1 Roni Horn, Book I: Bluff Life, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
2 Roni Horn, Book II: Folds, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
7
RONI HORN’S ICELANDIC ENCYCLOPEDIA
INTRODUCTION: RONI HORN AND PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER CONCEPTUAL ART
A: You are standing in front of a photograph of the surface of a dirty river. Flecks of light glint off the brown wavelets, and here and there, you pick out small white numbers directing you to a series of compact footnotes that flow beneath the image. You follow the river of texts as they describe the history of the Thames and your experience of water, and every now and then address ‘you’ as you read. You break to look back at the water, finding more numbers, glancing down and then up then down again.
B: You are faced with a grid of photographs, forty-eight snapshots of a young girl smiling, frowning, pulling faces. She is on the brink of adulthood, and seems to play different characters in the shots. Turning around you see another panel of her pictures. They feel familiar: the images are in pairs, but each part of a pair is slightly different, the girl changing her expression between two photos taken moments apart. You turn back to the first panel to check the differences but, unable to compare the pairs side by side, you attempt to recall details of the shots as you move between one grid and the other.
C: You enter a room whose plush red walls are adorned with pairs of photographs showing the backs of birds’ heads. Photographed against a bright white background, their feathers are pristine and intensely detailed; nothing could have moved during the shot. The setting and the stillness suggest that the birds must have been dead, but this is hard to verify since they are turned away. You find the creatures as sinister as the birds that populate Hitchcock movies but the artist has also transformed them, dissolving their avian identity by concealing eyes and beaks.
These situations describe three photographic installations by Roni Horn: Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) from 1998; This is Me, This is You from 2000; and Bird from 2007. In the context of this volume’s discussion of photography after conceptual art, we could begin by distinguishing these serial works from the work of Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, whose monumental single images exemplify a new kind of post-conceptual pictorial photography. For Michael Fried, their pictures ‘appear to deny the presence before them of the beholder, or to put this more affirmatively, to establish the ontological fiction that the beholder does not exist’;1 Horn, by contrast, directly incorporates the viewer in the work creating a physical space for their experience and addressing them in her texts. But does Horn continue the formal, theoretical, and material concerns of conceptual photography? The signs suggest so: Still Water (the River Thames, for Example) could be seen to extend the interplay of text and image in the work of Robert Smithson. This is Me, This is You might recall Douglas Huebler’s critique of singular portrait photography, and the ways in which he encouraged his subjects to play games before the camera; Bird could be read as a self-reflexive work, an allegory of photography since the work concerns the medium’s ability to produce uncanny doubles and its propensity to render its subjects deathly still. In one project, Horn employs skilled photographers (Still Water) as did Mel Bochner when he made 36 Diagrams and 12 Photographs (1966), in the next, (This is Me, This is You), she works with ‘deskilled’ snapshots as did Dan Graham in Homes for America (also 1966). For her, it all depends on the conceptual demands of the work.
However, despite the formal connections between Horn’s photographic work and conceptual art, closer attention to Horn’s practice would suggest that, just as it can be distinguished from the counter-tradition associated with pictorial single-image photography, it can also be set apart from conceptualism and its legacies in the expanded field of photography. One place to begin making this case would be Horn’s earliest published photograph, From a Gold Field (Surface structure), a black and white close-up of her now famous sculpture Gold Field, an ultra-thin sheet of gold foil measuring approximately a metre-and-a-half square, placed directly upon the floor. Made in 1982, and published the following year, the photograph has a remarkable resemblance to James Welling’s foil photographs from 1980 (the photographs are pretty much identical). Yet whilst Welling produced photographs of foils to interrogate the status of the photograph, questioning its (in)ability to produce abstract images and our propensity to view a crumpled surface as a landscape, Horn was using the black and white picture to reinterpret Gold Field, drawing attention to its topography rather than to its substance. The photograph was a tool put to use to think about sculpture.
Following this distinction between Horn and Welling, one can continue to drive wedges between Horn’s practice and that of her contemporaries. Though she started to show her work around the time of the ‘Pictures’ exhibition (1977), Horn was not interested in representation and photography’s function in the image world. She has contested problematic ways of categorizing identity, but has rarely occupied herself with photography’s role in the construction of subjectivity, as have artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, whose connection to feminist politics is far more overt. Horn sometimes photographs particularly resonant settings, for instance, the views from the windows of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst home, but is uninterested in using photography to forge narratives about places and history, as have figures such as Martha Rosler or more recently Matthew Buckingham. Horn has taken photographs of tourists and of tourist venues, but is neither critiquing the tourist gaze nor appropriating the ‘tourist photograph’ to send-up high art photography, as is the case with contemporaries Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Horn is neither very bothered with the different textures of analogue and digital photography, nor with the theoretical implications of the transition from one technology to another: these have been the concerns of artists such as Tacita Dean and Zoe Leonard.
In short, Horn seems relatively indifferent to photography’s histories, its materiality and technologies, its functions in the wider world, and its theoretical or philosophical status as an index or a copy. Instead, photography, the photographic book, and the photographic installation are just other idioms that Horn has used in a practice whose mediums are diverse, yet whose subjects are concentrated: experience, identity, and place. Even though Horn uses photography extremely precisely, and neither in multimedia installations nor in combination with other mediums, photography per se is simply not her worry. Photography is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This puts a huge gulf between her photographic work and that of other prominent artists who directly address the situation of photography after conceptual art.
In what follows, I want to look closely at the work of Horn’s which includes the greatest number of photographs – four hundred and one, to be precise. This is a series of nine books published since 1990 collectively titled To Place whose subject, in Horn’s terms, is the ‘relationship between identity and place’.2 The volumes, which together constitute one of the most important groups of artists’ books since Ed Ruscha’s 1960s books and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s publications on industrial architecture, take Iceland and Horn’s relationship to it as their ostensible focus. Iceland is a setting which enables her to ‘taste experience’3 and to feel placed, and it appeals because it is constantly changing. The books and the photographs within them suggest the possibility of a kind of identity in a perpetual state of becoming, and yet one that is firmly rooted in and by the world. This paradoxical concept of identity lies at the very heart of Horn’s thinking, and while it is one that emerges perhaps from a sculptor’s sensibility, it is a concept that exceeds the realms of the sculptural. Being open to mutability, and at the same time being placed, describe ways of thinking and behaving as well as a spatial relationship with the world.
While this concept of identity is at the core of the series To Place rather than issues about photography, Horn nonetheless has had to engage questions about this medium. These include photography’s role in archiving and creating orders and categories of information, its status as a medium whether distinct from, or related to, other mediums; its traditional genres; its history in the context of artist’s books; its temporal identity as a still image; and the part it plays in the tourist industry. These issues are obviously pertinent to the wider project of photography after conceptual art, and I will endeavour to show how Horn works though them, and how, in so doing, she builds on the concerns of photo- conceptualism even whilst distancing her approach from other artists. But – to press the point – however much Horn has had to address these photographic questions, they are only subsidiary matters that she has had to confront on the way to making a work which is really about becoming and being placed.
Horn once called To Place an ‘Icelandic encyclopaedia’,4 referring (albeit with a degree of humour) to a kind of publication whose very job is to provide what she called ‘a collection of knowledge’.5 Encyclopedias define and compartmentalize information, and they share this function with photography, which has historically been an instrument put to use to order and classify visual information. Horn, however, resists the very idea of definition. ‘Things don’t have exclusive names and fixed identities’,6 she has said – a comment that coheres with her longstanding critique of forms of definition and compartmentalization such as conventional binary understandings of gender identities.7 Horn understands the world – constituted by things, people, identities, landscapes and ideas – as mutable and active, not fixed, and her attraction to Iceland has derived from the fact that this is a particularly fluid place: ‘Iceland is always becoming what it will be, and what it will be is not a fixed thing either.’8 Given her antipathy to definition, and the associated attraction to Iceland, the question that arises about To Place is why Horn would have chosen to make an encyclopedia comprising volumes of photographs when this approach to knowledge was anathema to her, and even more of an anathema to the representation of Iceland? I want to start my account of To Place by looking at the way in which Horn uses the photographic book’s capacity to isolate and compartmentalize information against itself and how she puts this facility to work in order to produce a sense of mutability.
Bluff Life, volume one of To Place, was published in 1990. Like all but the most recent two volumes, it is a black, clothbound hardback book measuring 81/2 by 101/2 inches. The word ‘Ísland’ appears embossed towards the top of the front cover above the name ‘Roni Horn’. Bluff Life is the only volume in which photography plays a subsidiary role, for the book contains reproductions of thirteen watercolour and graphite drawings produced in 1982 during a two month stay in a lighthouse off the southern coast of Iceland (see plate 1). At the back of the book, however, there is a single photograph of a seascape. The photograph is bisected between a rippled black sea and misty white sky, but the indistinct horizon line suggests a day when the boundary between water and air was blurred.
Folds followed Bluff Life the following year, and marked the real entry of photography into the series. Folds are structures used to separate flocks of sheep after they have been let out to pasture over the summer, and Horn gathered thirty-six images of folds at twenty-four locations and arranged them over twice as many pages, with blank pages somewhat randomly interspersed (see plate 2). It becomes clear looking at the book how important the material texture of the book was for the artist. Horn chose to print the photographs on uncoated paper, which makes them feel integrated into the very substance of the book. She explains that she wanted to ‘minimize the descriptive value of the image and place the emphasis on atmosphere’. ‘When you print on uncoated paper’, she continues, ‘the ink, instead of sitting on the surface, is absorbed into the paper and mitigates the flat, graphic nature of the printed image. While you gain atmosphere or presence when you print this way, you also lose detail, contrast, a certain clarity.’9 Certainly the folds look atmospheric, all the more so because they are pictured as lonely structures against wide empty landscapes: the oldest look like abandoned ancient settlements.
Lava (1992) begins with four double page spreads in which the names of Iceland’s volcanic eruptions are arranged in a grid. Horn randomly collected lumps of lava from various volcanic fields across Iceland and brought them to her studio in New York where she placed them on a light table and had them shot by a professional photographer (see plate 3). The lava appears in the book mostly one lump to a page, but sometimes several tiny chunks spread across the paper. Although they are reproduced actual size, they seem singular and monumental. The rocks appear as surfaces as much as solids, and the lack of depth throws attention on their jagged and astonishingly irregular outlines. Each surface is itself a landscape of darkened holes and illuminated craters: these rocks contain rather than cast shadows. Photographed in this way, and excerpted from the vast fields of lava deposits of their island context where they exist in huge profusion, Horn’s chunks become exquisite individual specimens of long-gone volcanic activity. After the photographs, the names of the eruptions reappear, first arranged as they would be on a map of Iceland; and next run into each other on two densely printed pages where they appear like bricks in a wall of language. Finally there are pages which identify the lava fields from where each of the photographed rocks was taken. Horn printed with letterpress, using lead type to press the letters into the paper so they would be ‘physically, not just graphically, located on the page’. As she noted ‘the book’s text components carry the same weight as the photographic components.’10
Pooling Waters from 1994 comprises two parts. The first collects images of hot pots, swimming pools, springs, and industrial plants powered by underground water sources (see plate 4). There are also interiors showing empty and full swimming pools and the locker rooms that surround them. Bathers and tourists appear in some outdoor shots but never very prominently – the focus is rather on the pool and its setting in the landscape. The pictures are slightly bigger on the page than those in Folds and are certainly more detailed, for in this volume, Horn used coated paper to increase the definition of the images. Accompanying this is Pooling Waters Volume 2, a collection of texts by Horn recounting her experiences in Iceland, printed first in English and then in Icelandic, and interspersed with occasional black and white images of odd flying-saucer shaped clouds, a unique feature of the Icelandic skyscape.
These first four books of To Place seem to be regular volumes of an encyclopedia. The external design stays constant, and their internal make-up is highly distinctive: each book includes a separate body of material, namely (i) drawings, (ii) sheep folds, (iii) lava chunks, (iv a) hot pools, (iv b) texts and clouds. However, the volumes do not read like a regular run of encyclopedic volumes, and nor do the images appear like successive components of a standard archive, because the mode of the delivery of information changes from one book to the next. Thematically, there is no apparent logic connecting the Bluff Life drawings to the Folds photographs – no reason why a series of pictures of lava follows, nor why the next volume is devoted to hot water. Drawings are followed by landscapes, then studio photographs, then more landscapes, and then black and white cloud compositions. The first volumes of To Place gather information and images, and indeed archive some of the most notable elements of the Icelandic landscape, but the suggestion is that each volume of photographs is always partial, always fragmentary, and will never capture the full identity of Iceland. The images in Lava are emblematic of the project as a whole: Iceland can only be represented in fragments, through luxurious debris that is debris nonetheless. What accumulates is a mass of extractions, rather than a slowly unfolding vision of any stable totality, a progression towards incompletion.11 To Place is not only a fragmentary but a fluid encyclopedia, its volumes like new tributaries joining a long river and each new volume changes the identity of the whole by inflecting the memory of those proceeding it.
For all that they feature single subjects, the opening volumes of To Place actually unravel conventions associated with photographic archives and encyclopedias. In this respect, Horn’s project in To Place has something in common with many photo- conceptualist works which borrowed the forms of the archive. Think, for instance, of all those projects which collected photographs of a single subject and which, in so doing, critique the culture of administration: Christian Boltanski’s The Clothes of Francois C (1972); Charles Ray’s All My Clothes (1973); and Hans-Peter Feldman’s A Woman’s Complete Wardrobe (1974), to name just one group of works linked by subject. But Horn’s series is distinctive: each individual subject is carefully determined rather than chosen for its banality, and is given serious treatment (for instance, each sheep fold and each lava chunk is identified); it is the links between one group and the next that defy the conventions of an archive, having no basis other than in Horn’s experience and desire. Horn’s anecdotes, which appear in the second part of Pooling Waters, do even more to undo the constraints of the archive. One passage reports how Horn got stuck out in a severe storm and took shelter by the wall of a sheep fold.12 Another describes her nighttime motorcycle journey to a hot pool which she bathed in alone.13 A third recounts her cooking dinner beside a field of ‘plush gray-green lava’.14 Unlike the objective and depersonalized texts that featured in so many photo- conceptual works, and that often parodied the conventions of journalistic writing, Horn’s are carefully written, personal, and deeply felt. It is impossible to shake the affect of these texts from the memory of the previous photographs in the previous volumes: words stick to images though never as would captions or textual explanations. The lava lumps, the folds, and the pools become features of a landscape touched by Horn’s encounters with them.
3 Roni Horn, Book III: Lava, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
4 Roni Horn, Book IV: Pooling Waters, vol. 1, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
5 Roni Horn, Book V: Verne’s Journey, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
6 Roni Horn, Book VI: Haraldsottir, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
The ambition to disturb archival and encyclopedic conventions continues with the fifth volume of To Place, Verne’s Journey (1995). Unlike the easily identifiable sheep folds, hot pools, or lava chunks, here the opening image defies recognition. The next page is a close-up of the last, but the identity or scale of the image becomes no clearer. We could be looking at a splat of bird shit on a rock; in fact, this is an aerial view of a glacier. There follows a sequence of fifteen photographs of the Snae- fellsjokull peninsula, two similarly sized blurry seascapes like the one in Bluff Life, and finally a series of five spreads echoing the beginning of the book. The first shows a turbulent Maelstrom, the next, a blown-up detail of it, spread out to fill a double page (see plate 5). Looking at the third and fourth images, enlarged pictures of the previous ones, Cézanne’s account of Courbet’s painting of 1869, The Wave, comes to mind. Cézanne remarked that standing in front of the pictures, the spray seemed to splash into the room:15 the effect of Horn’s whirlpool images is as intense, but the direction is reversed. As we reach the end of Verne’s Journey we appear to travel inwards to the centre of the swirling vortex.
The way in which photographs are arranged in Verne’s Journey creates an experience for the reader/viewer closer to reading fiction, rather than to surveying an archive. Where each picture in the previous three volumes is neatly separated from its neighbouring ones, Verne’s Journey begins and ends with sequences of unidentifiable images that provoke imagination and draw in the reader with the movement of the zoom. Sequenced in this way, the images become more dramatic, but Horn was also interested in replacing Verne’s fantastical representation of Iceland with a real account of its terrain. Making the book, she set out to discover ‘a landscape that already existed in fiction, just as Verne invented a fiction that already existed in Iceland’.16 She gathered and made photographs relating to the setting of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and in the place of Verne’s imaginary terrain with its exploding volcanoes and dust storms, she supplied images that show the ‘exceptionally mundane’17 geological realities that existed at the site of his story’s setting. The final image is the heart of a whirlpool, but in accordance with her intention, the zoom also makes the Maelstrom appear as so much plain swirling water becoming ink on paper. If the book explores the differences between an imagined and physically encountered landscape, its presentation of that landscape oscillates between the extraordinary and the mundane.
Even after considering only the first five volumes of To Place, it is clear that Horn never understood the encyclopedia as an orderly or objective ‘collection of knowledge’. Her encyclopedia is closer to Borges’ ancient Chinese encyclopedia of animals divided into ‘Those that belong to the Emperor’, ‘Embalmed ones’, ‘Those that are trained’, ‘Suckling Pigs’, and so on.18 In the context of a discussion of conceptual art, though there is a large gap between Horn’s anti-archive and those that proliferated in the photo-conceptualism of the early 1970s, the non-photographic work by Alighiero E Boetti, Classifying the thousand longest rivers in the world (1970–77) seems a close precedent. Boetti compiled this encyclopedia only to expose how ludicrous it was to measure fluid forms whose breadth and length is always changing: Horn’s Iceland is akin to Boetti’s rivers. In another of her interviews, Horn remembered researching Iceland before her initial visit and finding the island ‘situated in the encyclopaedia between ice hockey and ice skating’.19 A sense of randomness can prevail even in the most ordered of informational forms because alphabetic sequence establishes bizarrely inappropriate juxtapositions. To Place adopts the form of an encyclopedia only to explore its tendency to produce unexpected connections, and to contest the very idea of definition.
As is already evident, photography is the primary medium of To Place, although the books also feature watercolour and graphite drawings and typographic works. However, rather than listing the various mediums present in To Place in this conventional way, we would do better to attend to the ways in which Horn works against the notion of medium specificity. This principle was rooted in modernist theory, but remained compelling to many artists of later generations including the photo-conceptualists who were deeply concerned with the properties of photography – Mel Bochner making works about the distortions of the camera lens; John Hilliard and Jan Dibbets looking at camera settings, and so on. Horn approaches the idea of the medium in a completely different way, not to explore a medium’s individual character, but to let its identity change into that of another medium.
Texts form drawings. Photographs can also be drawings: Horn has described the lava photographs as drawings, a claim that becomes clearer when the pictures are seen in the context of the condensed, heavily worked forms of the Bluff Life drawings. These drawings also emphasize the different physical textures of charcoal and watercolour, and when we think as well of the stone folds and the lava fragments, we could connect the first three volumes of To Place in terms of their quasi-sculptural presentations of materials. Lava could also be seen as another kind of sculpture. The book in some ways functions like the containers Robert Smithson fabricated to store the stones he picked up in New Jersey and brought to New York galleries – Horn’s book is a kind of ‘non-site’ with Iceland as ‘site’. One medium can become like another, and this idea plays out again in Verne’s Journey where photography shares the conventions of cinema, both in the opening and closing sequences, which mime the progression of a zoom in a film, and in the central sequence where aerial ‘establishing’ shots cut to photographs taken on the ground.20 The last image of Verne’s Journey could also be understood as a drawing, for here the photograph loses its identity as a detail of a maelstrom and becomes material, an ink on paper drawing.
Horn also complicates the definitions of the classical genres of landscape and portraiture throughout To Place, letting one become the other. These genres were of course established within the history of painting, but have also governed the history of photography. Even in conceptual photography, these genres remained separate. Artists such as Douglas Huebler did all they could to challenge the conventions of landscape photography, and of portrait photography, but they did not seek to fold one genre into the other. Horn, by contrast, undoes these genre distinctions, allowing a face to become a landscape, and a landscape to seem like a kind of face.
Haraldsdóttir, 1996, the sixth volume of To Place, features sixty-one photographs of a young woman called Margret taken over a six week period in the summer of 1994 (see plate 6).21 Horn travelled around Iceland with Margret, presumably visiting many of the outdoor pools pictured in Pooling Waters. At each spot, Margret disrobed, no matter what the weather, and Horn photographed her, neck up in the water, quite close up. The photographs are arranged in six alternating black and white, and colour, sequences. There are several double page spreads where Margreet appears on both sides of the gutter; elsewhere there is a blank left or right page. As well as the very dramatic breaks from duotone to colour and back, subtle differences animate the sequences: Margreet shifts from left to right in the frame, and is sometimes cropped so close that her face fills the page; elsewhere she recedes slightly so more of the pool’s surface appears around her. The book reads like a series of symphonic movements. When, in the central colour section, Margret opens her lips for the first time, it is like a sudden burst of sound. An eerier chord is struck later as in the last colour sequence, the mist between camera and subject bleaches colour out, softening the contours of Margrét’s face as though a veil fell between her and the page. Thierry de Duve has addressed You are the Weather, the installation which derived from this book, thinking about the ways in which the viewer is addressed by Margreet as she seems to implore them to say what they desire from her image.22 Haraldsdóttir produces an even more intimate encounter with the subject, especially since, when holding certain spreads of the volume up in two hands, two Margreets appear life-size and close-by facing the single reader.
Horn was interested in the way in which Margreét’s features and expressions changed in different climactic conditions, as she bathed in bright sunlight, fierce wind, biting cold and in mist; at the same time, she was careful to crop the photographs so as mostly to withhold direct information about these shifting weather conditions. By repeating the subject (Margrét) whilst allowing the book to show a huge range of changes in her appearance, Horn managed to make a series of portraits that are in fact not quite portraits, but instead indirect representations of landscape. The reader/viewer realizes after some pages that the images in Haraldsdóttir are not providing information about Margret’s mood or character or class or profession, as most portraits aim to do; instead, her face alters as a pure effect of the Icelandic landscape and climate. A face becomes a register of the weather, and this is one of the ways in which the genre of portraiture becomes landscape in Haraldsdóttir; another is the way in which Margrét’s face itself becomes a landscape. After viewing repeated yet ever-changing images of her features, the face loses its identity and we grow to think of her skin as a terrain; eyes and nose as landmarks. In Horn’s words, ‘the face becomes the place.’23
In the three volumes of To Place following Haraldsdóttir, distinctions between landscape and portraiture unravel in new ways. Arctic Circles is a collection of seventy-two photographs made in the north of Iceland, and records, in Horn’s words, ‘a collection of cyclical and circular events’.24 Horn visited a couple living in a landscape touching the arctic circle whose work involved the gathering of eider feathers from nests laid down by the birds. As well as being interested in geographic circles and the natural cycles of the birds’ and the couple’s labour and life, she was also taken the fact that in this remote corner of Iceland, the couple’s main entertainment came from an American soap opera with its cyclical narrative structures. She photographed head shots of the couple in black and white and colour, also picturing their TV screen, their working room, and the nests and flocks of eider birds (see plate 7). Pictures of the seascape looking towards the Arctic horizon punctuate the book, but each cut in half and set against a blank facing page, seemingly a way of letting the photographic layout acknowledge the frustration of Horn’s desire to see, in a panoramic view, the line of the Arctic Circle itself. As the book unfolds, each of its component elements repeats but they never coalesce: never are the couple pictured at work, for instance, nor watching their TV. The creased faces of the elderly couple suggest a landscape again – ones weathered by and attuned to this hostile landscape. Yet the main way in which Arctic Circles confronts traditional separations of the genres of landscape and portraiture is by representing the interdependence of couple and the landscape. The book argues in its own way that the two cannot be thought apart: remarkably, this point is made without picturing the couple and the landscape together.
7 Roni Horn, Book VII: Arctic Circles, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
Becoming a Landscape separates the component parts of Haraldsdóttir, and also marks the first departure from the format of the previous books in the series. Horn produced two books, formatted for the first time in landscape, held together in a slipcase. Each presents a sequence of close-up shots of the surface of bubbling hot pools interspersed with studio shots of an androgynous child’s face (see plates 8 and 9). The photographs in each book are nearly identical, but small differences reveal that they were taken moments apart. Most obviously, the juxtaposition of the child’s face and the bubbling pools creates a connection between the portraits and the landscapes, between pre-teenage life (when identity is fluid and unfixed) and the Icelandic geology. Like the child, Iceland is ‘becoming’. Portraiture is connected to landscape in terms of subject matter in Becoming a Landscape, but another kind of merging occurs on its pages as one genre becomes the other. The child’s face becomes a kind of smoothly contoured landscape; the pools meanwhile begin to resemble eyes, navels, and other bodily orifices. Partly this is because the reader/viewer looks at them whilst also looking at an actual body; partly it is because of a trick of orientation: Horn pointed the camera forward to picture the upright child, and downwards to photograph the horizontal surface of the pools, but arranged both kinds of images on the same plane, thereby allowing their difference to be elided as one becomes the other.
8 Roni Horn, Book VIII: Becoming a Landscape, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
‘Iceland is always becoming what it will be, and what it will be is not a fixed thing either.’ As we have seen, Horn’s intuition about Iceland is expressed through her treatment of the subjects, mediums, and genres of To Place. More than any other philosophy, her approach to becoming as a state to be valued in itself rather than as a progressive and temporary movement from one state to another echoes Deleuze’s. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze argues that ‘to become is not to progress or regress along a series becoming is not an evolution.’ Becoming instead ‘concerns alliance’ – ‘every becoming is a coexistence’ .... ‘Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible.’25 As Cliff Stagnoll has shown, Deleuze ‘use[d] the term “becoming” to describe the continual production of difference immanent within the constitution of events, whether physical or otherwise. Becoming is the pure movement evident in changes between particular events. This is not to say that becoming represents a phase between two stages, or a range of terms or states through which something might pass on its journey to another state. Rather than a product, final or interim, becoming is the very dynamism of change, situated between heterogeneous terms and tending towards no particular goal.’26 Instead of making one medium into a second so that it fully takes on the other’s identity, or allowing one genre to take on the features of another in a secure and solid way, Horn explores the very process of becoming in itself. In the flow between the subjects of its volumes, in the way one medium becomes another, and in the manner in which a landscape becomes a portrait and a portrait, a landscape, To Place can be seen as a work that explores ‘the very dynamism of change’. As we shall now see, this dynamism also characterizes Horn’s approach to the physical form of the book.
9 Roni Horn, Book VIII: Becoming a Landscape, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Gottingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
In many accounts of the place of photography in conceptual art, critics have thought about images without paying sufficient attention to their mode of presentation. Yet a famous photograph of ‘Artists and Photographs’, the seminal edition published by Multiples Gallery in 1969, shows that each artist chose a different support for their images: photographs were presented on index cards (Mel Bochner), in envelopes (Sol LeWitt; Douglas Huebler), on a folding poster (Robert Morris), on postcards (Andy Warhol), and, in the case of Ed Ruscha, in a book. Even cursory attention to the latter’s books would reveal that he thought as much about subjects (gas stations, swimming pools) as about how they would be published. The photographs are sequenced and sized, with carefully determined borders, and blank pages inserted between images. The format of the book was also crucial: depending on the ideas for the work, Ruscha would use a standard binding, a ring binding, or a concertina of pages. The format of the book was chosen as the artist worked out how he wanted the photographs to appear in it, but another determining factor was the kind of physical (and affective) relationship Ruscha wanted to create between the viewer/reader and the book. Once, in a lecture about his photography of the 1960s, Ruscha showed a photograph in which he held one of his books in his hands. More than the content of the photos on its pages, the slide drew attention to the fact that Ruscha treated the book as an object, an intimate hand-held thing. I now want to turn attention to the ways in which Horn has used the book form in To Place, asking how she has extended some of these (perhaps under-acknowledged) concerns of artists of the 1960s. How has Horn approached the dynamic between the image and its carrier (the book), de-familiarizing the way in which a reader/viewer encounters the photographic material within? How has she structured the relationship between photograph, book, and reader to create a physical, intimate, active, and affective experience?
Horn’s books are larger than Ruscha’s but actually feel at once luxurious and humble; indeed their form creates a dynamic of humility and luxury. The uniform black covers look quiet, all the more austere in the context of other books which sell themselves with brash cover images. Because of their austerity, the exquisitely printed reproductions on the pages inside appear all the more dramatic. This dynamic of outside and inside raises the intimacy of the encounter between reader and object: turning over the black hard covers to reach the first pages, the reader feels invited into an almost secret world.27 The first volumes of To Place created an affective and sensual experience as well as presenting a sequence of images, and as the series progressed, Horn found ways to complicate and extend this experience.
In Arctic Circles, Horn took another route with the book form, creating what could be described as a circular labyrinth for the viewer. Of all the books in To Place, this is the one whose content most approximates the idea of a photo-essay, for it concentrates on a single setting and we see people, their landscape, their labour, and their house. It was perhaps because she was working with what could seem a particular ethnographic subject that Horn needed to be all the more adamant in her refusal to create a narrative or make a coherent presentation of a theme as in the traditions of the photo-essay. As we have already seen, Horn separates out the components of Arctic Circles. As well as this, for the first time in the series To Place she uses photographic repetition and reflection, reprinting the very same images at different places in the book and flipping some around (for instance, those of a dead snowy owl). Horn deploys techniques specific to photography but not to produce any kind of meditation on the medium. Instead she creates a feeling of déjà vu for the reader so that the idea of cycles and repetitions, explored in the images of the book, is extended to the register of affect.28
Arctic Circles makes for a particular and unfamiliar reading experience, sometimes confusing, sometimes quite meditative: the book activates the reader’s attention, and this principle is extended in Becoming a Landscape. One takes the first volume from the case and pages through it; then puts it down to take up the second. Soon one senses that though the sequencing of images in the books is identical (six hot springs; a face; seven more hot springs, the same face), there are differences between the paired pictures because Horn photographed the same subject twice with a slight delay between one exposure and the next. The ‘twitch of time’29 between Horn’s two photographic exposures becomes analogous to the time between the two separated moments of viewing them in the two books. Rather than allowing her readers to ‘lose all sense of time in a book’, through her use of photographic doubling and temporality, Horn hyper-sensitizes them even to the tiniest fragments of time.
The latest instalment of To Place is Doubt Box and here Horn deconstructs the architecture of the book completely.30 Doubt Box is literally a black box inside which is a stack of twenty-eight cards, each printed on both sides (see plate 10). The child from Becoming a Landscape reappears, now clearly a boy in the midst of his teenage years, with soft stubble and acne marking his once smooth face. Most cards have images of the surface of a silvery and thick glacial river. Now and again you reveal a misty scene of small icebergs; rarer still appear bird heads with dead glass eyes fixing your stare. There is no prescribed way to read this volume, just as there is no set way to arrange a pack of playing cards. The viewer can spread the cards before them and invent games; they can riffle through the stack one way up; view each card in turn, flipping over each one; or shuffle cards together. The subjects are restricted to four main types, yet infinite permutations of images become possible. Previously, Horn had managed to sequence images in such a way that the viewer had an experience that was not simply determined by which image followed the last; in Doubt Box, by contrast, Horn relinquishes the control of photographic sequence entirely, and opens the book to chance.
10 Roni Horn, Book IX: Doubt Box, from To Place, 1990–2007, as published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009/Hermann Feldhaus.
To Place is an anti-archive of shifting focus where mediums and genres become one another; it is a series of volumes where the idea of a volume is undone to allow for sensual and active encounters. It should now be clear both how Horn builds on and away from the concerns of photo-conceptualism in this project, and how she continues her own career-long commitment to questioning traditional modes of categorization, division, and documentation, while also generating intimate and diverse kinds of experience. However, we are yet to reach the real heart of To Place, the central idea that drives the project. This idea is a paradox of the kind that Horn is drawn to: Iceland is both a place of ‘becoming’ and a place where she feels centred. It is a landscape of flux and a place where she feels securely placed. To understand the importance of this latter claim we need to go back to the very start of Horn’s encounter with Iceland.
When Horn first arrived in Iceland, in the mid-1970s, she left behind the materials that she had worked with in the sculpture department at Rhode Island School of Design, but did take with her a camera. ‘I could spend part of my time photographing the island’, she supposed. ‘After a few days there I tried to take a photograph. But with my attempt to distinguish the first shot, the place disappeared on me. Photography – or really doing anything much more than just being in a place – requires the imposition of a whole other consciousness. I hadn’t been in Iceland long enough to simply be there.’ She continued:
On the first visit Iceland was still a fantasy to me, still too unknown. All the dazzling features, of which there are many, isolated themselves. It took months just to get past this veneer of sensationalism and picture-postcard possibilities . . . . It was obvious that photography was going to interfere with my interests and that I didn’t have it in my power to take the pictures I wanted to take anyway. I put my equipment in a locker in the bus station in Reykjavik and took off for four months.31
It was only after experiencing Iceland without a camera over this and many subsequent visits that Horn finally reconciled herself to making photographs. By this time, she was clear of the value Iceland held for her, and it had little to do with the plenitude of exciting scenery. Iceland, she had realized, worked for her in an active experiential way. ‘I come here to place myself in the world’, Horn later wrote. ‘Iceland is a verb and its action is to center.’32 The language of infinitives recalls the words of Richard Serra’s 1967 Verb List, presumably a text Horn would have encountered during her sculptural education. Concerned, like Serra, with experience, not images, Horn discovered that Iceland was valuable because of the activities it enabled: to place, to centre. Yet these experiences exceeded the realm of the sculptural that was Serra’s concern. ‘Iceland is the place where I have the clearest view of myself and my relationship to the world. By clearest view, I mean a view that is not constricted by social conventions.’33
Horn’s book series is called To Place because Iceland’s role has been ‘to place’ her in the world. Once we acknowledge this, it becomes clear why her project cannot simply involve photographing Iceland’s landscape and collecting images into a series of books: such publications would merely be a souvenir of a country which happens to have had an effect on her. It is also clear why Horn has been unconcerned with ‘critiquing’ the tourist image of Iceland or representing it through anti- spectacular images, such as those found in Dieter Roth’s monumental work Reykjavik Slides (1973–95 and 1990–93), an installation of 30,000 slides of every single building in the capital: such critique is beside the point. Rather than creating or refusing beautiful images of Iceland, Horn has endeavoured to show how it is that the country places her. But she has also endeavoured to place her viewer. Iceland has to continue to be a verb in these books, and herein lies Horn’s challenge, for photography, in capturing and stilling a subject, usually makes it a noun.
Most obviously, Horn shows how Iceland places her by making photographs which cause us to think about how she was physically placed in and by the landscape. We get a sense that the structures in Folds, for instance, were photographed by someone up on the nearest slope (a clearer view could have been achieved with an aerial photograph, but such a picture would not tell us that the photographer had been in the presence of the fold). Horn, we intuit, must have been alone and the experience of walking in the landscape would have been intense. We also feel this because our situation in viewing the book rhymes with hers: holding the book we too are alone, so a kind of chain forms between us, the camera, and the photographic subject. Lava contains completely different kinds of images, but likewise, it shows how Iceland places Horn, since it ‘share[s] something of the feel of the island without depicting it’.34 Instead of producing dramatic and picturesque views of lava fields, Horn offers her viewer an exquisite and tactile sense of volcanic debris.
Iceland also places Horn by making her aware of kinds of time that are rarely experienced in cities such as her own. For instance, in Iceland the passage of time is not so much registered by shifts in hours, or from light to dark; time is registered in ever-shifting weather. In Iceland too the duration of human life can seem connected to the duration of planetary life, as glacial and volcanic activity reveal the very formation of the earth. Horn’s books place their viewers in Icelandic time – in the changing weather of Haraldsdóttir and in the bubbling waters of Pooling Waters and Becoming a Landscape.
Another facet of what Horn means by the title ‘To Place’ is revealed through an aphorism Horn published in 1983: ‘The island: a reflecting pool’.35 Later she explained that ‘My image of Iceland as a reflecting pool is the idea of using nature as mirror and measure. It’s an understanding of oneself through a knowledge of what real, not imposed, limitations are. My experience and the ice-and-ash desert interior of Iceland provide an especially accurate reflection. The desert is a mirror. It’s a self- sufficient, self-contained environment. It gives nothing. What you take from the desert is who you are more precisely.’36 Iceland places Horn because it acts like a mirror. By looking into and experiencing it, she has become more aware of herself. As well as illustrating the idea of a reflecting pool, Horn’s challenge has been to recreate this effect. ‘The book can become a kind of mirror’, she hopes.37
There are various reflective surfaces in the photographs in To Place: some of the pools in Becoming a Landscape, for instance. More oddly, reflections glint off the glass eyes of the dead animals in Arctic Circles and Doubt Box. But Horn develops her concept of Iceland as a reflecting pool most powerfully in the presentation of blank surfaces. Faces and rocks act as these surfaces and most recently in Doubt Box, water has fulfilled this role. Stilled by the act of photography, the glacial river loses its fluidity and the silvery, infinitely-creased skin of water takes on new identities. Water seems to thicken even as it ripples and crests, and all sense of scale and of our orientation to the image is lost: each photograph becomes a landscape for the imagination to explore. As readers look at these images, and the repeated surfaces in Horn’s other books, they begin to project their own thoughts. The books become the desert in which they find ‘who they are’, mirrors which they look into to discover their own feelings and ideas.
We can now appreciate the function of surfaces in Horn’s photography, and of her refusal to let us imagine that we have access to the interior thoughts of her human or animal subjects. Horn’s insistence that photography should only present a surface has nothing to do with the idea of photography that animated Warhol’s work; nor is her treatment of surface related to the work of Fischli and Weiss, and their admission that as travelling artists they can only use photography to track the ‘visible world’. Horn presents surfaces because it is in Iceland’s opaque surfaces that she has found herself; and in the hope that the viewer might do this too. These images do not always let us know exactly what her personal experience of Iceland has been. In fact, they often withhold information about her experience. But it is precisely in this act of withholding, and in their blankness, that they allow us to have an experience that it is akin to hers.
Once, discussing her photographs with Lynne Cooke, Horn said ‘usually the subject matter of the image is not the subject matter of the work.’38 So what is ‘the subject matter’ of To Place? I believe it could perhaps be distilled to this formulation: To Place is an argument about identity in which the principle of becoming and the necessity of being placed are both paramount. The principle of becoming is posited as one subject flows towards the next; as one medium shares the features of another; as a genre becomes its opposite, and as the books become active forms rather than passive repositories of information and images. The demonstration of being placed involves using photography to show how the artist was situated and situating the reader too. To Place is populated by images in which Horn found a mirror for her thinking and which let the viewer find a place for their own thought as well.
When the two core subjects of To Place are finally understood like this, we realize that this series of books is neither just a record of Horn’s personal experience, nor an account of this specific location called Iceland. The ramifications of To Place are more widespread. To argue and allow for becoming means to confront the division of information into neat orderly categories; to deny social conventions and divisions; to disrupt artistic conventions too. As an argument about being placed, the work stakes a position against the discourse of globalization. It is a counter-argument to the discourse that celebrates the global flow and interchange of people and products, money and information.39 But what makes these two subjects or arguments most compelling is that they come together when they are usually kept apart. After all, the joys of flux are usually celebrated to counter the idea of being placed; and the argument for being placed is usually a conservative one made by those who seek the comforts of stability. On the very first page of Bluff Life, Horn wrote ‘to let the sea lie before me’, an inkling that it takes dedication to find a sense of fixity in front of something always shifting. To be rooted in the mutable; to let ‘becoming’ place you: these are the paradoxes that Roni Horn explores in To Place and they are ones that have become more and more urgent since the series of books began.
CODA: FROM ICELANDIC ENCYCLOPEDIA TO LIBRARY OF WATER
Since publishing Doubt Box, Roni Horn has completed another Icelandic project: the Library of Water (see plate 11). It is not another volume of To Place, but can nevertheless be seen as the culmination of the work. The title of ‘Library’ suggests a repository for an ‘Encyclopedia’, and yet no books are to be found in Horn’s installation. Neither are there photographs. Instead, the library archives melted water from ice collected at twenty-four glaciers across Iceland. Horn relishes the absurdity of archiving water but has also acknowledged that this is not merely an exercise in the impossible. There is a very serious impetus for this work: climate change. In a matter of years, some of Iceland’s glaciers will have melted, and Horn’s installation will be the only repository of ancient waters. Library of Water addresses itself to the ecological crisis, and this turn in Horn’s concerns merits more discussion than I will devote to the project here; what I want to note in concluding is the relationship with To Place, one which cements my contention that questions of photography are only ever peripheral in that series of photographic books. The Library of Water seems to me an apt culmination of the books because central to the volumes and to the Library are ideas of becoming and of being placed.
11 Roni Horn, Installation shot of Vatnasafn/Library of Water, commissioned and produced by Artangel, 2007. Photo: © Roni Horn, 2009.
Opened in 2007 in the small fishing town of Stykkisholmur, the Library of Water is small white building on a hilltop. The installation is housed in a rectangular room abutted by a semi-circular alcove. Windows run most of the way along one of the long sides of the space and arch around the semi-circle. At the side the view opens onto the sea; at the curved end, you can see a panorama of Stykkishoolmur, its harbour, a vast bay, and hills, sea, islands, and mountains beyond. Beige rubber tiles carpet the space bearing weather words in English and Icelandic. Rising from floor to ceiling, and dispersed in a random cluster with some outlying individuals, there are twenty-four circular glass columns, each filled with water from the glaciers.
You can see tiny deposits of sediment at the bases of the columns, which are lit from above, but the real drama unfolds with the weather outside the space. Constantly changing light shifts the shadows of the columns around the walls, as the colour of the rubber grows warmer or softens. The columns themselves and the water inside them also change appearance with the weather. Because of their shape and the shape of the room, light from both sets of windows reflects and plays over the glass columns in unpredictable ways. As you move around and through the columns, and particularly when other people enter in the space, this movement of light becomes more dynamic. Your reflected body bends, magnifies, diminishes and disappears; people vanish behind one column, but distort behind others, bodies warping through water and glass. Horn’s columns defy the architectural function of bearing loads just as they refuse to regulate space as columns have done in porticos and cathedrals; space flows around these columns which scatter and cluster through the room. Sitting at the table in the alcove, or walking on the rubber floor between and around the columns, you have a sense of everything changing, and you are attuned to the tiniest shifts of light and to the unpredictable expansions and contractions of space. The appearance and the feeling one has of the identity of the installation is in constant flux.
But at the same time, the Library of Water creates a powerful sense of place. The installation cannot be imagined or experienced as a hermetic space cut off from the world around it as so many other sculptural installations are. The generous windows bring the view inside and tether the installation precisely to its geographic setting. As you look outside towards the landscape, your view is interrupted here and there by the columns, but rather than actually blocking out the landscape, these structures repeat and reflect it, so the outside is brought within. The water inside the columns is completely still, and what sedimentation that does occur will never do so before your eyes. The architecture also gives a sense of solidity: however much they change appearance in the light and however irregular their placement, the columns are thick and powerfully proportioned, and their main cluster is a centre for the entire space.
The experience of the Library of Water is therefore at once an experience of mutability and of solidity; this is a space of continual ‘becoming’ and one in which you feel completely centred. The Library exists in Iceland but in a way it is Iceland for Horn; it works on the visitor as Iceland has worked for her, and as the books and photographs of To Place work, too.
Notes
1 Michael Fried, ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday’, Critical Inquiry, 33, Spring 2007, 500.
2 Horn, ‘To Place’, in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Göttingen, 2009,143.
3 Horn, ‘Iceland’, in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, 73.
4 Horn in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews Volume 1, Milan, 2003, 433.
5 Horn in ‘Weather girls, interview with Collier Schorr’, in Roni Horn, London, 2000, 124.
6 Horn in Obrist, Interviews Volume 1, 440.
7 See in particular her text ‘Pronouns detain me’ where she writes ‘I want a language without pronouns . . . I want to come before gender.’ Roni Horn, Pooling Waters Volume 2, Cologne, 1994, 61.
8 Roni Horn, Inner Geography, Baltimore, 1994.
9 Horn, Inner Geography.
10 Horn, Inner Geography.
11 With a degree of humour Horn has said that she thinks of ‘the maps in Lava as combining with the images to form a biography of Iceland’ (Inner Geography). She was referring to the fact that Iceland has emerged through a series of volcanic eruptions, but the point is surely that she refuses to relate Iceland’s biography through a singular narrative or through any one means of representation. Instead, her ‘biography’ is made of dispersed fragments, and told through ofa range of disparate graphic devices.
12 Horn, ‘Pastoral and Cave’, in Pooling Waters Volume 2, 62.
13 Horn, ‘Floating in the Desert’, Pooling Waters Volume 2, 21.
14 Horn, ‘Simple and Complete’, Pooling Waters Volume 2, 29.
15 Cezanne described the impact of the painting as follows: ‘One takes it right in the chest, one retreats, the whole room feels the spray.’ Cited in Gustave Courbet, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2008, 292.
16 Horn, ‘To Place’, 143.
17 Horn, ‘Interview with Claudia Spinelli’, Journal of Contemporary Art, 1995, jca-online.com/ horn.html; consulted 12 December 2008.
18 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The analytical language of John Wilkins’, in Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, Austin, TX, 1993.
19 Horn, ‘Interview with Mimi Thompson’, Bomb magazine, 28, Summer 1989.
20 For a related approach to the idea of mediums and becoming, see George Baker’s essay on Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Films, ‘Film Beyond its Limits’, in Anthony McCall, Mead Art Gallery, Warwick University, 2004.
21 Margret’s surname, which Horn used to title the book, is typically Icelandic since all Icelanders take their second name from the father’s first name. This title suggests the Icelandic setting of the photographs even though the country’s landscape is out of the frame.
22 Thierry de Duve, ‘You are the weather’, in Roni Horn, 78–85.
23 Horn, ‘To Place’, 144.
24 Horn, Roni Horn, 144.
25 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London, 1987, 238, 292, 294.
26 Cliff Stagnoll, ‘Becoming’, in Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary, New York, 2005, 21.
27 On the idea of intimacy, Horn has commented, ‘The book is an intimate form, it mostly engages the individual individually. I can think of no other form so inherently private.’ Roni Horn, Inner Geography.
28 Similarly her decision to photograph television screens has no connection to the concerns of ‘Pictures’ artists of her generation with their interests in rephotography and the simulacra; these photographs in Arctic Circles instead rhyme with other pictures of stuffed animals.
29 Laurence Bosse and Roni Horn, ‘Five questions by way of introduction’, in Roni Horn: Events of Relation, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2000, 9.
30 One precedent would be Douglas Huebler’s Location Piece 2 from the Multiples Gallery ‘Artists and Photographs’ edition: Huebler’s work was an envelope containing various cards that the viewer could arrange as they chose.
31 Horn, Inner Geography.
32 Horn, ‘Island and Labyrinth’ in Pooling Waters Volume 2, 23.
33 Horn, Inner Geography.
34 Horn, Inner Geography.
35 Horn in Roni Horn, Kunstraum München, 1983, 100.
36 Horn, Inner Geography.
37 Horn, ‘Interview with Claudia Spinelli’, Journal of Contemporary Art, 1995, jca-online.com/ horn.html; consulted 12 December 2008.
38 Lynne Cooke in conversation with Horn in Roni Horn, 18.
39 In art, this discourse finds its greatest exponent in Andreas Gursky. His photographs are obviously made all over the world, but more significantly, their elevated viewpoints ask us to imagine that the camera floats over the surface of the world, looking down before moving on.