Daniel Kariko
Interview: Daniel Kariko: Storm Season (2006–11) and SpeculationWorld (2008–10)
Interview with Dr. Adam Jolles, Associate Professor of Modern European Art and the History of Photography, and the Art History Department Chair, Florida State University.
Tallahassee, Sept. 30th, 2012.
Adam Jolles: You’ve been photographing the landscape for a while now. You studied at Arizona State University with Bill Jenkins, who curated the New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman House back in 1975. Much of your work has investigated what Jenkins called the “man-altered landscape.” What led you to the two series you’re exhibiting here together? On the surface they seem very different—one’s in black-and-white and the other’s in color, one concerns the historic waterfront of Louisiana, the other contemporary suburban development in Florida—but I imagine you have a strong sense of what ties them together.
Daniel Kariko: I think that the overarching theme of these two series is the disappearance of natural landscape.
While I was a graduate student in Arizona, I made work that was more personal and narrative. It was not until a couple of years after graduation that I started observing the parallels between the images from the New Topographic work and the landscape I inhabited in Florida. I started thinking of Florida as the “closing bracket” of the work that Jenkins curated in 1975. The start of the new developments in Robert Adams’ images seemed to mirror the land sprinkled with now foreclosed new developments in central Florida.
I come from a country that was “disassembled” during the 1990’s war. I always thought of that as a strange geographical process. Although I don’t often refer to it, this became an umbrella motive for me. I enjoy investigating the process under which landscape transitions into different states. In case of these two series, I observed the landscape that is disappearing under the human influence. In SpeculationWorld this process occurred through the construction of new housing in place of agricultural land in Florida. In Storm Season this process appears natural, although Louisiana wetlands disappear due to a number of connected human activities that include channeling of Mississippi River, and Oil industry related continental shelf subsidence.
In addition to disappearance, these two series address a particular time reference within these two landscapes. Where SpeculationWorld is a snapshot of one time period, emblematic of our recent economic and political situation, The Storm Season is a record of continuous changes of Louisiana estuary, through recent hurricanes and BP oil spill.
AJ: It’s interesting that you refer to the landscape in transition. Both of these series address a cultivated landscape that is changing—commercial docks that are decaying, houses that are overrun with weeds—not a natural, idyllic one that is under threat.
DK: Perhaps because of my background, I am attracted to landscape that is inextricable from human activity. I am interested in the way that the land is commoditized by the people who own it, or simply observe it. The landscape that is idyllic represents no interesting point of discussion for me, because it is not a space that most of the people occupy.
AJ: Is it fair to say that all of the spaces you’ve photographed in these two series are abandoned? What drew you to them in particular? To what extent do you try to register the fact that they were once occupied?
DK: I am interested in post-apocalyptic motifs. Without trying to sound too pessimistic, I’m attracted to the idea that these spaces were once occupied and used by people. I’m interested in their narratives, and how they affected the land they inhabited. This probably relates back to my childhood in Yugoslavia, during the Balkan conflict.
I consciously seek out human absence in these images, much like Richard Misrach does in Desert Cantos.
AJ: When you were in Orlando doing the groundwork that would culminate in SpeculationWorld, George Packer’s article “The Ponzi State” appeared in The New Yorker (Feb. 9, 2009). Packer’s essay was a powerful indictment of the rampant speculation that Florida developers had been engaging in, and I remember thinking at the time how much it would have benefitted from a portfolio of your prints, which underscore his points effectively. Your images don’t just provide documentary evidence, however. They’re carefully constructed, rich in irony and detail, and well-versed in the history of recent landscape photography.
DK: These images grew out of a larger project documenting the changes in Florida Family-owned farms. At the time, I lived and worked in Tallahassee, and had a “front door” view of the massive clearing of farmlands to make room for speculative tract-housing developments. Then suddenly, in 2008, the development stopped, and I started looking at the landscape that was rendered useless for housing as well as for agricultural use.
At the time when The New Yorker article came out, John Raulerson, my collaborator on the Farm project and I rushed to document the areas mentioned in the essay, the hotspots of speculative housing, now undergoing the highest rate of foreclosure in the entire state.
Later, we got a chance to use a small plane, and photograph the locations from the air as well. In my mind, these images immediately evoked the aerial images of Emmet Gowin, and housing images by Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams.
AJ: I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry when I’m looking at them.
DK: I think that’s true. I like to make images that will pose questions, rather than emotionally direct the viewer. I think my work is successful when it exists on the edge between extreme emotional states.
AJ: You used polaroid film and a pinhole camera without a lens to make the images of Louisiana. The photographs seem more nostalgic to a certain extent, as a result, aesthetic, but rich in the amount of information they convey. You’ve spent a lot of time in Louisiana over the past decade. Why did you choose such a process for this particular series?
DK: I photographed in that particular area of Louisiana since 1999. In summer of 2006, after hurricane Katrina, I decided to rethink my objective approach of the color documentary image. The pinhole images taken with a hand-made 4X5” camera, using a Polaroid T55 positive-negative film, insured that I would have images that were physically made and developed on the location, making a direct emotional reference to that landscape.
Unlike the SpeculationWorld images, which were intended to objectively record the stillness of the Florida real estate bust, the images from Louisiana were meant to exist in a suspended, timeless sense of continuous shift. A number of the photographs were taken at the same location, over several years, and they are barely recognizable as a same location.
AJ: The foreground seems to play a significant role in the Louisiana pictures—rocks, pieces of driftwood, an oversized catfish. Is this for compositional effect?
DK: This is a result of pinhole camera’s wide angle and unlimited depth of field of relative focus. I enjoy how these images are abstracted through the diffraction of the pinhole aperture. The foreground is compressed and objects change their scale. Sometimes I photograph objects from only a couple of inches away, so small things are pictured as fairly large and significant on the film.
Copyright Roberto Muffoletto 2012