Topography of the Titanic 2003
Popular narratives and myths surrounding Titanic have been impacting on the city of its birth since it set sail and sank on its maiden voyage in 1912. The Harland and Wolff shipyard produced many ships of note during its industrial zenith in the early part of the last century, including the Titanic’s almost identical sister ships; Olympic & Britannic. However it seems that the tragic fate of ship 401 may ensure that the almost redundent 75 hectare site of its production, will emerge as „one of the largest waterfront developments in Europe“ and that Belfast will have presence in Titanic’s international profile.
In his project Kai-Olaf Hesse seeks to explore aspects of this legacy in the context of memorial, archive and future development.
Karen Downey, Curator, Belfast Exposed
“… One could spend a lot of time looking at Topography of Titanic as an elaborately composed, deliberately poetic conceit. The ship is gone and with it the memories, but it can be re-enacted with commonplace materials, it can be made up again.
…Actualities aren't accessible to us through photographs. Gilles Perez was one of the first to realize that documentary/ photojournalism was in a way impossible; it was impossible to get to the truth, the event had already happened and photojournalists, in a way made up the news; took photos of things that stood in for the truth of the event. All you could see were residues, traces, and suspicions of what happened…“
Ian Jeffrey
Titanic and the Dock
David Bate
How do you photograph the trace of a trace? If a photograph shows what is visible in front of the lens, the job of the photographer is surely to show what it has seen? But what if the original object you want to photograph is missing, how is the presence of that object to be signified? How do you say something that is meaningful when the object is not there, when you have to photograph it by 'other means'? This is a question about photography and memory: about how and what we are able to remember through pictures when the thing to be pictured is not the original object.
The example I am thinking of in this instance is the memory of the ship, the SS Titanic. Although the Titanic is perhaps the most famous ship ever built, it sunk in 1912 less than a year after being launched. Yet it lives on in the minds of countless people as the great Titanic ship disaster. If the Titanic ship is the object that is missing, it is the shipyard where it was built which is the space that must yield up a trace of its memory. This is the task that Kai-Olaf Hesse takes up (even if it was not his main aim) when he photographed the land of the once great Harland and Wolff shipyard, the old industrial area on Queen's Island where Titanic and many other ships were built. The 85-acre Harland and Wolff shipyard site, left largely derelict as a post-industrial space and is undergoing a twenty-first century re-development by the 'Titanic Quarter Ltd' – an organisation with no irony in its title. As the land area is re-developed, the space as it currently exists, as an ex-place, as an industrial wasteland, will disappear and the remains of the now old shipyard will be transformed; re-built to take on a new identity. As the old yard becomes this new and different type of place, the memories of what it once was nevertheless endure, but only with the people (and their friends and families) who lived it or still carry the memories and through the documents that have survived the place. Some of these 'documents' are photographs.
Remembering a past is dependent upon that past being continued through the representation of it. But why remember at all the Titanic and the docks where it was built? Would it not be better to forget it? Indeed, the question begs an answer. It is not only that all docks represent a crucial part of the history of industrialization (and the lives of all the workers there that were shaped by that history), but that this one, the shipyard of Harland and Wolff, gave birth to the Titanic which has a particular historical and cultural resonance as a 'wreck'. With the remains of its rusting hulk at the bottom of the Atlantic, the Titanic ship disaster, somehow still carries the meaning of a trauma beyond its vast remains. From its hull, a trauma ripples out across the world as a warning sign for all other potential disasters. The ship signifies a disaster and this image of the wreck and the story attached to it, perpetuated by James Cameron's Hollywood film Titanic, demonstrates that the tragedy is not just meaningful as yet another shipping accident, but that it is also the symbol of a huge cultural tragedy marked by with class prejudice, social ineptitude and catastrophic judgment. It is perhaps the significance and persistence of this warning sign that the value of pictures of the birthplace of the Titanic are given their meaningfulness today. That is to say, the fact that something so vast and apparently solid and invincible against nature, as the Titanic was thought to be, could so easily be smashed to pieces, lost and sunk beyond any trace in a matter of hours is precisely the melancholic aura which attaches itself to the spaces of these derelict docks.
When you look at the photographs by Kai-Olaf Hesse of the old slipways, the old offices, bits of building, the racks of paper plans for ship designs and the chronic absence of people in the pictures, he is drawing out the sense of the place as a modern ruin. In eighteenth century theories of representation, the presence of a 'ruin' in a landscape was a reminder of the collapse of once great civilizations, usually the Romans and the Greeks. Those signifiers (found across a whole range of European paintings and even in gardens), the depiction of dilapidated buildings, are meant as a warning to the modern viewer of the landscape, to remind them of the fragility of any civilization in itself. 'How little it takes for the mighty to fall' is the motto behind all these pictures. While this sort of meaning gnaws away at the viewer in the work of Kai-Olaf Hesse the status of these pictures, as photo-graphs is also to work as a set of 'documents'. Kai-Olaf Hesse uses, more or less, the same visual rhetoric as the famous German photographer couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher who, based in Düsseldorf have since the late 1950s been photographing industrial structures. Kai-Olaf Hesse did not study with them and his work differs in the stance of the camera and his use of colour film, but the overall strategy, the absence of figures, the almost shadowless lighting and passionless interest in industrial things are there to similarly indicate something about culture and cultural values.
In this so-called 'objective' photography, theorized as a type of photographic document devoid of 'bias', a passion nevertheless emerges in Kai-Olaf Hesse's work. This passion emerges when the points-of-view and scenarios enable the viewer to invest the remaining industrial objects with a value as poignant and 'pregnant' with what Roland Barthes had called the 'that-has-been'. This is the particular, if not peculiar feeling of 'being there' which photographs, above all other forms of representation, seem to have the capacity to invoke. One trigger for this must surely be the historical context, sentiment which comes from the knowledge that the Titanic and her sister ship Olympic (and of course all the others built long before and after them) were once actually here in the spaces where these pictures are taken. This background knowledge is partly what these pictures depend upon, in what is at once an aesthetics of absence, where the picture shows something as 'not there', while yet also invoking a presence, in that, the picture invests the absence of ships or people with an aura of their very presence. In other words, the absence of a thing (a ship and construction workers), conjures up a feeling of its presence by its very absence. In this paradoxical structure of photographic meaning, what the spectator brings to the picture is crucial.
In contrast, the historical photographs of the same shipyard, taken at the time of production, and with the enthusiasm of recording the industrial magnitude of the construction of ships, work in a different way. These photographs provide concrete clues to the process to the construction of ships. They also bring a crucial historical context to the newer modern photographs by Kai-Olaf Hesse. In these historical photographs, kept at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, you can pick almost any one of them out to see the phenomenal labour involved; the massive industrial architecture and the swarms of workers around them whose individual lives (and deaths) were dominated by these industrial scenes and structures. These historical pictures show graphically the intense industry of shipbuilding. In some pictures, the beginnings of the ship can be seen, traced out on the ground in the same way that a skeleton of an animal is seen cast in a fossil. It is in contrast to these rich and complex historical photographs that the viewer is left with almost 'nothing to see' in the ones by Kai-Olaf Hesse. What 'appears so solid' in the historical pictures, to misquote Karl Marx, 'melts into air'.
But I think we also have to consider the production of all these photographs within a bigger picture, of industrialization across the globe. If the space of the old Harland and Wolff on Queen's Island are passing to a new phase, from high industrial 'brown site' to post-industrial residential and urban consumer 'lifestyle' complex, then it should not be forgotten that elsewhere in the world there are shipyards still being used (and developed) at these other older phases of industrial use, in the USA, Poland, Korea, China and so on. Ships are still being built somewhere. It is in this sense that the photographs of Queen's Island and its history draw us into this bigger picture of industrial experience: of the immense if invisible sea traffic and global industry of shipping. The questions raised about what to do with the near derelict yard, once capitalism has made them redundant, is precisely what you do with the space when that history is over. If the high industrial moment has passed on from here to some other part of the globe, it is not to condemn the feelings to be got from the photographs of Queen's Island as merely one of nostalgia.
In the long history of shipyard spaces, the industrialization of them (from smaller yards) seems like some insane project. When you look at these old historical photographs of Harland and Wolff, the spaces and the people seen in them (often as tiny figures), the magnitude of the idea, the toil and turmoil of work invested in the place seems almost ungraspable, gigantic almost beyond comprehension. It is thus not in order to serve nostalgia that the function of 'remembering' through all these photographs operates or is triggered, but rather to exorcize nostalgia. To lose the past 'nostalgically' is to wish that that the past was still present. To wish that the past was still here is to obliterate the present. But this is not the aesthetic of the Hesse pictures; they may have a yearning feeling towards a lost object, but this is the feeling of the melancholic, an internal aesthetic sense of anger about what or why something has been lost rather than wishing it to still be present.
In the historical photographs, the presence of the objects (materials, human figures, constructions, etc) serve as a reminder that these things are now gone. Then, the recent photographs of the same Harland and Wolff yard by Kai-Olaf Hesse show us the actual absence of those things that we can see in the historical photographs. But paradoxically, by showing the broken and dilapidated remains of the industrial works, bits of the yard and the residue of once useful objects (appearing to some like modern obtuse sculptures), the things in these photographs have an effect of bringing the ghostly presence of the past into the present. Given that some of the remains, as pictured in Kai-Olaf Hesse's photographs are already obliterated (or fetishized as monuments) in the processes of brown site 'regeneration', the traces of the industrial yard in Hesse's photographs are an important addition to the total archive of photographs of the Harland and Wolff shipyard representations. They show the industrial site as ruins, pictured in images that can never quite achieve the status of nostalgia or of heroic monuments. Neither advocating a triumphant industrialism, nor an idealized working class life smashed by capitalist development, the photographs memorialize without glorifying or denigrating. These are photographs that remember, that try to recall the past through the traces of 'what-has-been' as a means to imagine the past from the position of our present. This is a task that the historians of photography have yet to acknowledge, even if photographers have had a consciousness of the problem ever since Auschwitz.
The ship, that modern metaphor which also exists in antiquity, and the building of a ship serve as an allegory of civilization, its 'voyage' to another place and the potential collapse and failure of that project.
(Text anlässlich der Ausstellung Topography of the Titanic, Galerie Belfast Exposed)
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