Exploring, Photographing and Vacationing in J. G. Ballard’s Airport Landscape

Abstract

Landscape and architecture has played a major role in J. G. Ballard's writing, I have in particular been fascinated with the use of airports in his work. When attempting to hunt down and photograph J. G. Ballard's airport landscape police and security would disrupt my ability to take photographs meaning initial plans would be altered and I would turn my focus to the peripheries, spending time cut off from the infrastructure, dwelling in abandoned waste land and forgotten patches of wilderness. Inadvertently I would replay the roles of certain characters from Ballard's work, becoming marooned and learning to adapt to the landscape. Photographing these places would yield unusual results, images resembling a science fiction landscape, turning the realist properties of photography on its head. I would discover that the extreme nature of the airport landscape influences those who experience it, so when Ballard's work portrays the modern landscape he is also revealing the unseen psychology of the humans inhabiting it.

Keywords

• psychogeography
• contempoary
• architecture
• urban planning
• photography
• sprawl