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The archive of the California Historical Society Collection is home to an extraordinary array of photographs taken between 1860-1960. Browsing its many pages one day, I became curious about the large number of records testifying to the Orange Empire. They opened my eyes to a whole period in the economic and cultural history of this region, a crucial but lesser-known stage in the development of one of the world’s most influential megacities.
The archive, naturally, is a chronicle, in a kind of raw and mixed-up way. The earliest images date to the 1880s, a decade of great democratisation for photography. And so in strict empirical terms, it speaks to only a sliver of Dartmoor’s human history. But the weight of the past is present in virtually every collection. You routinely stumble across Druidical antiquities and monumental relics from the Bronze Age; and, in the Francis Lee collection, arrowheads, axes, daggers and scrapers - all subjected to the cold gaze of scientific documentation. The archive is steeped in an expansive historical consciousness, testament to a time when photography became the handmaiden of both archaeology and antiquarianism.
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There’s a striking tension in the title of Richard Mosse’s new project. The conjunction of two concepts which really shouldn’t go together - one suggesting materiality, the other its opposite: a lingering resemblance of some departed being. Even in strictly metaphorical terms, the image doesn’t feel right, is jarring. We tend to think of ghosts as unitary, indivisible apparitions that may nevertheless contravene the laws of physics. And so the notion that they could somehow break is not intuitive. Spectres may appear, disappear and hang ominously over a place, unseen yet always felt, but they cannot crack like a precious glass vase. As the master-signifier for the cycle of imagery which loops appallingly onwards in Broken Spectre, though, this inherently discordant phrase is, I think, apt. What is the Anthropocene if not a historical epoch, or rather boundary Event, in which we have apparently ‘broken’ the very planet whose Holocene state now figures as a kind of spectre in political discourse?