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Simon Norfolk
Daylight magazine: Issue 4 / 2006 - Example page spread for a portfolio by Simon Norfolk (p.6-7)
2006
Magazine spread
Daylight Magazine
© Daylight Magazine and the contributors
LL/11484
Photojournalist Simon Norfolk wrote the text that accompanied the portfolio on p.6 of Issue 4 (2006)
"The following photographs are part of a larger project attempting to understand how war and the need to fight war have formed our world how so many of the spaces we occupy, the technologies we use, and the ways we understand ourselves, are created by military conflict.
I was astounded to discover that the long, straight, bustling, commercial road that runs through my neighbourhood in London follows an old Roman road. In some places the Roman stones are still buried beneath the modern tarmac. Crucially, the road system built by the Romans was their highest military technology, their equivalent of the stealth bomber or the Apache helicopter a technology that allowed a huge empire to be maintained by a relatively small army that could move quickly and safely along these paved, all-weather roads. It is extraordinary that London, a city that should be shaped by Tudor kings, the British Empire, Victorian engineers, and modern international finance, is a city fundamentally drawn, even to this day, by abandoned Roman military hardware.
Which brings me to archaeology, since I have always seen myself as more of a discoverer of the hidden in a landscape than as any kind of "artist." Anybody interested in the effects of war quickly becomes an expert in ruins, detritus, artefacts, and these images are the result of a long fascination with ruins and their portrayal through the history of art. Some of the earliest photographers were ruin photographers and they drew on the devastation and decay in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, in the garden designs of Capability Brown, in the novels of Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley, and in the work of such poets as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. The thinking that united these artists is fundamentally misunderstood the ruins in these artworks were not examples of dreamy-headed pictorialism but profound philosophical and political metaphors for the foolishness of pride; for awe and the Sublime; and, most importantly to me, for the vanity of Empire.
Since Israel represents perhaps the purest form of the "soft imperialism" that America has used in the making of its global empire, it is a good place to meditate upon the brutality and arrogance necessary for that empire's construction and, in turn, what these new ruins might mean for all of us."
© Simon Norfolk / Daylight Magazine (2006)
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