Min turab

“Landscapes altered by man.” In recent years, this expression has become a recurring formula, especially in the field of contemporary photography, where it is often used to define those environments in which human agency is explicit and visible. Despite its anachronism—after all, hominids, like any other living being, altered the planet from the beginning—, its use does not usually imply any hint of irony, quite the contrary. What realities, then, does this formula refer to that have made it so naturally imposed in recent times? What new alterations does it intend to point out?

Although the territory, especially from the mid-twentieth century, has undergone transformations on a planetary scale incomparable to those of any previous era, the success of this expression, at least as far as the photographic medium is concerned, cannot be entirely detached from the impressive critical fortune that an exhibition presented in 1975 had—discreet in its intentions, but unavoidable in its subsequent influence—such as New Topographics, whose subtitle was precisely Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscapes. It was also at that time, as William Jenkins, the curator of the exhibition, rightly reflected in his approach, when the environment began to be analyzed photographically from other points of view, from other perspectives less idyllic and much less spectacular than those that had prevailed until that moment. However, few critics delved at that time into Jenkins’s brilliant approach, and probably did not pay special attention to the diversity of the projects selected for the exhibition either, which, perhaps too automatically, were associated with a simplified desire to illustrate the transformation of the North American landscape.

Many artists and photographers belonging to that generation that began their professional careers in the sixties, and not only in the United States, decided to work—even if for fundamentally diverse reasons and with artistic approaches—in territories where they could photograph less conditioned by the impositions inherited from Western landscape culture. On the other hand, it is no less true that, over time, attention to this type of space—empty, flat, mute, common, or dull, as Robert Smithson’s indications precisely stated when choosing where to photograph[1]—has undergone an inverse process. The identification of these characteristics in any place has become a new parameter of aesthetic interest that is imposed, ignoring its social, political, or economic realities. In other words, the altered landscape, to which other aspects and levels of globalized degradation have been added over time, has been invested with new values and interests, almost as if it were a new monument.

Added to all this is the fact that, for some years now, certain spots on the planet have been obscenely vying for the highest levels of extravagance, spectacle, and environmental excess, which has turned them into privileged destinations for artists and photographers subjugated by the magnitude of the alterations fueled by petrodollars. Specifically, some cities in the Arabian Peninsula seem to have been and are being conceived precisely for this purpose. However, what surrounds them, what lies on their edges and peripheries, as well as a large part of the Gulf territory, has been much less attended to. Partly because of the laws and prohibitions that until recently prevented the use of cameras there; partly because where there is considered to be nothing to see, nothing calls to be photographed. For all these reasons, many of these territories through which Roger Grasas has traveled remain protected under the mantle of the overlooked: that which, even when present, remains invisible.

If in the mid-1980s John Gossage, invited to photograph in Saudi Arabia, declared that he felt challenged by that “nothingness” that the desert offered then, and where some locals tried to avoid disappointing him due to the absence of supposed places of interest[2], a few years later the Min Turab project—which in Arabic literally means ‘from the earth’, what springs from it—sets out to ascertain how that nothingness is cracking: the exact point of its rupture, where one landscape is torn apart and another new one is imposed, sweeping away the previous one. Of course, the landscape is not only the land, the territory we tread, but also the way we perceive it, understand it, and evoke it visually. Hence, we can conclude that in that semantic ambivalence of language that attributes a double reality, material and cultural, to the concept of “landscape,” the globalization of the territory is also at play. Roger Grasas’s photographs indicate this unequivocally.

Although his itinerary has something of a nineteenth-century exploration, the grand tour through the territories of this Min Turab that is also a source of alteration—with oil being the main agent of change—is not magnetized by the new centers of photographic pilgrimage. On the contrary, his drift seems to lead him in other directions. In reality, his places of observation point to the new urban centers in their unbridled development, but from a slightly different positioning: that of the outskirts, the edge, the periphery, or the alleyway. What can be perceived with that simple displacement of a few kilometers and what unfolds from that less privileged secondary perspective attends to the minor, the apparently anecdotal detail, but which in this case turns out to be the most significant. As a whole, these photographs propose to scrutinize with some calm the exact points where the alteration produces a fatal mismatch, the friction that comes to disrupt previous visions and ideas of a place: those that we might have as foreign spectators without knowledge of the cause, those that the local inhabitants might also have, dealing with the vertiginous transformation of their landscapes to which, for the first time in history, they will survive.

The Disney imaginary, perhaps the first to conceive authentically hybrid and globalized landscapes, has been perversely amalgamated with the charm of the Arabian Nights; the forgotten historical center of Doha has been occupied by a kart track; spotlights, fairs, recreations, and trompe-l’oeils… There is no need to list the unmistakable signs of the conversion of the place into a theme park because they act on a global level. Each and every one of the images in this book, to a greater or lesser extent, points to the point of no return of an alteration that not only annihilates certain views from a landscape perspective but, much more importantly, imposes other ways of life. The geopolitical implications of the territories of Min Turab also entail another important nuance. What in Barcelona or New York would hardly provoke discussion, in cities like Abu Dhabi, Doha, or Dubai scandalizes and fascinates the foreign public in equal parts. It is difficult to resist criticism in the face of the omnipotence of technological deployment and to escape the most atrocious spectacle of globalization in countries that are not our own. Aware of this complex situation, in this project Roger Grasas chooses to move away and observe from a certain distance what is happening on those rocks on which the landscape breaks.

If the classical conception of the landscape, whose heritage survives in many of the current photographic projects, contributed to ideologically naturalizing the unequal dimension of social relations, hiding the reality of the historical and conflicting processes involved, the challenges with which the current photographic practice confronts itself in its reflection on an increasingly complex landscape are evident but not easy to address. The option that can be seen in the approach of Min Turab could be precisely that of confronting this new visual order that determines the conditions of hypervisibility—and experience—of some landscapes and the exclusion of others, identifying those blind spots where waves of images are being replaced by others of a very different sign.

Marta Dahó

[1] «Empty, plain, vacant, surd, common, ordinary blank dull level beaches, unoccupied uninhabited, deserted fields, scanty lots, houseless typical average void roads». Vid. Robert Smithson apud Robert A. Sobieszek, Robert Smithson: Photo Works, Los Angeles County Museum of Art y University of New Mexico Press, Los Angeles y Albuquerque, 1993, pág. 25.

[2] The conversation is recounted in this blog: http://www.hatjecantz.de/fotoblog/?p=4712.