Of all the thousands of photographs amassed by the Dartmoor Trust, this one stood out. I love the light on those rippling slopes, mottled with the shadows of an approaching shower. It’s not necessarily the most beautiful landscape in the archive, nor even in this particular collection. But, for whatever reason, its thumbnail compelled a proper look. Arbitrary, perhaps - but that comes with the territory.
The photo certainly captures the exuberance of immersion under big skies. It’s that moment on a hillside when things quite suddenly change; the wind picks up, the sky begins to spit. In just a few minutes, the view will be sapped of all radiance, shaded by an indifferent cloud. It’s one of the best examples of a Romantic gaze I came across in the archive. Dartmoor, here, is picturesque in all its uncultivated roughness, the composition’s formal balance offset by the impressionistic lustre of the moor grass - strands of gold receding into hazy clumps, and then down to a winding stream.
The vast majority of the archive, however, eschews such painterly tropes. There is repetition to the point of excess, with sometimes almost forensic coverage. Much is in monochrome. And we are often confronted with the pleasing materiality of scratched negatives and annotated slide-holders.
The records are still being catalogued, and so the archive requires some patience. There’s no click-through from the full-size scans, meaning each image must be individually accessed from the grid, which can lead to quite a superficial plundering of the webpages. But if you spend long enough with the collections, the Moor in all its different guises begins to shine through - as playground, sanctuary, standing reserve, temple, penitentiary.
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.
The Lee collection as a whole contains over seven-thousand photographs covering more than a century - including countless shots of Dartmoor’s tors, rearranged here in a Becher-like typology. Beyond these, you encounter all Dartmoor’s features and permutations: temperate rainforests, standing stones, ruined cottages, sheep looking on nervously. But, above all, windswept hills, valleys, clitters and streams. The Moor at its purest. It’s not obvious why the photographer went to all the trouble. Reiteration of the similar is interrupted - for pages - only occasionally by a smothering of snow. His bequest is the quintessence of archival excess; it’s as though he was grasping for a certain fixity that might somehow flout the laws of constant change.
But the Moor is unruly, always mutating - on both the level of its ecosystems and that of its social inscription. Only this month was its status as the last bastion of wild camping in England overturned. And even as a hastily-negotiated settlement with certain landholders to preserve some access is finalised, Dartmoor now signifies, as it has many times before, a battleground over values. Over the scope for ‘improvement’, the fate of prisoners-of-war, the future of forestry…the upland has long been implicated in questions about how society should he run, and in whose interests.
Such debates were especially intense during the time of Dartmoor’s piecemeal integration with the wider economic area. In many of the older collections, the encroach of industry is palpable. From 1823, a new railway line to Princetown enabled quarrying at Foggintor, Merrivale and Haytor to pick up pace. Then came plantations and reservoirs in the twentieth-century. The moody picture of Meldon Viaduct above is by Robert Burnard, who co-founded the Dartmoor Preservation Association - the main foil to the Forestry Commission in the 1920s and 30s - alongside his father.
There’s also, of course, a whole human history in this archive; the Moor is a landscape of memories - rambles, picnics, harvests, monks from the Abbey at Buckfast unloading beehives. There are long-gone faces of walkers, workers, prisoners. Groups out for a stroll in their Sunday best, mixed with family moments evoking universal themes, but dated by clothes, paraphernalia, even postures. Very occasionally, there are spectres of the photographers themselves: a self-portrait in a standing mirror, or Taylor’s photographic equipment. Immersed in the sheer abundance of the larger collections, so much of it passes you by.
But then certain images just leap out from the grid. Such as this, of an unknown lady at Two Bridges, Tavistock. There’s a melancholy in the scene which goes beyond the starkness of winter. Something about the solitary figure wrapped up in her luxurious coat. She’s by some degree the most vibrant point of this beautifully muted photograph, though, against this hibernating backdrop, it doesn’t take much.
Beyond the manifest content of the archive, there’s also its many forms to admire, along with their imperfections and degradations. The diversity in techniques and processes speaks to broad social currents as photography became ever-faster, affordable and more portable. Read in a different way, it would be possible to track the evolution of the medium in this archive, from the laborious days of plate cameras right through to the age of binary.
In some sense, it is jumbled, fragmentary. But on some fundamental level, too, the records attain a fragile unity by their very (contingent) presence in this space: the Collection is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. But you’d need to dedicate far more time perusing the records than most of us have spare before you began to understand it. And so this whirlwind tour is inevitably influenced as much by chance as syncretic intent. But, at the same time, it could not be otherwise.
In any photographic archive, there’s an immanent tension between the individual image, with all its potential for an independent ‘career’ outside the bounds of its container, and the anonymising mass within which it is buried. But the possibilities for recombination are endless. And so a degree of arbitrariness is the only way to make the archive, and the landscape itself, manageable.
I end with some favourite objects from the luminous Falcon collection.
