Unstable ground: a photographic reflection on the landscape of Table Mountain

van der Merwe, Eugene

Unstable ground: a photographic reflection on the landscape of Table Mountain

Master Thesis

2022

Abstract

In my MFA project Unstable Ground: A Photographic Reflection on the Landscape of Table Mountain, I have photographed the landscape of Table Mountain, surrounding parks and green spaces to reflect on the entanglements between its history, notions of nature and landscape and subjective relationships to place. I have tried to make sense of this site through my photographs, research, and writing, not looking for stability but seeking to reveal the precarious, the in-between, the unseeable, while also trying to learn more about my own relationship with this landscape and land and how it allows or denies photographic representation. Table Mountain's geology, composed of layers of rock and sediment, is overlaid on its surface with human impositions, and its cultural history is similarly composed of the sedimented layers of meaning brought to it by all those who have interacted with the site over time. These layers and erasures contribute to this project's reading of the site as a palimpsest. Each place I photographed represented multiple stories, multiple opinions, multiple histories and multiple points of view, and I have used different methods of layering in my photographs to evoke these strata and deposits.

Keywords

Fine Art

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