Ground Sea

Front matter

Ground Sea VOLUME 1 Photography and the Right to Be Reborn

Hilde Van Gelder

Leuven University Press

PART II: Shuttle

6. The Right to Reappear

7. Naming the Person without a Name

8. Fools & Rights: Leaves for an Illustrated Reader Plates

9. This Precious Jewel

10. Plotting

Notes Bibliography

15 33 55 63

673 701

And here, doing is more important than knowing. — Walter Benjamin, “News about Flowers” (1928)

j

| could not help reflecting how much more pleasure it must give one to protect life than to take it away; and how much happier [the fisher] must be in catching the fish with no other intention than to feed them, than it can be with us, to first torture them with hooks and then throw them on the ground to expire in agonies.

Anon., “A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth [1755],” in The Faber Book of Utopias, ed. John Carey (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 140.

whiting’ > noun (pl. same) 1 a slender-bodied marine fish of the cod family, which lives in shallow European waters and is a commercially important food fish. e Merlangius merlangus, family Gadidae. 2 [usu. with modifier] any of a number of similar marine fishes, in particular: e a fish of the Indo-Pacific (family Sillaginidae), including the commercially important Sillaginoides punctatus of Australia. e the northern kingfish of eastern North America.

—ORIGIN Middle English: from Middle Dutch wijting, from wijt ‘white’.

whiting? > noun [mass noun] ground chalk used for purposes such as whitewashing and cleaning metal plate.

Angus Stevenson, ed., Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2025. Original emphasis.

Le RER | | ai | mi ai f

The Search Project (Kickoff)

Amateur angler posing with his vibrating line after successful catch of two unlucky whiting from the passenger #port channel @CalaisQuaidelaColonne #¥lapaysannedesmersmyriampont

A “late bite” #endoftheday @CaféduMinck #LastDayofWinter #fishes #smelledtheroses #proud #man #gate @SpiritofBritain

After “breakthrough,” the British witnessed la difference* The French section was generally swisher and better-lit, it contained a shrine to

St Barbara, the patron saint of miners, a “cairn” of champagne bottles and the odd fag-end. The French tunneling machines had girls’ names: the British numbered theirs.

*Note the unconventional spelling “/a difference,” an apposite amalgam of French and English.

Martin Latham, “The Secret History of the Channel Tunnel (1802-2001),” in Kent's Strangest Tales (London: Portico, 2016), 103. Original emphasis.

Postcard auctioned online ofthe @Dover #bronzeage #boat Photographed with three chalkstones collected on a beach nearby, where the ancient navigators lived who buried this #WorldsOldestSeagoingBoat

#accidentaldiscovery #kent1992 #love

Preface: \Nater-Bound

In “Planetary Madness: Globalizing the Ship of Fools,” W.J.T. Mitchell sketches a dim perspective for the future. Humankind today has finally succeeded in making its habitat global. Through this achievement, however, life on our blue planet has become increasingly unpredictable. While allowing the world economy of deregulated capitalism to become dysfunctional, as Mitchell argues, human beings reconverted their spaceship Earth into one big ship of fools.! To reach this bleak conclusion, Mitchell acknowledges Allan Sekula (1951-2013), an acclaimed pioneer in problematizing late-twentieth-century society’s exaggerated focus on “cyberspace.”? Sekula’s influential photo-text Fish Story (1995) marked a decisive step toward orienting its readers’ attention to maritime space—a vast zone that he identified as our collectively forgotten space.

Allhis life, Sekula, who trained as an ocean swimmer during his youth, was inescapably attracted by the seas and their rhythmic waves. He was haunted by the black masseur, to refer to the metaphoric image that Charles Sprawson used to describe the depths of the seawaters.? In the triptych Dear Bill Gates (1999), Sekula integrated a self-portrait made

Fig. Pı.

Detail of invitation

card to the exhibition Allan Sekula. TITANIC's wake, CCC Tours, Nov. 18, 2000-Mar. 4, 2001.

Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Calais. Photo by author. Courtesy Allan Sekula Studio.

while swimming in open water. (fig. P.1) Wearing a red cap, but without a protective wet suit, he looks like a sea mammal, keeping his nose just above water. With translucent white goggles stuck to his slightly tilted forehead, he is winking at the camera—at us, the viewers. The artist’s dilated left pupil suggests he is about to pull a boyish prank, trying to entice us along like a selkie. His blinded right eye, however, counterbalances this lightheartedness. From the abysmal darkness of his closed eyelid, a large tear appears to roll down his cheek. As if building the opening scene of a drama film, the meaning of this photograph suddenly shifts. Now, the courageous swimmer rather looks like a sea-knight who knows his opponent is about to defeat him in a duel.

At eventide on September 7, 1999—sometime between sunset and the blue hour—Allan Sekula made Dear Bill Gates in the cold northwest Pacific Ocean in front of the Microsoft tycoon’s bunkered Seattle villa. 4 Taken from within the water with a Nikonos 35mm underwater camera, the photograph completing this sequence shows two women in a Larson bowrider named Sometime. (fig. P.2) Its poop-deck light is on, marking the moment of transition to nautical twilight when the first stars become visible. Both crew members appear to be peering into the same direction as if searching for something in the water right before it gets dark. The woman standing up front is stretching out her two arms. She seems about to bend down, ready to pick out of the sea whatever it is they have been looking for—the identity of which we will never know but about which we could speculate while we observe the small speedboat from the artist’s immersed perspective (as if he were a nix diving around, about to vanish back underwater again). In each picture

Fig. P.2.

Allan Sekula, Dear Bill Gates, 1999. One of three Cibachrome color photographs in single frame, accompanied by a typewritten letter and a photocopy of Winslow Homer's Lost on the Grand

Banks. 73.8x270.8 cm (framed triptych). Letter 30x23 cm, 39.7x31 cm (framed). Homer-copy 29.7x42 cm.

© Allan Sekula Studio.

of Sekula’s trio of disassembled images, the waterline rises higher, like an aquarium filling up.’ Or is it rather the ground under Gates’s resort that subsides and sinks?

During a public lecture, entitled “Genitality and the Backyard Pool,” Sekula projected this third picture on a screen for his audience, without, however, lifting the veil of mystery enveloping the image. Wittingly, he only told the audience that the two women were there to haul him out of the water if he would become hypothermic. But he also insisted that, for him, the sea was a key point of critical intervention.° An open letter to Gates, dated November 30, 1999, accompanies the three photographs of Dear Bill Gates. This date refers to a historical day of anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protests, now chronicled as N30, in Seattle.” The work’s poster version, as glued onto the construction fence of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, then undergoing renovation, contained an additional element: a small photocopy of Winslow Homer’s painting Lost on the Grand Banks (1885). (fig. P.3) Back then, the work, representing two fishermen peering over the side of their rowboat into a rough sea, had just been sold to Bill Gates for a fabulous price: $30 million. In his first letter to the magnate, Sekula expressed a feeling of shock by this (at the time) record price for an American painting.’ How could one possibly pay so much money for a painting representing the lamentable tableau of near drowning at sea?

The coincidence between the painter’s name, Homer, and that of the author of one of the greatest epic poems ever written, The Odyssey, is striking. For his filmic works, such as, most prominently, The Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010, codirector Noél Burch),

Fig. Pa.

Allan Sekula, Dear Bill Gates, 1999. Poster version as installed on the construction fence of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2000), then undergoing renovation works. Variable dimensions. © Photo: Frits Gierstberg. Courtesy Allan Sekula Studio.

Fig. PA.

Stills from Allan Sekula, The Lottery ofthe Sea, 2006, 180 mins., color, sound. English, Spanish, Galician, with Spanish subtitles. Direction, camera, narration:

Allan Sekula. Editing: Elizabeth Hesik. Projected dimensions 386x290 cm. © Allan Sekula Studio.

Sekula sailed the oceans extensively. He generously shared his rich knowledge of the sea with his audiences and readers. He encouraged them to follow in his wake, even if this involved getting soaked in dirty waters. (fig. P.4) In The Lottery of the Sea, we observe the artist emerging with a waterproof camera from a swimming zone in the Mediterranean, right after we also see feces floating nearby. During conversations that he and I held in his Los Angeles Echo Park work studio in late May and early June of 2013, Sekula pointed out that a vital element in his overall intellectual undertaking had been to criticize the construction of a swimming pool in the backyard of one’s house. In his view, the underlying human drive for doing that was one possible way to sublimate the death instinct, Thanatos.? He considered it of uttermost urgency to hinge Thanatos back to the sea—to Thalassa, as he said. Only in this way would humans eventually be capable of reestablishing a more harmonious connection to the salty liquidity of the sea. This, he believed, would help them overcome their fear of death and find a better life balance. While discussing this subject, we found ourselves sitting in front of the studio’s principal wall. (fig. P.5) Sekula described this wall, to which he had attached numerous pictures and clippings, as a platform allowing him to keep certain images on the top of his mind. He pointed out a small picture appending to a used envelope with a striking amount of postage

Fig. P5.

Allan Sekula Work Studio, Echo Park, Los Angeles.

Clipboard wall. March 2013. © Photo: Ina Steiner.

Courtesy Allan Sekula Studio.

Fig. P.6.

Heritage Images, Gertrude Ederle American Swimmer, 1926. © Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

stamps. The image illustrates one of his key leitmotifs, the figure ofthe woman swimmer. It is a reproduction of the legendary photograph of twenty-year-old Gertrude Ederle emerging from the English Channel waters at Kingsdown (northeast of Dover) on August 6, 1926. (fig. P.6) Ederle had just become the first woman to swim across the naturalmoat between France and Britain, in arecord time of 14 hours and 31 minutes. Aside from her exceptional swimming skills, acquired from a young age while spending summer holidays on the banks ofthe Shrewsbury River in New Jersey, she thanked her success to a revolutionary two-piece bathing suit cut up from a one-piece and to motorcycle goggles that she had also modified. A pink swimming cap and a thickly applied layer of grease (petroleum jelly) covering her entire body completed her outfit.

When Gertrude Ederle departed from the beach at Cap Gris-Nez, she entered a rough sea, caused by a strong southwesterly wind. After a thirty-five-mile crawl-stroke battle, she reached the vicinity of the Kingsdown lifeboat station, her body covered with bruises and painful jellyfish stings, her tongue badly swollen from the salt water. The next day, The Guardian reported on her heroic endeavor as follows:

As the swimmer got nearer the shore visitors and residents between Kingsdown and Deal collected all the dry material they could lay their hands on to build big bonfires, which they lighted on the beach to act as a beacon for the swimmer. When Miss

Ederle got to within some 500 yards of the beach the crowd had increased to thousands, and every man, woman, and child assembled became almost frantic in their excitement as it became apparent that the swimmer had succeeded. The shrill blasts from the sirens of the two attendant tugs were insignificant compared to the great volume of human sound which came from the vast concourse of people on the foreshore.'°

In 2001, a reporter for The New York Times visited Ederle in a nursing home in Wyckoff, New Jersey. As she told him, she recalled the above-described moment, when she emerged from the water and her feet hit the sand again, as the most wonderful moment of her life.! When the steamship sailing her back to her native country approached New York, the crew invited her to join the upper deck. Airplanes soon flew over the ship to greet and honor her by swooping down and dropping bouquets of flowers. Back in New York City, a reported crowd of two million granted her a heroic homecoming as Queen of the Waves.!?

During the abovementioned lecture delivered at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Sekula, while showing the Ederle portrait to his audience, referred to Elaine Morgan’s contested aquatic ape hypothesis. Morgan is famous for having speculated about the aquatic origins of the human species, and for having praised women as more prolific long-distance swimmers than men, and as figures of underwater endurance in general— here referencing the Japanese Ama divers, who, since time immemorial, have dived for pearls and more recently played an essential role in the development of the cultured pearl industry. In the present book, this emblematic portrait of Ederle is the starting point for sketching a more contemporary metaphoric image of a figure that medieval culture identified as Melusine, a legendary water-serpent woman who emerged from the sea and who, for that matter, possessed not only the gift of aquatic knowledge but also divine powers.!* Sekula himself somewhat triggered that understanding of the figure of Ederle as blessed with a divine force since, on his studio wall, he positioned the small clipping right above a larger reproduction of the Buddha Shakyamuni from Si Thep, a tall sandstone sculpture from the ninth century AD." (see fig. P.5) Ederle’s portrait is an ambivalent picture, representing both a seductive mermaid putting on a broad smile and an alarming siren lighting up from her covered-up Cyclopean eye.

To write this book, I accepted Sekula’s—and Ederle’s—call to put the goggles back on along with them and to engage in a transfigurative yearslong open-water swim. Inspired by Ederle’s perseverance, it felt vital to overcome fear (or, rather, to see myself through it), and to respond in my own way to the lure of the sea, as Alain Corbin put it in his seminal study. Corbin traced this particular fascination for the sea back to the early seventeenth century, when the French poet Saint-Amant settled on the wild coast of Belle-Île and lyrically described the sun rising out of the sea in the morning twilight as recalling the Resurrection.!® In line with these authors, Ground Sea—as I have come to call my undertaking—claims the urgent need to both observe and reinvent the world from an aquatic perspective. Corbin has recalled how the Great Flood runs as a common theme through the oral traditions of all ancient peoples. As this old belief had it, the sea is the site where life began.!” Today as well, it is on the coastline that the “archives of the earth” reveal some of their deepest and most important secrets.!8 From the mid-eighteenth century onward, the “water-dwelling girl and woman” came to embody and personify this idea that the sea was the original womb, possessing the power to restore fertility.!? Strikingly, the country where these conclusions could best be drawn, it was argued, was Holland—a land that had risen out of the water and (for that matter) had been “blessed by God.”?°

Allan Sekula considered himself part of those water-dwellers who felt themselves drawn to the Netherlands and northern Belgium (Flanders), where he produced numerous artworks and publications, frequently exhibited or lectured, and had many friends. But he also described himself as someone busy with “dog paddling while Rome burns.”21 This metaphor of the paddling dog served to color further his desired transformation into a wild man at the end of a turbulent twentieth century replete with failed utopianisms. I derive this notion of wild man from medieval folklore, literature, and art. As explained by Paul Vandenbroeck with respect to Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), the painting by Hieronymus Bosch, “wild folk” refers to such beings as sirens, mermaids, mermen, and sea-knights, all of whom have been considered not ordinary mortals, but beings with special powers who, for that reason, bear atypical knowledge of human life? Take, as a preliminary example, the following verse that Sekula wrote as a “Prayer for the Americans and Their Allies 6/16/01.”

The sky will be our shield

The market will never fall

The icecaps will never melt

The sea will never be exhausted.”3

Ground Sea investigates life in those regions of our Earth where ground—the solid surface of the Earth—and sea—the expanse of salt water that covers most of the Earth’s surface and surrounds its land masses— meet in various constellations.?* We are living in an era in which the polar ice caps continue to melt at an alarming pace.?° In certain zones, human beings need to start preparing for rising tides, which

will involve, among many other things, learning how to live not only with

the welling water but sometimes also onthe water. In other parts ofthe

planet, temperatures are likely to go up so much that these regions will

no longer accommodate any form of life. Their inhabitants will have to

go elsewhere, away from a loved birthplace where the wellhas dried up, to find water that will help them survive. Ground Sea’s principal focus

is on those individuals who in recent times grew convinced, for better or

worse, that being water-bound is our inescapable destiny. There willbe

no way around this reality. Some among us will try to make the best of it. Others will continue to pursue their denial as long as possible.

In the view of Bruno Latour, humankind will have to reinvent itself radically to break away from its previous existential condition as

“Earthbounds.”? Building on overwhelming evidence provided by geoscientific research, Latour claims that to continue to be Earthbound is to remain part of those who are, for him, the former humans. These are the people who first became “modern” and who afterward oriented their behavior toward Ground Global, as he calls it—globalizing the planet’s economy along the way. For Latour, it is crystal clear that the world toward which most people continue to aspire today, the Globe as boundlessly Global, has no terrestrial existence. The resources needed for the accumulated capitalist ambitions of each nation-state are simply not available. Consequently, as Latour concludes, a time may approach during which humans will collectively need to start looking more actively for a place where their enormous passenger plane running low on fuel can safely land.

However, where do we find such place? According to Latour, there is no realistic way of going back to seeking refuge in what he calls Ground Land—a concept hinting at reactionary populist nationalisms involving relatively small parts of territory as native soil to be claimed. The idea of a Shrunk Britain, as Latour calls it, that regains autonomous control over its land and sea territory embodies this worldview, among other examples. Ivan Krastev, for his part, connects this new dream with that of an imagined Nativia. Increasing amounts of natives in Europe seek to reinvent their territory as if it were an isolated island from which they can chase unwanted foreigners. What is most striking, Krastev argues, is that such persons pursue this goal “without the slightest pang of guilt.”?” But unless we should interpret the expression of a Shrunk Britain literally, as a warning sign pointing at an island ever-shrinking in size due to the rising sea levels, I agree with Latour and Krastev that such conceptions of Ground Land or Nativia are problematic.

How are we to respond, then, to the fact that, as argued by Latour,

“the very notion of soil is changing” today??® What are we supposed to do now that we increasingly feel “the ground itself” of a cohesive society “slip away beneath our feet”??? The ordeal common to us all is not only that we are short ofresources but also that we find ourselves “deprived of land” to accommodate all our wishes. Latour, for his part, is very concerned with finding out, then, “what land” on Earth is still inhabitable.*! Here, in Ground Sea, I shift focus and put forward the resolute hypothesis that no landing will be viable as long as it is searched for in terms of a specific area or territory. Landing, today, involves what the word land means in its verbal tense: a specific action connected to the aspiration of arrival. I understand this idea of arrival is ambiguous. It can mean either the desire to encounter a welcoming refuge or the ambition of conquering a space. Ground Sea takes as its working tool the word’s hospitable meaning, eloquently defined by my colleague Nicoletta Grillo in conversation through the Italian word approdare, which literally means “coming to the margins [of land].” In time, the term has also acquired an additional metaphorical layer of meaning and is used to mark the moment of arriving at a haven, a warm home.

Undoubtedly, some readers of this book belong, just like me, to the crazy club of Wind Assisted Fucking Idiots (WAFIs). Usually after a couple of shameful experiences they prefer to silently repress, WAFIs conclude that berthing a boat figures among the more critical sailing maneuvers—even more so, and perhaps paradoxically at first sight, when wind and stream join forces in guiding your ship to the quay. Thus, the first rule for avoiding collision and finding viable points of encounter between ground and sea is to learn how to skillfully embrace the elements. The purpose of this book is not to explore the sea as an area available for accommodating the, in my view, unrealistic wish of further capitalist growth. Instead, I put forward rivers and seas as key places for restoring and reinventing life on this planet. I investigate the option of imagining a plane-converted-into-ship that will not foolishly go out of control but will instead be self-confidently seaworthy, and ultimately finds a fitting berth for arrival and then safe mooring.

In what follows, I investigate what Ground Sea provides us as a nurturing place from which to learn as well as grow and develop. Characterized as itis by broken and turbulent waters, I observe Ground Sea as a domain that, however elusively, informs us how to prepare for what is to come. With “us,” I mean all human beings—excluding no one—now bound together, according to Latour, in an awkward family resemblance through two feelings of loss. The first feeling is felt by those who experienced the actual loss of their land—through the history of colonization—and the second by their former colonizers, who are on the verge of losing their land to the sea.%? Ground Sea proves capable of providing a horizon where human beings can, and will likely have to, end up dwelling—at least for some time. They do so already, often in tragic circumstances. How, then, as a photo-art historian, can one credibly contribute to developing a substantiated case for a non-imperialistically defined water-boundedness within today’s predicament? How should this study, Ground Sea, contribute to seeing the water-bounds not as our planet’s outcasts—or worse, as menacing omens—but instead as heralds of hope for a reimagined future on Earth?

This question has continued to haunt me ever since one evening in the fall of 2009, when an express-mail mystery package from the Us Postal Service arrived at my home in Brussels. The parcel contained a first edition copy of Sekula’s Photography Against the Grain, carefully wrapped and signed by its author. At the kind instigation of his wife, Sally Stein—to whom he dedicated this book when it first came out in 1984—Sekula had sent one of the few remaining copies he still owned to Belgium, using my fortieth birthday as a suitable pretext for such a weighty present. Long out of print and unfindable in any local library at that time, most scholars in Europe were only familiar with this landmark publication through barely readable photocopies, likely obtained via services such as Interlibrary Loan. Photography Against the Grain came accompanied by an email in which its author jokingly wrote that this gift was to be taken as an encouragement to continue expanding my

“intellectual seriousness” as a photography researcher.>°

As an odd sign of my gratitude for such a precious gift, I readily confess that I held on to my habit of reverting to the, by now, erratically marked photocopies that I made as a student. For it was, and continues to be, inconceivable that I would smudge the book’s naked integrity, as it is the conceptually most influential specimen in my entire collection. Over the years, I even grew fond of this very paradox. Within my research library, Photography Against the Grain figures among the volumes that I have returned to most. Yet, I have never touched the book without wearing gloves. Upon opening its pages, my sacred copy will still spread the smell of an old ink-printed publication. More recently, I concluded that my reticence to reading the book’s pages must be the result of this rather heady odor. For, although I experience the need to open it from time to time, a brief instant usually suffices, as the scent simply prevents me from concentrating on the written lines. Significantly, however, it is that peculiar smell that has occasioned a particular type of photo-based research, one that I would like to describe provisionally with a title borrowed from one of Javier Marias’s earliest novels: Voyage along the Horizon (1972 [2006]).

Photography Against the Grain’s opening lines read as a programmatic statement, “this is a book about photography.”* At the same time, Sekula continued, it is also a book that speaks within and alongside and through photographs. John O’ Brian aptly characterized Sekula’s methodological approach, saying that his writings have shown a systematic interest in those photographic images, both historical and contemporary, that display before our eyes both a predominant socioeconomic structure and its accompanying narrative. This narrative is so omnipresent in our globaleveryday reality that many people somehow tend to overlook the basic factthatreified socialrelations maintained and fortified by that very narrative are not a metaphysical necessity inescapably inherent to the contemporary world. Photography writers who do not take this acquired narrative for granted have but one task left when seeking to unmask it: they need to piece together the nature and ways of its very construction from the ready-made world of signs surrounding a particular situation.*°

O’Brian agreed with Sekula that only a sustained zooming in on a specific topic allows for a profoundly deconstructive reading of the hegemonic narrative, against the tensions and abstractions of the conditions of advanced capitalism that helped to promote it. The way to make real progress with such detailed investigations is to create “a book of photographs.”3° Reading through and writing alongside a well-chosen selection of photographs makes it possible to build a reflexive “social practice” from which a renewed “political dialogue” will eventually emerge.’ The photography writer who constructs arguments from “within concrete life situations”—in other words, situations not marked by a deliberate effort to circumvent an overt or active clash of interests and representations—will develop a realist practice that tends to go against what Sekula observed to be the all-encompassing and strangling grip of present-day advanced capitalism.>®

To brush photography against the grain, then, means that one researches, investigates, and develops a study of photographs that are as minimally complicit with global capitalism’s systemic logic as possible. In its methodological selections, Ground Sea follows Allan Sekula’s lead. The present book is the outcome of a prolonged focus on one aspect of our collective life situation today, which is best described by means of an old-fashioned term: the wandering of peoples to countries in Europe. As indicated, my entry points into the subject material are those spaces where the land touches the sea or where the sea, in various guises, nourishes the land. For it is there that one encounters those who find themselves, most inspiringly and powerfully, water-bound.

Traditional mussel farmers in south-Italian Taranto call the fertile plots where they grow mollusks orti. Its etymological source is the Latin word hortus (garden). Hortus is a concept that has made it into contemporary Dutch and German, contrary to French or English. Though it is not very colloquial, it indicates (in Dutch) a well-kept and pleasant garden or (in German) a protected place.3 I want to propose adding this inspiring word to the English language. Eventually, the challenge is to install a mesh of duckboards between the gardens of the sea and the gardens ofthe land. From this cross-fertilizing perspective, Ground Sea specifically turns its attention to immigration control in the border zone around the English Channel near Calais and Dover. With Marta Welander, I identify this contested area as profoundly marked by a politics of exhaustion.*

From that angle of empirical observation, Ground Sea indeed makes a case for photography’s capacity to brush contemporary hegemonic realities against the grain. “Now is the nagori of photography,” Victor Burgin wrote.*! The etymology of nagori, as Burgin elaborated, is nami-nokori, meaning “remains of the waves”: these remains are “ephemeral imprints

— rivulets in the sand, shell fragments, and other detritus — left by the waves as they withdraw from the beach.” In Japanese, nagori carries a sense of resignation, involving a course of destiny that seemingly cannot be changed. Photography as we once knew it, according to Burgin, now finds itself in such a state of resignation. It has irrevocably disintegrated into digital imaging—shattered and scattered as it is by the internet, social media, or cameras in mobile phones. But from that very position, photography can reinvent itself again. A nagori moon, or nagorino tsuki, is “the moon that remains visible at dawn.”* From that dimly visible position, photographs can contribute to reworking the relationship between image and dialogue today. This, according to Burgin, “may be the key to both psychic and political health.”