ABSTRACT
Imagine a perfect location. Look at these images. Two views: a beach of sorts, a cluster of possibly urban
buildings. They could be anywhere, any place, this beach, these buildings; there is nothing in the photographs to render the particularity of Place. No landmarks, no familiar iconography, no human interest. If photographs are inescapably descriptive, as some would have it, then these are perversely nondescript. They evoke the ideality of Anywhere or Nowhere. If the photograph is documentation, why do we not instantly recognize these views as the Being of Place? From one perspective it’s because nothing takes place (so more is happening than just the ellipsis of iconography). There is no obvious happening, no promise of eventuality, no incipient drama. There is an erasure of the figurative (in the still photograph drama is always only incipient, projected as a potential, or a trace, in the spacing of bodies and things, the rendering of Space into Place).
