Ford, Simon. 2025. Landscape Photography as Cognitive Mapping: The Temporal and Spatial Politics of Garden Festival Wales and its Territory. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This research project, which is theory and practice based, is a response to Fredric Jameson’s call for a practice of cognitive mapping. The field of study is the site of Garden Festival Wales, Ebbw Vale, South Wales, that occupies, mainly, the former location of Ebbw Vale Steelworks. In bringing attention to Jameson’s concept, it is hoped to reaffirm social landscape photography’s political agency.

Garden Festival Wales was the last of the UK National Garden Festival programmes that took place between 1984 and 1992. They were major public events staged in various regions of the UK as the industrial economy was being dismantled in favour of financial services and a capitalism increasingly operating at a global level of value production. Blighted industrial land was remediated prior to the construction of the festivals, thereafter their purpose was to promote the regions in anticipation investment and jobs would follow. However, there was another motive behind them, and it was ideological, the advocation of a new future reconstructed on the values of consuming and ownership.

The research study proposes the ruins and remains of the garden festival are emblematic of this transitional period of UK history. From a society and economy, at the time, established, primarily, on industrialism and the collective to a society based on finance and the service sector, at its core a liberal individual.

The social and aesthetic philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno is central to the theoretical interests of the project, together with Walter Benjamin’s history as philosophy organon. Notably, his speculative concept of the dialectical image – a method of schematising history in such a way it questions what seems invulnerable in the present. The research asks how his concept can be made appropriate for a practice of photography that has the former industrial landscape as its main interest.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00039191
Keywords:	Fredric Jameson Cognitive mapping, Walter Benjamin, dialectical image, Theodor Adorno, negative dialectics, social landscape photography, political art, aura, global capital
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Visual Cultures
Date:	30 June 2025
Item ID:	39191
Date Deposited:	14 Jul 2025 14:36
Last Modified:	14 Jul 2025 16:08
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39191

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