FIGURE 5.1 Wire Sketches. © Liz Ellenwood
CHAPTER 5
Staying in Line
Conductivity
HAVE YOU EVER FELT that political correctness has gone so far that it feels like the tool of the oppression it is meant to combat? Have you ever seen one bumper sticker too many telling you that there is something wrong with you and how you ought to live your life?
If so, have you ever deliberately left a light on just to prod your hippie-fascist parent's obsession with energy conservation? And to add insult to injury, subsequently felt guilty about it because you don't fundamentally disagree, in fact quite the opposite, but simply can't stand hearing one more “don't forget to turn the lights off dear” before you even had a chance to reach the switch?
Your parents are of course the product of their parents and the apparently limitless growth and consumer generation, which they were rebelling against. The austerity brought by War and The Great Depression, which can be traced back to The Great Crash, informed each preceding generation in turn. Each new generation tries to carve out an existence in response to what had seemingly traumatized them the most at the hands of the previous one. This kneejerk is as predictable as it is important to understand. The inevitable trajectory this causes is not unlike one electron bumping into the next down an electrical line, all the way getting heated and losing energy at the same time.
Identify the Elements
Liz Ellenwood's Wire Sketches engage black and white photography at its core—literally in black and white and tonally in true opposition to one another. There are essentially no or few mid-tones in most of her self-described sketches that could have been drawn with a steady hand and black pen on white paper (Figure 5.1).
What Are We Looking at?
Ellenwood has stripped the vaunted richness of gray tones in her gelatin silver prints and reduced her images to their lowest common denominator. No exposure, paper-white, complete exposure and maximum density in the black areas. At first this seems like an almost sacrilegious waste of all the non-exposed silver in her paper. The prints themselves seem to represent a deliberately wasteful and inefficient exploitation of the paper and latent chemistry.
Yet, there is great beauty and truth in her extravagant compositions. Indeed, truth in a photograph, who would have thought? We all know that photographs lie or, at best, are so subjective that what at first appears as unassailably self-evident easily evaporates when the frame is shifted just a little.
How Can the Images Be Interpreted?
The great truth Ellenwood so poetically references is inefficiency itself. For non-photographers it would not be relevant how she initially sets this stage through her process, though it is a great opening line. The inefficiency is the subject matter itself. Transmission wires lack efficiency. Through the process of transmitting power energy is lost. Only rare, highly expensive superconductors can transmit power with virtually no loss.
How this loss is to be mitigated in the future represents research into which many companies are investing substantial R&D resources. This I see as part of Ellenwood's topic. For the purposes of this analysis, inefficiency and loss are quite enough to consider. Ellenwood's vignettes don't show us how the transmitted energy is generated, where it is sent from, or where it ends up. As such she opens up windows on intersection, energy, and the interminable flow of information. This makes our lights work, supplies our entertainment, powers businesses and global industries, and even the NSA depends on this grid (Figure 5.2).
Highways of voltage transmission where one electron bumps into another down the line in a chain reaction of endless invisible movement are not dissimilar from our motorized highways, and like our roads, this infrastructure has to be continuously maintained. Wildfires, falling trees and branches due to storms or heavy snow, and even cars smashing into an electrical poll can black out anything from a few homes to multi-state-wide areas.
The grid is highly vulnerable, visually polluting, or beautiful, depending on your viewpoint, and arguably, a thing of the past. European countries that are highly developed bury their power lines the way we bury our gas, water, and sewer lines. Developing countries that are just starting to provide energy and information choose wireless information distribution and localized energy sources such as solar and geothermal. As such we are looking at another aspect of the divestment in our infrastructure. When the visible distribution grid is going to disappear in the US is anyone's guess, but its vulnerability to weather and even terrorism is as troubling as the many coal-burning or nuclear power plants that supply our massive energy consumption.
Conclusion
Ellenwood's photographs therefore speak, like minimalist Japanese haiku, to sources of power, the nature of information or misinformation traveling on our energy and information highways, and are imbued with a nostalgic simplicity about a realty that is anything but simple. As mentioned, Ellenwood “wastes” most of the silver waiting to be exposed in her paper. Were the images digital, they would use a negligible amount of ink in comparison to other photographs.
FIGURE 5.2
Wire Sketches.
© Liz Ellenwood
The dawn of widespread individually generated renewable power and its subsequent storage will pit the individual, legislators, and energy corporations against each other in new and unprecedented ways. The scalability of energy, through innovations like the new Tesla home battery, which can draw and store energy, is reflected in her process too. This entanglement of competing interests will be far messier than the wire salad that is currently part of our visual landscape.
Assignments You May Want to Challenge Yourself With
•Energy
•Visual haiku
•Vulnerability
•Infrastructure