Fragmentary Landscapes: Revealing Seismicity in the Imagining of Southern California

Abstract

This paper introduces ‘Terra Incognita’, a contemporary photographic practice located in the relationship between photography, seismology and the visual representation of landscape in Southern California. Photography and geological science have been used together since the late nineteenth century to document this region, and Terra Incognita can be situated within this visual culture of using photography in the representation of scientific knowledge, in particular to extend the threshold of visual perception. Concepts borrowed from archaeology provided a framework for the Terra Incognita practice, and also (together with discourses on Southern California, photography itself and seismology) for constructing meaning in the photographs. The seismic activity caused by the extensive fault zone which exists in this region is immense, with the topography moving at a rate of about five centimetres every year. Southern California, through sitting precariously on the edge of the North American continent, challenges thinking about how any landscape can ever be known. It has been described in terms such as ‘utopia’ and ‘sunshine’, but also in the same breath as ‘dystopia’ and ‘noir’, and the idea of things being in flux or unsettled has been central to creating an identity of place. The paper concludes that within the limits of the photographic medium, of human perception and of seismic prediction, ‘fragmentary views’ become the only way to know this ‘unknow-able’ landscape.