John Timberlake

John Timberlake: Statement on Another Country work, 1999-2001 Between 1999 – 2001 I made a series of photographs entitled Another Country comprising dioramas and backdrops drawing from three distinct visual sources: the Romantic tradition of European landscape painting, principally Constable, Turner and Cozens; documentation of nuclear tests conducted by Britain between 1953 (the date of the first British atomic test) to 1958 (when Britain developed its first thermonuclear bomb), and the amateur model making of the type associated with miniature train and militaria enthusiasts. In these three elements – which I unified in the final photograph – I saw interesting contrasts in relation to depictions of history and landscape. For example, the model making tradition is generally associated with a particular form of truth-telling: a better, more ‘truthful’ model is generally regarded as one that has the most amount of detail. On the other hand, the Romantics had generally regarded the sketch or radically incomplete painting as more truthful than a complete Classicist rendering. The third element was the image of the nuclear test. I first encountered actual photographic prints of these in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London. Alongside files full of documentation of actual military engagements and battles, there was file labeled ‘Atomic War’. I was interested how the photographic documentation of nuclear tests was filed as if documentation of actual war. Of course, as the tragic experience of veterans and ‘down winders’ of all nations1 where nuclear tests took place know, the effects on land and people were as if a small nuclear war had in fact taken place in those areas, and of course the tests took place during the Cold War era, but nevertheless, I was interested in the role that fiction – the spectre of a war that never happened – was used to label an archive of fact, so that the images of test clouds stood in for something else. Looking at the nuclear cloud photos in early 1999, I was struck how the vividness of that particular iconography had changed since the end of the Cold War – although of course the nuclear threat itself had not vanished, its representation had undergone some sort of shift in its cultural resonances. The Romantic images I roughly transcribed were ones very much still in circulation as archetypal of the English and European landscape, even though they are around 200 years old: their mythologies and fictions continue to cast a long cultural shadow in discourses of landscape and its history. Of course, the British nuclear tests actually took place on Australian Aboriginal lands or at Christmas Island (which were deemed to be mere ‘desert’ by European aesthetic sensibility), and in that sense there is a deliberate and provocative contrast insofar as these picturesque landscapes are haunted by the destruction that actually took place elsewhere. In keeping with the project I bought a set of oil paints from a hobby shop, repainting successive backgrounds on the same canvas once I’d made each photograph. I made the foregrounds of the dioramas from paper-mache and household filler, and remodeled the figures from kits of soldiers with modeling putty. I shot on 120 colour negative film, and the works are all hand C-Prints, with no digital manipulation. 1 Carol Gallagher’s moving photographic documentary book American Ground Zero (MIT Press, 1993) is recommended for readers interested in this legacy from the American perspective.