Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Canny is best defined as the ability ‘to know, or to understand’, where the uncanny sits outside the realm of one’s familiar knowledge or perceptions. In this paper, I will discuss uncanny landscapes depicted in photography, focusing on abandoned places of the COVID 19 pandemic lockdowns. During this unprecedented socio spatial event, global lockdowns resulted in the instant abandonment of urban and architectural spaces around the globe. These were photographed and published widely. They reminded us of post-apocalyptic landscapes popularized in cinematic science fiction. Amidst the mass devastation of the pandemic, these photographs were eerie, yet strangely beautiful. In this paper, I explore the uncanny nature and the relative aesthetics of these photographic places and spaces. I will argue that for a space to be a place, it requires embodied human interaction and experience. Without the latter, I will argue, an architectural aesthetic of absence emerges. An aesthetic understood through the concept of the gaze: the spectator’s gaze, and in this case, the photographic gaze. Through this discussion I hope to show how these photographs produced during the lockdowns reveal the uncanny nature of abandoned architectural places, and how these can be sources of melancholy, but also of beauty.