John Yang & the island as boundary object: photography, marine light & spectralities of national feeling on Ile de Sein

Abstract

This paper explores a series of photographs taken on the Ile de Sein, a 1 km long island off the French Atlantic coast, by architect-photographer John Yang in 1960. Today, these photographs have developed a powerfully auratic life of their own, shaping affective understandings of the island through the multiple spectralities they awaken, thickened by the image’s (and place’s) continued existence in time. This photo-spectrality is underscored by the tendency for islands to serve either as places of loss and nostalgia (for instance, through cultural anxieties about postwar reconstruction and decolonization) or of dystopian visions (through fears about the Ile de Sein’s possible disappearance due to sea-level rise). A more-than-representational analysis suggests that Yang’s photographs’ contemporary affects can only be understood through an expanded concept of place in which material-environmental interactions infiltrate politics, society, and culture. The interplay between figural and metonymical presences in them simultaneously mediates a lifeworld of ‘islandness’ and broader instrumental and discursive histories through which the Finistere littoral has shaped the geographical narration of the French nation. The key to these non-terrecentric empathetic affects is constantly-shifting marine light, at once extra-discursive and atmospheric, and best captured by monochrome photography.