the art of dissent excavations

Stephen Gill, from the series Buried, 2006 Stephen Gill, from the series Buried, 2006

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Buried by Stephen Gill and Hackney Wick: projective renders associated with the redevelopment as “CGI smears on the
an excavation blue fence”, drawing attention to their abstracting tendency, and suggesting
their potential to blur reality in disorientating and deceptive ways.6 The fence
BEN CAMPKIN he refers to is itself an image as well as a physical boundary. It encircled the
perimeter of the construction zone when demolition began in the summer of
“Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him.”1 2007. It quickly became an especially contentious boundary for many artists
and photographers. They had previously wandered freely in this area, recording
“[T]here is something to be gained in focusing explicitly on an archae- it as they wished, but were now prevented from doing so as this large “piece of
ology of the present, on an archaeology that engages with the here and the city” was “locked down”.7 Early on in the construction phase the Olympic
now.”2 Delivery Authority (ODA) anticipated criticism of a lack of visual accessibility
to the site, installing twenty webcams streaming live footage of the construc-
In the mid-2000s, London-based photographer Stephen Gill published a tion zone to their website. The ODA’s top public relations priority was to
number of special edition photographic books through his own imprint, communicate the progress of the site towards its idealised future, the Olympic
Nobody.3 Eight of these contain photoworks documenting Hackney Wick dream. Aware of the power of images, the ODA prioritised spending on visual
and the London 2012 Olympic Park area before its reconfiguration as such.4 communications, and the production of a photographic and film archive to
Here, I consider one example, Buried (2006), featuring photographs Gill took record the site as work proceeded.8 The webcam images and time-lapse pho-
of Hackney Wick and subsequently buried and exhumed. Which sites did Gill tographs, and the “CGI smears” Sinclair refers to, were precisely intended to
choose to document like this, and why? What does the act and metaphor of “bury” certain things, closing down the area’s pre-existing identity and his-
burial mean in relation to this contested site, and the manner in which its tory, neutralising any sense of controversy about the form of redevelopment,
redevelopment proceeds? In what contexts can we situate Gill’s methods and suggesting “transparency” while keeping spectators and unauthorised image-
Buried’s motifs? makers at a safe distance.
In this project, Gill combines low-tech equipment and simple photo- Of course, numerous other professional groups have produced their own
graphic formats with the labour intensive process of burying and retrieving archives of the site as part of their day-to-day work. These kinds of photo-
his photographic prints. The resulting images engage the photographer and graphic documentation normally serve to fix and stabilise an urban area in the
viewer in more dynamic exchanges with the sites they depict than the utilitar- throws of physical and social transformation, making sense of it as works pro-
ian photographs typically produced by professionals involved in urban change gress, rationalising it. Photographs “clean up” an architectural or archaeological
– those of construction contractors, architects and archaeologists. Gill’s archive site, “freezing” time in order that it can be understood. Within the proliferation
makes visible structures and spaces that have since been demolished, removed of publicly available images produced by built environment professionals asso-
or assigned new uses in the area’s restructuring. In Buried Gill produces an ciated with the Olympic redevelopment we hardly encounter any that depict
image from – materialises – the properties and movement of the ground, the a sense of process, or the messy realities of construction. As the works reach
“bioremediation” of which has been central in justifying the need for “regenera- completion, polished architectural photographs become the norm, those that
tion”, an ambiguous and contested term.5 typically “present a newly completed and unsullied ideal”.9 This is what makes
The photographs in Buried pointedly contrast the seamlessness and lack of Gill’s photographs so unusual.
context of the idealistic “photo-real” simulations and architectural photographs Taken and disseminated during the pre-construction phase, Gill’s work
circulating according to the official communications agendas of the Olympic emphasises process, chance and a subjective and intimate understanding of
development process. Such images are highly controlled at the macro scale of the area’s qualities before its possession by the ODA. Traces resulting from
master-planning, and the micro scale of specific architectural schemes. The the burial of the original prints expressively record the photographer’s material
writer Iain Sinclair, one of the most vocal critics of the Olympics, evokes the interaction with the site, as well as the physical influence of the site on the pho-

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tographs. Marks, smears, scratches and dirt take the “witness” aspect of docu- control over the presentation of his photographs, and has meant that the many
mentary photography to a new dimension, communicating the photographer’s he has taken of Hackney Wick have been disseminated in publications printed
presence directly, while also quoting from the site through the voice of its own and bound in the area. Close identification with place, and with Hackney and
materiality. In this, Gill’s photoworks poetically and forensically open up urban Hackney Wick, in particular, have been consistently important for Gill. He has
transformation in all its emotional, material, spatial and temporal complexity. become well known for his methodical documentation of everyday urban sites
and lives, through understated, self-consciously low-tech snapshots, revealing
Surface patterns and complexity in ostensibly simple and familiar scenes, objects and
Buried is a small A5 book, packaged in a stone coloured cardboard slipcase: city features.
self-consciously nondescript and earthy. As well as the book itself, inside there Gill took the photographs in Buried with a secondhand plastic Coronet
is a plain envelope containing a photograph, as if a treasure hunt clue. In edi- camera, purchased for 50 pence in a market local to the sites they depict. How
tion number 007 this is a snapshot of an overgrown and mossy concrete verge: are we to read the frugal use of such low-tech equipment, and the sparse under-
a definitively urban manmade feature reclaimed by wild plants and flowers. The stated quality of the work? The camera lacked focus and exposure controls, and
format and proportions of the image and frame recall an over-sized Polaroid. knowledge of this communicates the virtue of unpretentious yet skillful crafts-
The slipcase also contains the book itself, smeared with earth, actual abject dirt: manship, and an association with everyday amateur photography. The recycling
evidence of its recent burial. The first time I handled one of the 750 editions was of a discarded piece of equipment made redundant by more recent technology
in the sanctuary of the British Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading suggests creativity and pragmatism in Gill’s approach to photographing an
Room, an orderly and carefully controlled environment, which heightened the area rich with history as a “landscape of production” and industrial innovation.
surprising out-of-place textures of its dirtiness, as well as bringing to mind the This same area was portrayed as derelict in the regeneration discourses, and
usual function of archives to protect against damage and material decay. contaminated beyond remediation except in the most dramatic – tabula rasa
The book’s title, “Buried”, is in a version of a rounded serif font, Cooper – form, intended to transform it into a “landscape of consumption”.12 In the
Black, eroded underneath, as is the name of the author, Stephen Gill. The context of the Olympics and elsewhere many artists have taken against such
positive and negative images of the letters suggest simultaneously a pile of dirt dramatic modes of restructuring the industrial zones that were the lifeblood of
and an excavated trench. The colour of the text hovers between grey, brown modern London; and have themselves revelled, sometimes romantically, in the
and black. The author’s name is obscured by actual dirt, so that you would have informality, and socio-economic and material diversity, on offer.
to pick at it to reveal it. A sense of abjection, prompted by the dirt’s unknown Gill’s attitude to the Olympics is equivocal but much of his work appears to
origin, and its connotation of a rotting object, might put you off. lament what has been or will be lost. On his website he comments:
Inside are 27 images that echo the format of the enveloped one. In contrast
to that pristine print, here the images and their white borders are damaged The games… will bring many good things to the area: new transport
and distorted. Three explanatory paragraphs include the information that “the links and much-needed infrastructure. But there will be losses, too.
photographs in this book were taken in Hackney Wick and later buried there”. There is another side to Hackney Wick. Away from the noise and
They were deposited at various depths and positions, for variable lengths of chaos nature has somehow managed to find and keep a place for itself.
time.10 The suggestion is that the reader should take the single unblemished The canals and rivers and secret allotments (known only to their dedi-
photograph and bury it themselves, joining a collaboration with the authors, cated gardeners) are home to many birds and animals. These hidden
identified as “Stephen Gill and Hackney Wick”. paradises have a vibrancy of their own which will soon be muted by the
Buried is a c-type – chromogenic colour – print book, designed by Melanie dust that will cover them.13
Mues, and is one of a series of photobooks published with the intention of
“making the book the finished expression of the photographs, rather than just This statement indicates Gill’s appreciation of a poetics of dust and burial, as
a shell in which to house them”.11 This method gives Gill maximum possible well as his interest in the spontaneous forms of urban nature that existed in

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this industry-saturated environment before the Olympic redevelopment. The a lock in the Lea Navigation system. The management of these waterways
photographs in Buried depict a range of views that highlight the area’s com- since the ODA took over has been challenged by those who argue that the
plex metropolitan nature. Two pylons, iconic landmarks conveying manmade area’s already rich ecology, and its natural bioremediation following the closure
power and energy, are shot from below, set pictorially against a grey sky in of heavy industry, is being destroyed in favour of a sanitised biodiversity that
an overgrown park. They are harmonious outcrops rather than incongruous better fits a managerial, neoliberal image of the good city.14 The photograph of
eyesores. As we move through the book we view industry and infrastructure, a man inspecting a marrow is presumably taken at Manor Gardens Allotments,
street scenes, workers, workspaces, snapshots of local residents, discarded from which the owners were evicted in 2007.
objects, scrap yards and the anonymous interstitial background architecture of Sometimes Gill’s strategies are pictorial, as when a shot of a bridge over
industrial parks, alongside blurry close-ups of plants and flowers, allotments the Lea in another of his photobooks, Archaeologies in Reverse, echoes Claude
and their guardians. Monet’s Bridge Over a Pond of Waterlilies (1899). At other times, less so: urban
Each visual fragment coheres within the series through a common presenta- nature has an edge, rather than being pretty; it can be disorderly and unfinished
tion format, and the consistent interruptions of scratches, specks of dirt, stains, rather than formally laid out. In Buried, a cormorant sits in front of a graffitied
watermarks, fingerprints and other traces, indexing the burial of the original concrete wall. A grassy bank has been sectioned off with plastic construction
prints. The degree to which these disrupt the image varies. Some photographs safety fencing: surgery imminent. Water streams through mossy canal gate tim-
are just lightly speckled, but towards the book’s centre the original subject mat- bers and wildflowers bloom through chainlink fences. These images of urban
ter becomes virtually unrecognisable, erupting into kalaedoscopic explosions nature well illustrate architectural historian Antoine Picon’s notion of contem-
of psychedelic colour, alien forms that bleed, bubble and blur into one another. porary cities as the primary form of landscape experienced in the contemporary
These result from the emulsion on the original photographs’ surfaces breaking world. We have moved away, Picon argues, from a traditional experience of
down in contact with the water and chemicals in the soil. landscape as relaxing and contemplative, towards “anxious landscapes”, where
If the link between reality and the photograph was inscribed when Gill nature is experienced in the process of reclaiming environments saturated by
originally pressed the shutter, the blemishes record a second interaction with man’s technological endeavours.15
the site, analogous to the exposure of light on film, more direct and literally Gill’s photoassemblages of artifacts, organisms and settings suggest a subtle
grounded in the site’s materiality, yet less controlled and predictable to the pho- understanding of the city as an environment with its own nature, the meaning
tographer. In one image the process has produced a new multi-coloured coral of which is constructed dialectically between manmade and natural images and
reef-like landscape. Another shows a jumping dog, seemingly bursting through objects. Here is a pre-existing biodiversity at odds with the ODA’s vision of
intensely orange layers of flame that spontaneously combust the picture plane. formal parklands, which might not be economically productive, but which Gill
In the shot of the two pylons, the clouds of the overcast sky float into the white (and others) celebrate as a positive and meaningful feature of the city, and a
border. An image of a man inspecting a marrow on his allotment has a dirty space for creativity and imagination.
frame: added realism, involving us in the scene, surrounded as he is by piles of
earth. At the same time, these supplements to the photographs – as with the Contexts
collages of plants in his later photobook Hackney Flowers – disrupt the conven- Gill belongs to a lineage of artists and writers who have highlighted the urban
tional photographic illusion of reality, making us aware of the photograph as everyday, running from the surrealists and situationists, to the psychogeogra-
material artifact. phers of present-day London, including Sinclair, and, in photography, Richard
Although the sites featured often seem low key, definitively ordinary, as Wentworth and Mark Atkins. Gill, like Atkins, has collaborated with Sinclair.
a group they represent a number of important locations in the controversies Both have engaged with Hackney in a sustained way through multiple projects
encircling the area’s Olympic-led redevelopment. The pylons were among the with overlapping motifs. Gill’s work, rather than taking a formalistic approach
first features removed from Hackney Marshes, replaced by power-lines buried to the built environment, is rather a kind of intuitive documentary, “sugges-
neatly underground at high cost. Another shot shows water bursting through tive of how buildings and cities are occupied and acquire a personal, emotional

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resonance”.16 He displays a psychogeographer’s interest in the flows of life, This approach has the potential to reveal forgotten times and repressed his-
energy and entropy that collectively shape the experience and imaginaries of tories in order to intervene critically, stimulating alternative urban imaginaries,
the area: what he calls the “spirit” of place.17 He gives emphasis to the process countering a collapse of imagination in urban development.20 Yet Luckhurst
of photography as one of “reaction to place” rather than straightforward docu- raises a number of important limitations. First, “the generalized structure of
mentation.18 As in Wentworth’s Making Do and Getting By (1974– ), Gill often haunting is symptomatically blind to its generative loci”; second, the “deadpan
identifies and highlights formulaic patterns in urban and material culture – as mythology” of its authors makes their political intent ambiguous; third, the
in his series of the back of advertising hoardings, ATM machines and lost peo- celebration of London’s ineffability tends towards a aestheticising “supernatu-
ple in A Book of Field Studies (2005). The rigid structure and repetition involved ralisation”, distancing us from the city’s shifting political structures; and finally
in such work contrast, on the surface at least, with the writings of Sinclair, the mode itself, even if it is subversive, is “necessarily occluded and interstitial,
who also highlights value in interstitial spaces and familiar things, but through passed on only between initiates”.21 Gill’s intent is implicit rather than explicit.
ambulatory connections. The language and mode he uses are more readily available to a cultural elite
Roger Luckhurst’s critique of the contemporary London literary psycho- familiar with the wider body of recent London psychogeographic work than
geographic tradition is helpful in thinking about Gill’s work, given his direct they would be to anyone else. However, his “collaboration” with the site cer-
association with the authors Luckhurst discusses. One of them, Sinclair, has tainly addresses the first of Luckhurst’s critiques. The soil powerfully brings
commented that Gill has learned “to haunt the places that haunt him”, and to mind the physical, political and economic restructuring taking place in a
in this statement he suggests how the photographer’s investigations of east specific place.
London connect with what Luckhurst describes as a “master trope” of the We can also connect Gill’s interest in “degraded” working-class urban envi-
uncanny, and a “contemporary London Gothic”.19 Pursuing a strategy of spec- ronments and the people who live in them with what the art historian Julian
trality, which itself contains the ghost of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the Stallabrass identifies as the emergence of an “urban pastoral” in late twenti-
literary exponents of this mode share a number of characteristics with Gill, eth century British art. Stallabrass comments that such work “is about seeing
and with Buried specifically. They use motifs of haunting as a mechanism to something valuable in something trivial associated with the less advantaged
“excavate” repressed traumatic memories, and lost or threatened histories. They sections of society, and bringing that to the attention of art lovers”.22 The mode,
focus on banal or degraded spaces and structures – conduits through which he suggests, can be described as touristic or “quasi-anthropological”, operating
overlooked histories and mythologies erupt into, and disrupt, the present. through repeated, formulaic, patterns. It focuses attention on particular “raw”,
Contemporary “regeneration”, and especially the form of the “Demolish degraded or seamy urban environments, encouraging a fascination with and
Dig Design” tabula rasa approach typified by the Olympic redevelopment, desire to venture into such places. These qualities could apply to Gill’s work.
either denies, fictionalises or neutralises the past. Driven by what Derrida calls In his case the quasi-anthropological moves into the quasi-archaeological, con-
“heritage fever”, it may construct specific reductive historical imaginaries that necting both with Robert Smithson’s notion of “ruins in reverse”, and a body
legitimise – or at least do not conflict with – the forms and directions it pursues. of recent London-based artists, overlapping with the psychogeographers, such
The implicit political strategy underlying the Gothic imaginaries of ruination, as Wentworth and Mark Dion, who have adopted archaeological methods and
burial and exhumation at work in London’s contemporary psychogeographic metaphors in their work.
practices instead reveal the city as a complex “polytemporal assemblage” –
Bruno Latour’s term, invoked by Luckhurst – in which different times collide. Sifting the soil
For Derrida, according to Luckhurst, hauntology was a way of thinking through The acts of literally burying these photographs and photobooks, and meta-
the “ghosts” of Marxism – its association with totalitarian regimes – in relation phorically burying the people and places that are their subjects, moves pho-
to his philosophy of deconstruction. In the London context, he observes, “the tography beyond the passivity and neutrality of official site documentation,
buried Gothic fragment… operates as the emblem of resistance to the tyranny instigating a necessarily more involved encounter with the land “in motion”.
of planned space”. Instead of flat images or records of places that have since been lost, or of the

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processes of demolition or construction themselves, the energy – both crea- The act of burying the photographs and books raises important questions
tive and destructive – and physical substance of urban change are made more beyond the artist’s own statement, which appears on the surface to be quite
directly and materially manifest. The architectural photographer’s conventional politically neutral, that his intention was simply to collaborate with the site,
play between distant overviews, involved but partial fragments, and constructed and introduce a chance element to his practice. Challenging the notion of “dirt
boundaries, are supplemented by visual and tactile information added through as matter out of place”, the definition popularised by the anthropologist Mary
contact with the site, and extending beyond the picture plane. Douglas, this is dirt drawn into the circulation of capital, and here used by
These are what the archaeological photographic theorist Michael Shanks Gill to narrate place, referring us to the soil’s embodiment of the area’s his-
terms “photoworks” rather than straightforward photographs, in the sense that tory. Rather than being “unnatural”, this earth has its own historically and
that they are explicitly interpretative, and they highlight the photographic geographically specific nature formed through a unique mixture of properties:
image as material artefact, comprised of paper and emulsion. The material- minerals, decomposing organic material, chemicals and industrial pollutants.
ity of photography is reasserted at a time when, through digital technologies, In Gill’s work dirt is introduced as a material for more than just its potential
photographs are being detached from the material and chemical processes that for “distress” aesthetics.25 He makes high art from base matter, and the “dam-
once defined their limits. The chance actions of soil, air, water and other ele- age” to the photographs indexes the effects of time and wear. Through burying
ments in the ground shape each image as a unique artifact. Like archaeological the photographs Gill highlights the materials, site, means of production and
photographs, the “truth” of these images can only be understood in relation to labour in his own practice, as well as those of the Olympic development process.
multiple temporal and spatial scales. In Buried, photographic time pertains to This counters what Marx would term the process of fetishisation at work in the
the presencing of the pasts of each site recorded, the present of each original spectacular results of contemporary tabula rasa redevelopment: abstract environ-
photographic act, and each burial and retrieval, and the viewer’s present, the ments and iconic built objects. In the process of his work Gill changes the value
moment of reading, with or without knowledge of the site’s transformed con- of the dirt in which he buries his photobooks. This brings to mind the most
dition. Right now, there are ongoing debates about the nature of the changes fundamental “regeneration” taking place: not only the mechanised bioremedia-
happening, although the place is already radically different from the moment tion of the soil, but its revaluation as an asset, and the transfer of its ownership,
the photographs were taken. from local residents and businesses and the state to elite private investors.26
That the images have been influenced by the chemical properties of the soil,
and thus draw our attention to it, is fitting given the expense and complexity of Digging up the contemporary past
its bioremediation in preparation for construction work and the Games. This As a project in conceptual archaeology Buried emphasises that the discipline of
was a key feature of the Olympic “regeneration” narrative, invoking the bio- archaeology itself – as with the “heritage industry” more generally – is inextri-
logical connotations of a term that originally referred to spiritual improvement. cably bound to neoliberal redevelopment, and limited in its critical possibili-
The justification for washing the soil was to remove hydrocarbons and heavy ties. In contrast to the archaeological work taking place within the contractual
metals: indicators of the site’s industrial use, mainly as landfill. Between 2007 frameworks of the Olympic development, Gill’s archaeological metaphor
and 2008 over 500,000 tonnes of earth were processed through a soil treat- is more akin to experimental “archaeologies of the contemporary past”.27 In
ment centre.23 The ODA has very successfully communicated this in the media the 1990s, such projects sought to destabilise the archaeological production
as a key benefit of the redevelopment process. However, critics have observed of knowledge, and the scientific distancing of archaeology’s object of enquiry
that much of the landfill buried in the area had been safely secured under 2–3 – the past – through performative archaeological acts intended to scrutinise
metres of topsoil in the 1970s, and that ironically the recent treatment of the present-day (“contemporary past”) material culture, and emotionally charged
soil had a hazardous effect on local people during the construction process, in situations. Similarly, in the context of Gill’s work, burial and excavation refer
which they were subject to dangerous dusts and high levels of radioactivity.24 us to the processes through which information and criticism have circulated, or
Furthermore, contaminated waste is still buried beneath the velodrome, and have been prevented from circulating – buried, suppressed, repressed – within
some of the remaining waste is now only buried to a depth of 60 centimetres. the regeneration discourses.

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In discussing repression and the operations of image and archaeological met- chance chemical reactions, damage and decomposition. The photobook con-
aphors within psychoanalytic thought, art historian Griselda Pollock observes: taining the archive is a “fetish object” in a psychoanalytic sense – an object that
stands in totemically for displaced traumatic memories. Like a trauma from
Repression at once erases and encrypts traumatic memories. They are the past that re-emerges to the surface when prompted by new events in the
buried and thus preserved like relics in the unconscious which is, as present, Buried takes on new meanings, beyond Gill’s original intentions, as the
Derrida has helped us to recognise, the Freudian archive. Analysis is redevelopment proceeds, and as the soil becomes increasingly significant as the
not only excavation; it is at the same time something more shocking: restructuring takes place.
exhumation. In this double form, analysis does not, however, aim at In Gill’s photoworks, there is an excess of image, overflowing from the
merely re-archiving relics in the psychic museum.28 frame. The method highlight’s conventional photography’s limits – its lack of
power to represent properly the ways that architecture and cities are made, the
Taking her lead from Freud’s archaeological metaphors, Pollock thus sees difficulty of documenting the complexity of social, spatial and material restruc-
psychoanalysis as an archaeological method of exhuming and “working turings of urban space, and the necessarily reductivist, abstracting tendency
through” traumatic memories. This therapeutic analogy could equally apply of all kinds of photography.29 These contextual, literally bottom (ground) up
to the potential of contemplating the “traumas” enacted on the various sites images are presented to us in a situation where images are playing a powerful
and communities in the Olympic Park development through the medium of role in promoting and implementing a particular form of top-down tabula rasa
Gill’s photoworks. In the context of a tabula rasa redevelopment, buildings and redevelopment. Gill’s intuitive approach contrasts with the form of business-
other structures are razed to the ground, returned to dust. The soil becomes an led managerial planning that has characterised the Olympic redevelopment
archive, with archaeology being the only means to extrapolate the knowledge it process. Critical fine art photography still has the power to reveal aspects of
contains. In burying images of the area’s everyday architecture and inhabitants, urban change that officials might not necessarily want us to see, and to prompt
Gill appears to want to preserve a set of memory-images. Once retrieved, their us to question its processes, and the authorities’ own use of images.
interactions with the land have leant them primal, elemental qualities. They
have changed dramatically, quickly, and now seem like evidence of a long lost
culture, its customs and rituals quite alien. As with memories, when the images
are recovered they have partly been distorted or erased, some seem banal, while
others are intense, vivid or traumatic. They form a dream-like sequence of
flashbacks rather than a coherent narrative.

Conclusion
Gill’s work prompts us to think about the different and conflicting “place
images” of the area – the active imaginaries, rather than passive representations
– through which individuals and groups have identified with it as a materially,
empirically and perceptually knowable entity. The fact that the photographs
and books have been buried and ornamented with dirt from the area makes a
binary understanding of reality versus representation more complex. The strat-
egy adopted is the antithesis of the developers’ own highly codified “photo-real”
CGI imaging of the site. Gill has created an archive featuring aspects of the
area that have been overlooked or actively denied – buried – within the official
discourses of the regeneration. He has then put that archive at risk, subject to

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Banned”, Telegraph, 17 March 2011. New Society Publishers, 2008). interests in the material past.” Michael Shanks, Textual Practice 16, no. 3 (2002): 526–45.
19 J. Magnay, “London 2012 Olympics: 3 George Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit”, first “Photography and archaeology”, in Brian Leigh 20 Luckhurst, “Contemporary London
Government Unveils Plans to Ban Ambush Mar- published in Tribune, December 1945, avail- Molyneaux (ed.), The Cultural Life of Images: Gothic”, 530.
keting and Bolster Games Security”, Telegraph, 7 able at http://orwell.ru/library/articles/spirit/ Visual Representation in Archaeology (London: 21 Luckhurst, “Contemporary London
Mar 2011. english/e_spirit (accessed 17 March 2012). Routledge, 1997), 73–107. Gothic”, 532.
4 George Monbiot, “Everywhere They Go, the 5 See Ben Campkin, The Regeneration Game 22 Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art
Notes to Duman, “AdiZones” Olympic Games Become an Excuse for Eviction (London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming); and Michael in the 1990s (London and New York: Verso, 1999).
1 Francis Keogh and Andrew Fraser, “Why and Displacement”, Guardian, 12 June 2007. Edwards, “London For Sale: Towards the Radical 250.
London Won the Olympics”, BBC Sport, 6 July Marketization of Urban Space”, in Matthew 23 DEME, “Creating Land for the Future”,
Notes to Powell & MacGilp, “The Games”
2005. Gandy (ed.), Urban Constellations (Berlin: Jovis, Dredging, Environmental & Marine Engineering
2 DCMS, Before, During and After: Making the 1 Iain Sinclair, “The Olympics Scam”, London 2011), 56. , http://www.deme.be/projects/belg_dec_lon-
Most of the London 2012 Games (London: Depart- Review of Books 30, no. 12 ( June 2008): 17–23. 6 Owen Hatherley, “Ghost Milk: Calling Time don_olympics.html (accessed 5 December 2011).
ment for Media, Culture and Sport, 2008), 5. 2 Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (Lon- on the Grand Project, by Iain Sinclair”, Independ- 24 lifeisland.org, “Gardeners exposed to 2012
3 DCMS, Before, During and After, 8. don: Vintage, 2001), 760. ent, 8 July 2011. Olympics Construction Radiation Hazard”, 15
4 “London 2012 Olympic Games Budget Cut 3 Wim Wenders, “A Step Ahead of the Times: 7 Interview with Paul Jennings, London 2012 October 2010, http://www.lifeisland.org/ (ac
by £27m”, BBC News, 24 May 2010. A Conversation About Photography, Painting and Organising Committee, and Anthony Palmer, cessed 3 January 2012).
5 “40 Adizones Across England”, The Great Film with Paul Puschel and Jan Thron Prikker”, formerly Olympic Delivery Authority Filming 25 An example of distress aesthetics would be
Outdoor Gym Company, 14 January 2010, http:// in Wim Wenders: On Film (London: Faber and and Events Manager, 21 December 2011, Canary fashion designer Hussein Chalyan’s 1993 collec-
www.tgogc.com/home/news-and-updates/40- Faber, 2001), 73. Wharf, London. tion, “The Tangent Flows”, in which he buried
adizones-across-england.html (accessed 27 4 This question was put to me by Anna Hart 8 This publicly funded archive has to date only clothes in his back garden and dug them up again,
March 2012). on a welcome break from the Olympic site while been made partially accessible. It is now controlled turning dirt and decomposition into a luxury com-
6 Donald R. Liggett, “Just Let Yourself Play, undertaking a project in Archway. See http:// by the London 2012 Organising Committee modity. See Katherine Townsend, ‘The Denim
Enjoying All of the Feelings and Sensations that www.archwayinvestigationsandresponses.org (LOCOG), a private company, which is negotiat- Garment as Canvas: Exploring the Notion of
Come When You Are IN The Zone”, in Sport (accessed 27 March 2012). ing with the National Archives and the British Wear as a Fashion and Textile Narrative”, Textile
Hypnosis (Champaign: Human Kinetics Publish- Film Institute with a view to depositing it with 9, no. 1 (2011): 90–107.
Notes to Campkin, “Buried by Stephen Gill and them. 26 Mike Raco and Emma Tunney, “Visibilities
ers, 2000), 15.
Hackney Wick” 9 Timothy Wray and Andrew Higgott (eds.), and Invisibilities in Urban Development: Small
7 Joe Fernandez, “Adidas to Build London
Olympic Venues”, Marketing Week, 11 September 1 Iain Sinclair quoted on Stephen Gill’s web- Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and Business Communities and the London Olympics
2008. site, http://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/about the Modern City (London: Ashgate, forthcoming), 2012”, Urban Studies 47, no. 10 (2010): 2069–91.
8 See Wikipedia, “My Adidas”, http:// (accessed 27 December 2011). 18; and see Robin Wilson, “At the Limits of 27 Buchli and Lucas, “Absent Present”.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Adidas (accessed 15 2 Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas, “The Absent Genre: Architectural Photography and Utopic 28 Griselda Pollock, “The Image in Psychoa-
September 2011). Present: Archaeologies of the Contemporary Criticism”, Journal of Architecture 10, no. 3 (2005): nalysis and the Archaeological Metaphor”, in
9 “Brown Backs Child Sport Campaign”, BBC Past”, in Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past 265–73. Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the
News, 13 July 2007. (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 3. 10 Correspondence with Stephen Gill, 8 Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford:
10 “AdiZones FAQs”, http://www. 3 See Hackney Wick, 2004; Buried, 2006; Hack- November 2011. Oxford University Press, 2006), 10.
tynewearsport.org/files/faqs.pdf (accessed 15 ney Flowers, 2007; Archaeology in Reverse, 2007; A 11 “Stephen Gill”, http://www.stephengill. 29 Wray and Higgot, Camera Constructs, 5, 19.
September 2011). Series of Disappointments, 2008; Warming Down, co.uk/portfolio/about (accessed 1 December
Notes to Iles, “The Lower Lea Valley: From Fun
11 London Borough of Newham, “Investment 2008; The Hackney Rag, 2009; and Off Ground, 2011).
Palace to Creative Prison”
Portfolio”, May 2010 , http://www.newham.gov. 2011. All were published in London by Nobody. 12 Raymond Williams introduced these terms
uk/NR/rdonlyres/8AF0D6BC-7A8E-4625- 4 Theorist of archaeological photography, in The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford 1 Joan Littlewood, quoted in Stanley Mat-
85D1-2083502CB3D5/0/InvestmentProspectus. Michael Shanks, defines “photoworks” as explicitly University Press, 1975). thews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space (London:
pdf (accessed 15 September 2011). interpretative photographs, where the photogra- 13 “Stephen Gill” Black Dog, 2007), 66.
pher is aware of photography as an act of cultural 14 Martin Slavin, UCL Bartlett School of 2 Matthews, Agit-Prop to Free Space, 72.
Notes to Wynne & Lenskyj, “Symbolic Resist- Planning London Planning Seminar Series, 3
production rather than of objective documenta- 3 Matthews, Agit-Prop to Free Space, 81.
ance: Turning the Rings” November 2011.
tion: “It is proposed that photography, far from 4 Reyner Banham, “Flatscape with Containers”,
1 Helen Lenskyj, Olympic Industry Resistance: being homogenous, is an unstable category, and 15 Antoine Picon, “Anxious Landscapes: From New Society 10 (1967).
Challenging Olympic Power and Propaganda (New that it is better to think less of photographs than the Ruin to Rust”, Grey Room, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 5 Quoted in Andrew Culf, “Olympics Can
York: SUNY Press, 2008); Helen Lenskyj, The of photoworks, with emphasis placed upon acts 64–83. Help UK Rebrand Itself, Says New Cultural
Best Olympics Ever?: Social Impacts of Sydney 2000 of cultural production: photowork is then one 16 Wray and Higgott, Camera Constructs, 28. Chief ”, Guardian, 27 April 2007.
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2002); Helen Lenskyj, aspect of how the archaeologist may take up the 17 “Nobody’s Bookshop”, http://nobodybooks. 6 Bill Morris, “The Cultural Olympiad
Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics, and remains of the past and work upon them. This com/shop/ (accessed 1 December 2011). – be inspired”, 11 March 2008, http://www.
Activism (New York: SUNY Press, 2000). is the positive moment of critique – finding the 18 Correspondence with Stephen Gill, 8 london2012.com/blog/2008/03/the-cultural-
2 Chris Shaw, Five Ring Circus: Myths and creative potential within particular modes of November 2011. olympiad-be-inspired.php (accessed 22 March
Realities of the Olympic Games (Gabriola Island: cultural production, a potential to express different 19 Roger Luckhurst, “The Contemporary Lon- 2012)
don Gothic and the Limits of the Spectral Turn”,

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