The wartime batteries, pill boxes and tank traps which hug our coastal landscapes and patrol our rivers serve as potent reminders of historical events. These concrete monoliths have themselves occasioned polemical debate regarding their heritage status. Often sitting uneasily within leisure areas such as Forestry Commission land, coastal footpaths and beaches, the very presence of these ruins renders the leisure landscape contested, interrupting our experience of the present with the tangible affect of the past. It is the uncontrolled quality of these heritage sites which interests me: they are seldom regulated and their propensity to function as ‘stray objects’ (Edensor, 2008: 330) is a source of fascination for me as a photographer.
Populated by these everyday ruins, the landscape becomes haunted; spectral, a place in which the presence of the wholly other is felt. Time seems out of joint: I feel myself seen in the landscape by the other, from another perspective in a different time. The hauntological landscape is an unconventional heritage site which ruptures the comfortable security of the present: time leaks; past into present, present into future, future into past. Photography plays an interesting role in the dialogue about these landscapes insofar as it is a medium which can be described as spectral (Derrida, 1998: vi). A medium which is concerned with the inscription of light, a kind of ‘spectrography’ (Derrida and Stielgler, 2013: 37-51) or ‘ghost writing’ (Wall, 2013: 238). This paper will consider several of these rural, unregulated heritage sites and will reflect on what we might learn from theses places. The paper will be presented from the perspective of the photographic practitioner and will be accompanied by photographic images of the fieldwork locations discussed in the paper.

References:
Derrida, J. (1998) Right of Inspection, trans D. Wills New York: Monacelli Press
Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2013) ‘Spectographies’ in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (Eds) M. del Pilar Blanco and E. Peeren New York: Bloomsbury
Edensor, T. (2008) ‘Mundane Hauntings: Commuting through the Phantasmagoric Working-Class Spaces of Manchester, England’ Cultural Geographies 15 (3): 313-333
Wall, G. (2013) ‘Ghost writing: photographing (the) spectral north’ Visual Studies 28 (3) 238-24

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