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In Australia’s Northern Territory, marked by climate predictions as “uninhabitable” in the near future, Liss Fenwick shoots fires, termites, and tree bark like it’s an ad for high fashion. Here’s why.
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LISS FENWICK: Growing up, I was a bit of an outcast in this place. It’s pretty gritty. I found an analog SLR camera, 35mm. That became my way of connecting to the world and to the land I found myself in.
I initially thought about landscape photography as a protest. If you shoot these trees and termite mounds using the aesthetics of fashion and commercial photography—like making a sexy portrait of the landscape—it’s a way of protesting our anthropocentric obsession with humans. It’s not all about us. When you’re dragging out lighting to a termite mound as a kind of pilgrimage, that stuff becomes absurd.
Humpty Doo and the Northern Territory were settled very late in the British Empire. And I’m a settler photographer— my ancestry is white settlers on unceded lands of the Larrakia Wulna people. Increasingly, I think we need to confront that inheritance. The land is still being colonized by these neoliberal mining corporations. They don’t give a shit about this place. It’s just about profits.
What I love about photography is that it allows proximity to the real. You have to be there, a part of it. I love the land and interpreting the mystery and the unknown. You can make the familiar transcendent through the image, imbuing it with meaning through light or perspective. I think that is where the mischief in photography is, too. It’s not trying to sell anything. It’s just joyful. Taking these pictures, it’s not standing back and imagining. It’s actually getting in the heat and the dark and allowing these things to affect you.
I think, rightfully, it can be tricky to talk about connection to land as a white person. But I’ve also read First Nations scholars like Bruce Pascoe and The Gay’Wu Group of Women, and they say whitefellas need to develop an understanding of land and a connection to land. That’s the only way we’re going to stop the planet from continually catching on fire and being exploited. So I like to make efforts towards that.
There’s this incredible Australian philosopher called Val Plumwood. She was canoeing in the Northern Territory and was attacked by a crocodile. She was pulled under the water, and they did a death roll. Her chances of surviving were very slim. Later, she wrote about the experience. In that moment, she said, she went from being a person, being herself, to being prey for this other animal. She called it breaking “the astrological delusion” that we’re the center of the universe.
That’s something we all need to be doing regularly, so we understand the interconnectedness of all things. It’s the only way we’ll get it into our heads that we can’t just consume everything all the time.
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