Groundmagazine#24

ED RAKET

GROUND MAGAZINE

#24

Text by Lorne Darnell

ED RAKET Tracks of a caravan mount up and then wind below the crest of a sand dune. Sun light rakes across a canyon wall. A stream of magma cuts its way through pyroclastic ash, while snow drifts come to rest in the folds of worn, barren hills. In these images of sublime nature, there is no sign of human culture that might give us a sense of place. Film stocks and apparent processes vary so wildly that they give us no clue to the era, either. Are these lost images from Roger Fenton’s series on the Crimean War? From Matthew Brady or Ansel Adam’s work in the American West? Or are they film stills from Star Wars scenes on the planet Tatooine? Where are we, exactly, in the photographs of Ed Raket?

Maarssen, it turns out, a little suburb north of the Dutch town of Utrecht. It lies along the modest river Vecht, whose course, to the best of my knowledge, features no waterfalls and no canyons, grand or otherwise.

The way to the site brought us from the town’s little station through neat clusters of 60’s housing developments, under the A2 highway, past rows of pollard willows, some older farms, and along the edge of a rectangular man-made lake. But perhaps not in that order, as everything we passed was so nondescript that no significant landmark, beyond a distant church tower, could fix the path in my memory. We took a left and appeared to be running straight back into the A2. There was no sign of what could possibly have served as the model for Ed’s photos, and yet he said stop, and we leaned our bikes against two concrete barriers at the entrance to a large vacant lot. I anticipated something like this, from what he had told me. He said that it was a construction site, that they had been moving dirt around with no visible purpose for some time, and that he had been shooting there for nearly six years. But I expected something at least head high, visible even at a relatively close distance. There was nothing.

The near side of the ‘lake’ had a patch of whiter sand, vacant at this time in the early spring, with a double-wide, prefab trailer set down in the middle of it, all adjoined by a parking lot. The Key West Beach House, it was called, sure proof that nature hates a vacuum. As we began to walk out onto the site, in trespass apparently, I nervously eyed the Beach House as you do the wedding bar during the dry preamble of the ceremony. But as we went along, a little pond with steep sides opened up, invisible to me earlier because of the way the flat grey light merged its fore edge with the sand beyond when viewed at a distance. “Look,” Ed told me, and I saw the stratification of his monumental canyons in three centimeter sections, rising just a meter above the water, each layer representing not a geological age, but the passage of time between dump truck loads of sand and the occasional putzing of bulldozers. A different kind of sublime overtook me here, not that of the German Romantic painters, but one generated by the dissonance between expectation and reality, as when we discover that a passageway is in fact a clever trompe l’oeil painted on a flat wall.

The next hour was a long string of these moments, and I asked Ed again and again if the divots only inches deep that marked the whole site could have actually formed his Badlands landscapes. I saw several plovers scuttle along when we came closer to the water, and I realized that those tracks around the ‘dune’ were indeed produced by an animal, though not a camel but a small bird. The magma was simply iron-rich water and oil slick, bubbling up from some layer of pollution beneath the sand and running out in tiny rivulets across the ground.

I could only think of Jacob van Ruisdael, the great Dutch landscape painter who transformed the low, modest dunes of Haarlem into veritable wilderness. While van Ruisdael tarted up his pictures with fantasy elements inspired by travels along the Mittelrhein, much of his genius was in the simple manipulation of scale, an effect often achieved, as by Ed, through the use of low vantage points. The break of a minor falls is put at eye level in the foreground, exaggerating its height, while the stunted scrub oaks behind appear as if they tower several meters high. There is rarely any human presence immediately visible in van Ruisdael’s scenes, nothing that would break this illusion of scale. Breughel sets his Netherlandish peasant dramas in fantasy mountain landscapes, but Raket, like van Ruisdael, never abandons what is actually at hand. He reimagines the otherwise flat Dutch landscape as something truly sublime.

GROUNDMAGAZINE # 24 2015 PHOTOGRAPHS @ ED RAKET WWW.EDRAKET.COM TEXT @ LORNE DARNELL

Chief Editor: Mieke Woestenburg office@groundmagazine.org