideal, attuned to the rhythms of nature. Closer scrutiny of the image throws up an uncomfortable detail, however. Just to the left of the vibrant orange tree, faint yet unmistakable, lies the outline of a mesh fence - a reminder of confinement, property, and, on a broader scale, the man’s own enmeshment within an expansive enterprise reliant upon a hierarchical workforce of racialised wage labor.
Picking and loading, Riverside, c.1900
Artesian well, c.1900
The story of the Orange Empire’s rise and fall takes on an added poignancy when one considers that in Riverside, the spiritual home of California citrus, the enterprise grew out of utopian dreams. The first Washington Navels were planted there in 1874 by the Spiritualist Eliza Tibbets who, along with her husband Luther, was part of a wave of idealistic settlers from the East. The community had been founded a few years earlier by the abolitionist lawyer John North. With its abundant sunshine, mild temperatures, minimal frost, and porous alluvial soil, the region was ripe for flourishing. The San Gabriel mountains provided both a suitable microclimate and, in time, a reliable water source for the expanding Garden.
To begin with, though, growers could rely on an apparently inexhaustible flow of pent-up paleowater. The discovery of immense subterranean reservoirs in the 1870s provided a straightforward solution to the problem of irrigation: artesian wells. As this miraculous water source started to dwindle, however, more radical interventions into the landscape were required. The neighbouring town of Ontario was in many respects a pioneer. Its innovative system of irrigation, hydroelectric power and land rights became a model for many other horticultural ‘colonies’ in the surrounding basin. In 1881, the Canadian brothers George and William Chaffey routed mountain streams down to the basin via concrete pipes; the desert tract was soon transformed.
In Riverside, residents experimented with various cash crops, but it was the Washington Navels that proved pivotal. They were unrivalled in flavour, size and sweetness, and, due to a mutation, almost seedless - meaning that growers had to graft cuttings onto other varieties of citrus trees, propagating, essentially, millions of clones. A June 1880 article in the Riverside Press and Horticulturist compared the variety with another batch of Navels imported from Australia:
The marked points of difference between the two Navel oranges lie in their external appearance. Instead of being like the Australian, ribbed lengthwise, it is smooth and more globular. The skin is of a finer texture, has more of a satin like appearance and shows a much higher color, being of a bronzy gold tint.
By the early 1890s, a sea of orange groves ran from the interior counties of Riverside and San Bernardino into Los Angeles. Many farmers switched from growing wheat to fruit. Land prices soared and, among the groves, new towns emerged: Pomona, Corona, Redlands, Highlands.
Southern Pacific Railroad line near Redlands, c.1880. The opening of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876, and the advent of refrigerator cars in the late 1880s made possible nationwide shipping for the first time.
For the Fruit Growers Exchange, the need to foster a market for the continuously expanding agricultural yield became paramount. As Pierre Laszlo observes in Citrus: a History, oranges had historically been seen in Europe and its diaspora as symbols of opulence. Sunkist embarked on a mission to reshape this perception. Its iconography began to appear on billboards all over the country, and consumers increasingly came to see the orange as health-promoting, a vitamin-rich antidote to the pathologies of urban life.
The advertising strategy necessarily occluded a troubling fact about the conditions of production, that the industry was becoming increasingly dependent on exploited minorities (Chinese during the 1870s, then Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos) to work as pickers, packers and sorters, who were routinely excluded from the body politic. California’s Alien Land Law of 1913, for instance, forbade immigrant farmers from owning land or possessing long-term leases. In contrast, Sunkist posters frequently featured a Victorian lady or rural maiden bedecked with flowers proffering fruit - an unmediated transaction, direct from garden to household.
Looking at these images from inside packing houses, it strikes me that while the machinery, uniforms and buildings may be obsolete, the underlying forces and rationality remains operative. In the early twentieth-century, the Exchange spearheaded the introduction of what political theorist James Burnham later dubbed the ‘managerial revolution’ into California agriculture. This meant a new emphasis on efficiency, scalability and the implementation of scientific growing techniques, which in turn stimulated new tools for growing, packing and shipping the fruit: mechanised orange graders, box makers, labellers, packing equipment and pest eradicators. A moment which marked, arguably, the crystallisation of factors that are now typical of contemporary agribusiness.
All these factors came together to fuel a highly profitable enterprise which reached its peak in the 1920s and 30s. Then, when it was no longer fit for purpose, when events - sprawl, war, disease, technological change - took over, it was rapidly destroyed. In the decade after World War II, Southern California lost a quarter of its citrus landscape. Thousands of acres of trees were bulldozed every year, and by 1970 agricultural acreage in Los Angeles County had fallen by over ninety-six percent. One of America’s most picturesque landscapes, the visual magnet that had attracted hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the state, had been eradicated.
But as Douglas Casaux Sackman puts it, the fruit trees were not so much destroyed as ‘metabolised by the Growth Machine’, which had simply found more profitable ways to manage the landscape. Great mounds of forlorn trees were burned, chipped and shredded - sold on for firewood and mulch. As can be seen in these remarkable aerial photographs by William Garnett, tract homes spread out from urban centres in waves of state-subsidised development, carpeting the basin, and when there was no more flat land, the surrounding hills were terraformed into landslide-prone terraces. The resulting sprawl became a national scandal.
It’s tempting to see this as the climax of a struggle between industrial and agrarian California. However, as is evident from many photographs in the archive, the Orange Empire was already part of the industrial world. In environmental historian William Cronon’s terms, we could perhaps view its rise as the grafting of a ‘second’, artificial nature onto the given, pre-existing (‘first’) nature. However, since the given landscape was far from untouched wilderness (Southern California was an outback during the Spanish colonial period, consisting of large ranchos), this is also problematic. Ultimately, we should heed Cronon’s caution about the inseparability of these terms: the nature we inhabit is never purely one or the other, but rather a ‘complex mingling of the two.’
References
Francesca Russello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (Yale University Press, 2016)
Douglas Casaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (University of California Press, 2007)
Willian Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton, 1991)
Pierre Laszlo, Citrus: a History (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
‘Broken Spectre’ recalls an eery phenomenon of nature first recorded on Mount Brocken in Germany’s Harz Mountains.
“I would like white people to stop thinking that our forest is dead and placed here without reason. I would like to make them listen to the voice of the xapiri who play here incessantly, dancing on their glittering mirrors. Maybe they will want to defend it with us? I would also like their sons and daughters to understand our words. I would like them to make friendship with our sons and daughters in order not to grow up in ignorance. For if this forest is entirely devastated, no other forest will ever be born.”
There’s a striking tension in the title of Richard Mosse’s new project. The conjunction of two concepts which really shouldn’t go together - one suggesting materiality, the other its opposite: a lingering resemblance of some departed being. Even in strictly metaphorical terms, the image doesn’t feel right, is jarring. We tend to think of ghosts as unitary, indivisible apparitions that may nevertheless contravene the laws of physics. And so the notion that they could somehow break is not intuitive. Spectres may appear, disappear and hang ominously over a place, unseen yet always felt, but they cannot crack like a precious glass vase. As the master-signifier for the cycle of imagery which loops appallingly onwards in Broken Spectre, though, this inherently discordant phrase is, I think, apt. What is the Anthropocene if not a historical epoch, or rather boundary Event, in which we have apparently ‘broken’ the very planet whose Holocene state now figures as a kind of spectre in political discourse?
How this predicament came about is not a question Mosse sets out to answer. Broken Spectre, as multi-channel film and photobook, immerses the viewer in one of the great resource frontiers of the twenty-first century, Amazonia, and confronts us with, as Jon Lee Anderson puts it, a ‘composite view of an almost unfathomable crime in progress’. It’s not just the destruction of primary rainforest with fire and chainsaw, jeopardising all manner of lifeforms. It’s also the reckless daring of the tipping point, beyond which begins the rapid transmutation of the rainforest into savannah, a cascade so terrible it feels unreal. The result is intense, overpowering. You’re never quite sure where to look. There’s no beginning, and no end; just a horrifying, beautiful panorama. And it dramatises something crucial about our situation: very many people continue to act as though ‘nature’ is just that mute, impersonal stuff of Enlightenment philosophy. Basically something to be mastered, acted upon, and, in the fundamentals, dependable - an essentially stable ground for human action.
At certain moments while watching the film, in a sort of pre-reflexive mode of thought, I caught myself wondering: do these people not know that what they’re doing? Do they not care? Much of the film’s power, though, stems from its subtle conveyance of the multi-dimensionality of despoliation. There’s no simplistic moralising, and yet there’s still an implicit meta-narrative - and in this way it confounds. Loggers, ranchers (vaqueiros) and illegal miners (garimpeiros) are not crudely vilified, but on a structural level there is no equivocation or understatement. Ben Frost’s visceral soundtrack, which draws on ultrasonic field recordings - birds, insects and bats - is key to creating this effect. But I had to keep checking myself; even as we’re taken up close to these people, there’s a nagging knowledge that they’re just bit players, local actors - often, too, with few other options. Most of the surplus from these operations is siphoned off to São Paolo or further afield, and in many cases the agents of destruction are languishing in debt bondage. Here then, is the film’s central tension.
In the cultural imagination of the West, at least, the signifier ‘Amazon’ is charged with an existential resonance. The urgency is real. For as we cannot fail to be aware, Earth’s largest rainforest is vulnerable, and we are in danger of losing it altogether. How could somewhere so vast and flourishing just disappear? Although many of her inferences have since lost favour, the archaeologist Betty Meggers’ 1971 characterisation of Amazonia as a ‘counterfeit paradise’ remains helpful. The lush primary forest, she suggested, a remarkable adaptation to unfavourable climatic conditions, is a ‘castle built on sand’. The foundation contributes nothing to the structure’s overall strength, and if the bonds are sufficiently weakened, the entire configuration, this ‘masterpiece of natural selection’ will collapse and disappear.
And yet, at the same time, deforestation has become so normalised, or so Mosse believes, that a radical subversion of the established image regime is needed to shock us into simply seeing it. To this end, much of Broken Spectre is shot on infrared film, specifically Kodak HSI, a discontinued stock which renders vegetation a brilliant, ghostly white. As a result, it’s highly effective in showing up the boundaries between life and death - charred wood and still vibrant, beleaguered striving. In the accompanying photographs, there are almost tender portraits of vaqueiros and garimpeiros, rendered delicate and gossamer-like by the film, which also ‘fails’ in a very visible way, with certain images showing signs of degradation, and others mottled with imperfections and the photographer’s fingerprints. The emulsion is highly sensitive to heat, especially humidity.
The film’s refusal of the conventional documentary style doesn’t end here. Broken Spectre’s searing, psychedelic colour palette comes from a comparatively futuristic technique: multispectral imaging. Unlike infrared, this can capture multiple wavelengths and has wide application in environmental monitoring. Scientists employ the technology to track changes in vegetation cover, detect deforestation and monitor the overall health of the forest ecosystem via satellites. A lofty enforcement tool. But, notably, the same remote sensing capabilities are also employed by agribusiness, to improve yields and precisely manage harvesting times, and by illegal miners to detect subtle variations in soil and topography - the ‘spectral signatures’ which indicate the presence of certain minerals. As such, Mosse’s chosen medium is internal to the narrative; the film could be seen as a kind of immanent critique.
Over the years, numerous artists have sought to represent ‘climate change’, which, in its amorphous yet all-encompassing scope, approaches the unrepresentable. In an effort to visually grasp this ‘hyperobject’, many have turned to the ‘God’s eye’ perspective afforded by aerial photography. Such is the grandeur of the resulting images that, in discussing Edward Burtynsky, Daniel Beltrá and others, commentators often reach for the ‘sublime’ - whether toxic, petro, industrial. All gesturing, I think, to the sense that these blasted landscapes - mines, tar fields, oil spills, landfill site - induce both aesthetic pleasure and existential grief.
Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten don’t eschew such elevated perspectives in Broken Spectre. Indeed, the helicopter sequences are among the most arresting moments in the film: we fly over clear-cuts, flooded valleys and vast open pits. But it works on other levels too. Blended into the macro, and occasionally interrupting it entirely, is imagery from the other extreme: close-ups of the undergrowth, transplanted chunks of rainforest drenched in ultra-violet light (in another echo of scientific practice) and photographed in a contrived indoor environment. A single square-inch of soil in the Amazon, Mosse reminds us, is ‘tripping with life’, and this dimension of the project reveals the micro-worlds whose interests we rarely consider. These images, ‘almost gothic nocturnes’, also probe the limits of human perception and help to relativise it. In this respect, I was reminded of the concept of Umwelt as proposed by the biologist Jakob von Uexüll (1864-1944) to describe how the world is sensorially perceived by particular organisms. Each inhabits a different subjective environment, and so there is an interpretive gap between human perception and ‘reality’. What we see in everyday life, around 0.0035 percent of the spectrum, is just the quirk of a bipedal mammal. On one level, Broken Spectre could be seen as a meditation on this gap.
Between these two extremes is the human scale, which has two poles: destroyers and defenders. We witness innumerable acts of violence in Broken Spectre: the felling of an ancient tree, hacking and burning, the dismemberment of slaughtered cows. A kaleidoscope so intense I was almost grateful when the panorama shifted back to an overview. The let-up is only ever fleeting, though. In one sequence, the horror returns sonically: an eerie, pulsating cacophony gradually builds until suddenly pierced by a truly spine-chilling siren. There are scenes of daily life on ranches, and of settlers at work. Mosse has spoken of spending the great majority of his time in the field negotiating access to these spaces. The Amazon is among the most dangerous places in the world for environmental activists, so being upfront about his intentions was out of the question. It turned out that flattery was the best approach. These macho figures are often proud of what they’ve achieved, and showing admiration for their tenacity and success in beating back the frontier of the jungle was the best way to win them over. An unpalatable bargain, perhaps, but I think a price worth paying.
Even though they’d doubtless feel betrayed upon watching Broken Spectre, I also wonder whether on some level they wouldn’t mind the portrayal. The vaqueiros in particular are amply dignified. In one scene, the camera follows as they gallop along a track in in ten-gallon hats, the lush vegetation on both sides gradually giving way to a blasted prairie. Evocation of the Western was a deliberate strategy on the filmmakers’ part, an attempt to somehow implicate the viewer through familiar imagery - to remind us that these processes are tied to a much longer history of encroachment into ‘wilderness’ by Europeans. Remarkably, only around one percent of the Amazon’s primary forest was lost before 1970. But with the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway under the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985), and, not long after, BR-163, the ‘Soy Highway’, the rainforest was opened up for large-scale exploitation. In this way, it is just the latest bitter frontier of ‘progress’.
If industrial plundering of the rainforest is a relatively recent phenomenon, the decimation of its native peoples is not. Until quite recently, it was thought by scholars that pre-contact communities were small and itinerant. But it is now widely believed that the seasonally-inundated várzea floodplains, at least, were densely populated before the arrival of Europeans. Evidence points to the presence of agricultural chiefdoms in areas like Marajó island, and it’s even possible that, in addition to cultivating maize and manioc, people managed banana plantations. Crucially, though, none of this activity undermined the ecosystem. In the early 1990s, the archaeologist Anna C. Roosevelt concluded that contemporary Amazonian groups are descendants of people who fled to the unproductive upland environment to escape disease, missionaries, and slave raiders. Recognising this history not only underscores the devastating impact of the conquest, but also stands as a corrective to longstanding portrayals of the rainforest as essentially primeval, untouched. Even after overtly ideological narratives about ‘savages’ lost traction, certain strains of anthropology continued to propagate a geographically deterministic view of indigenous Amazonia up until the 1980s. According to the paradigm of cultural ecology, in particular, the attainment of civilisational autonomy was prohibited by native peoples’ subjection to a hostile, constraining nature. Roosevelt’s approach was instrumental in sidelining the view that Amazonia lacked the necessary conditions for social complexity to emerge.
Another perspective can be gleaned from ethnography. While developmentalist discourse relies on the Amazon being characterised as a wilderness, for the Achuar of Ecuador, as the anthropologist Philippe Descola has observed, the rainforest is rather an immense garden carefully cultivated by some spirit, an ‘extension of the world of the homestead’. Not only does it provide an abundance of food, medicine and hallucinogens, its other inhabitants are not seen as beasts: even the great predators - jaguars, anacondas - are associates of shamans, who are, of course, included in society. As such, the discontinuity of outward forms belies an essential continuity of souls. And although the precise hierarchies and modes of interaction vary across cultures, the ontological system underlying this according to Descola, animism, is common to many Indigenous peoples of Amazonia.
We come closest to an encounter with ‘radical alterity’ in Broken Spectre during the speech of Adneia, a young Yanomami woman. For around seven minutes, the dyssynchronous channels resolve into one (momentarily blacking-out entirely while the reel is changed), as she stands before a circle of her people, flinging her arms with every utterance, at once distraught and furious.
‘Who will helps us to live in peace? Who will recover this forest?…It’s no use saying for nothing that you have lots of money. Put up a wire forbidding the prospectors to pass! Help us! Bring health back to this place! We want to live in peace. Be firm! You white people, see our reality! Open your minds! Don’t let us talk so gallantly and do nothing…This is what I ask of you, my friends: don’t film me for nothing. I don’t want that. I want you to really help me.’
It makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing. Sitting there in a darkened basement off one of London’s grandest streets, aware that our daily actions interpenetrate with the processes driving destruction of the Yanomami world, we know, feel, that we are the probem. But perhaps what’s most unsettling about the soliloquy is the nagging feeling that it won’t make much of a difference. With the return of Lula to office, there is hope, once again, that deforestation can be slowed. But it will take time to restore environmental agencies gutted under Bolsonaro, and it’s possible that 2023 will even see a rise. At the start of the government’s operations against garimpeiros in January, officials estimated there were up to 20,000 people connected with illegal mining in Yanomami territory - a chilling indication of the previous administration’s negligence. In a country riven by culture-war, in short, the long-term forces arrayed against the rainforest are formidable.
The Yanomami have long been one of the best-known Indigenous peoples among anthropologists and Western publics - if not for wholly salubrious reasons. In recent years, though, their mythocosmology has travelled beyond ethnographic circles in a more or less unadulterated way via a remarkable book, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (2013), which, like Broken Spectre, contains a profound appeal to the Western conscience. In some ways a kind of memoir, offering an account of Davi Kopenawa’s upbringing, his shamanic induction (‘becoming other’) and subsequent expeditions into the world of whites (the people Bruno Latour calls ‘Moderns’), first to Boa Vista and Manaus, and then to far-flung cities in Europe and North America, it also provides an unparalleled insight into the Yanomami thought-world. Part two of the book, ‘Metal smoke’, offers a haunting account of how Kopenawa makes sense of the death and destruction wrought by settlers - ‘Earth-eaters’ - in Yanomami cosmological terms. Although we don’t know to what degree his beliefs differ from other Yanomami, The Falling Sky can therefore be seen as a kind of direct, hermeneutic counterpart to Broken Spectre.
In conversations with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, Kopenawa vividly describes his confrontations with garimpeiros. He is forced to watch as they dig vast ditches, blast the land with high-pressure jets and soil the waterways with motor oils and a yellowish mud, all in a quest for an ‘evil thing’ about which the Yanomami knew nothing - gold (a vain search, anyway, because such dust is only derivative of the ‘true’ metal, which, Kopenawa explains, is buried much deeper and defended by spirits). Sometimes, working alongside FUNAI agents (the federal agency responsible for protecting Indigenous territory), he was able to expel prospectors from his ancestral land. But they always came back, in greater numbers, armed and ‘very bellicose’. Now, perceiving the desynchronisation of seasons and hydrological cycles, the shaman senses that the world is heading towards chaos. Fumes from factories are spreading in all directions, sickening trees and endangering even the xapiri spirits. The sky itself will become riddled with holes from the heat of mineral fumes, an outcome so far avoided only because hutukarari sky spirits are constantly pouring water on it to cool it down. But they cannot defend the Yanomami against evil things indefinitely.
As the Yanomami see it, the ignorance of whites (nicknamed ‘monster peccaries’ on account of their ceaseless digging and upsetting of the soil) as to the agency of spirits and shamans has already started unleashing a supernatural revenge in the form of droughts and deluges. If ecological unravelling continues, the last shaman will die, evil spirits will take over the cosmos and the sky’s roots will be torn out. Kopenawa is tormented by all this, and has sought for years to make whites understand. Perhaps if their thought could be steered away from minerals and merchandise, they might be able to ‘dream of something other than themselves’. Several times in the book, he expresses hope that young people may hear his words and show ‘far more friendship for the forest’ than their forebears. Although delivered more directly, this is also Adneia’s plea.
Davi Kopenawa with Yanomami children, Watoriki community. Fiona Watson, 1991 .
Before visiting the exhibition, my main qualm was that Broken Spectre would aestheticise ruination. Mosse has been criticised for this in the past, fairly or not. But when it came to it, the experience was so unsettling, the documentation so brute and unsparing, that my concerns were mostly dispelled: there’s a way, I think, in which the inherent tension between beauty and devastation is productive. In previous attempts to represent the climate crisis, environmental destruction has often figured as a thing rather than a contingent process - and not just as a function of the medium’s intrinsic fixedness. The epic composites of Burtynsky, for example, arguably show the impact of human ‘progress’ on such an abstracted scale that they effectively negate hope that something could be done to arrest our death-march. Disconnected from the social and political context, moreover, they invite us to adopt a purely contemplative stance, to gaze upon despoliation in a way that arguably promotes passivity. In this way, as Clint Burnham has suggested, they allow us, perversely, to ‘enjoy our symptom’.
For me, Broken Spectre’s multi-perspectival structure, as well as Adneia’s speech, an unforgettable inflection point, are the keys to a more complex, unsettling work of art. The project is an indexical record of unfolding physical, chemical and biological processes, but it also raises questions about the transparency of images and the ways in which we are culturally attuned to respond to them. We can’t really believe that the Amazon is being sacrificed for the sake of cattle and soy, that the panoramic horror unfolding before us is all for profit. At the same time, though, we recognise our complicity in the integrated global system that drives it, and the film’s power derives in part from this sense of dislocation. Mosse doesn’t downplay the criminality of the settler-invaders, but he does remind us that short-termism, binds and self-justifying behaviour are not localised in climate flashpoints; they are an almost universal condition of humanity in the Anthropocene.
Reflecting on it afterwards, it struck me that, in its appropriation of sophisticated scientific imaging techniques, Broken Spectre is inextricably tied to the very complex of forces that have taken us beyond the point of no return. Despite its decidedly anti-naturalist aesthetic, the film could be seen as an advanced product of naturalism, the ontology of the Moderns according to Descola. Only under the hegemony of naturalism, whose foundation is a mute, impersonal Nature, could the Earth be plundered with such wanton disregard. In contrast, the Yanomami - and countless other Indigenous peoples - take for granted that humans are just one element in a vast whole in which no real discrimination is made between themselves and non-humans. Nature, in other words, is subjectivised.
Does this matter? I don’t mean it as a criticism of the film per se, which may be the most powerful work of art yet made about climate breakdown. After all, one could make this argument about photography itself, a medium long harnessed for conquest and resource extraction. Merely to suggest that it is inescapably external to, and disconnected from, the Umwelten of the humans and non-humans it sets out to champion. This gap is thrown into sharp relief by The Falling Sky, which offers a glimpse of what it might be like to live in a world charged with agency. Ultimately, both works aim, on some level, at cross-cultural communication. But while the film presents only absence (of health, autonomy, a secure future ), the book gives us - in immense detail - the positive, constructive and affirmative side to the Yanomami. While in the film they are presented as basically reactive (though certainly not passive), the book gives us a rich and textured insight into an alternative way of simply being in the world.
Collective house near the Catholic mission on the Catrimani River, Roraima. Claudia Andujar, 1976.
Although Davi Kopenawa long ago renounced his youthful wish to become a white man, he continues, in his late sixties, to engage in outreach and activism. Just this year, he attended the opening of ‘The Yanomami Struggle’ in New York City, an exhibition of photographs by another friend and collaborator, Claudia Andujar, who first visited their lands in 1971. Strikingly, alongside a number of visionary portraits, the series also includes aerial images made on (colour) infrared film. Although her focus, at this time, was less on highlighting jeopardy than on conveying radical alterity, there is, then, a direct line from Andujar to Broken Spectre.
It may be coincidental that these two exhibitions ran simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic. But it will surely mean that their message was amplified. While the prognosis for the Amazon may seem bleak and the problems intractable, it is equally true that the work of Mosse and Andujar is likely to have unknown and untraceable consequences, rippling out through actions and conversations in a way that makes a collective difference. During sleep, Kopenawa says, the xapiri ‘never stop looking at us and wanting to talk to us...They call us: ‘Father, do you hear us? Or are your ears really blocked?’ At this grave moment in human history, Broken Spectre avers, the responsibility is on us to unblock our ears, if not for the xapiri, then at least for Adneia and the shaman.
The archive, naturally, is a chronicle, in a kind of raw and mixed-up way. The earliest images date to the 1880s, a decade of great democratisation for photography. And so in strict empirical terms, it speaks to only a sliver of Dartmoor’s human history. But the weight of the past is present in virtually every collection. You routinely stumble across Druidical antiquities and monumental relics from the Bronze Age; and, in the Francis Lee collection, arrowheads, axes, daggers and scrapers - all subjected to the cold gaze of scientific documentation. The archive is steeped in an expansive historical consciousness, testament to a time when photography became the handmaiden of both archaeology and antiquarianism.
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