Only after reaching the bottom did we stop
And listen to the drifting echoes —
As long-dreaded farewells when words are lost to worlds
In the embrace of death: of flesh with unimagined earth.
-- Peter Skrzynecki

Borrowing a title, “Lost to Worlds,” from this fragment of a poem by Sydney writer Peter Skrzynecki, Anne Ferran’s 2001 series of photographs is comprised of landscapes that look down at our feet, or just beyond them, to the ground about to be walked. There is nothing heroic about these views—no grand vistas or picturesque landmarks, just grass and a few desultory stones scattered about. The grass rises and falls gently, hinting at impressions and hidden accumulations, traces of buildings that may have once stood there many years ago. Shadowy foregrounds accentuate these markings in the earth, giving them a gravitas that they might not otherwise warrant. Without horizons, the grounds appear to stretch into infinity in all directions, cropped only by the camera’s vacant gaze. The square format of these images adds to their impassivity, flattening the space and countering the pictorial recession implied by the movement from dark to light, turning naturalistic scenes into abstract, and therefore emblematic, ones. The prints fill the field of vision entirely; this large size and the colorlessness enhance the abstraction.

Ferran adopts a diptych form more familiar in religious art, as if to imply that what is pictured is in fact sacred ground. But this pairing of images, each representing a slight shift in our line of sight, also insists that what we see is a sign, an artistic fabrication rather than a faithful mirror of an outside world. Refusing to tell us anything about what we see, to give us the explanatory information that we crave, these photographs challenge us to bring our own knowledge and desires to them. They represent the ground of history itself, waiting to be inscribed with meaning. For Americans, these nondescript landscapes might conjure the field at Gettysburg or the Greasy Grass of Little Big Horn, sites redolent with contested historical memories. With some prompting from a caption, Australian viewers could provide a more specific reference, the colonization of that continent as a British penal colony in 1788. These seemingly benign landscapes are all that remains of a prison for women convicts located in Ross, Tasmania, an island off the southern coast of Australia. Such prisons, known as Female Houses of Correction, or simply “female factories,” operated in Australia from 1828 onward, with the Ross Female Factory being used from 1847 to 1854.

Little is known about the women who were incarcerated there, usually for the crime of getting pregnant. Conditions were brutal—cold, wet, and muddy, and infant mortality rates were high, with hundreds of deceased babies buried in unmarked graves on and around the site of the prison. With only a few archaeological fragments by which to remember the prisons, the history of these women has become practically invisible, except in our imaginations. Ferran’s photographs bring past and present into communion, asking for a momentary acknowledgment of the suffering and loss that accompanied the development of our own comfortable lives.

Ferran’s work is currently on view in the “Deadpan” show, which I co-curated for the James Gallery at the Graduate Center, CUNY. The interview that follows was conducted this March on the occasion of the show.

Geoffrey Batchen: You've done a number of photographic projects in response to historic sites. Once you've chosen a site, how do you go about deciding what to do? To what degree do you think of yourself as a historian rather than an artist? Is there a distinction between the two?

Anne Ferran: Yes, there is a distinction, and no, I’m not a historian, though it’s probably true that history is a more imaginative/art-like enterprise than it used to be. Artists have a lot more freedom than historians to be selective and subjective when it comes to working with that kind of material. For example, in searching an archive, I might look for something that would be of peripheral interest to a historian. One time, I was looking for the first names of all of the women admitted to a particular asylum. It’s hard to imagine that a historian would be searching just for that. Another source of difference is in the outcome. I have produced photos, videos, textile works, picture books, and some writing. Not all historic sites interest me. In fact, relatively few do. Feeling that stir of interest is a sign that if I start work, sooner or later, I will hit on what to do. I might pursue a subject over a long time or even come back to a site after a gap of years.

GB: Your historical projects frequently seek to make aspects of Australia's history visible that are otherwise invisible, such as the lives of women convicts. Why is photography the best means of doing this kind of work? I ask because many of your photographs end up bordering on abstraction. In what ways is their photographic quality important?

AF: One reason for using photography is that those invisible people, usually social outcasts, would either not have been photographed at all or would have been photographed repressively (Allan Sekula’s term). So, using photography now is partly an answer to its absence then. I also use photography because of its fraught relation to the evidential, the way that it seems like an act of straightforward recording but never is. That plays out a bit differently in each body of work. The photographs that I’ve made of the convict ground (the sites of former female convict prisons in Tasmania) in the series “The Ground at Ross/Lost to Worlds” are of the kind that one might expect to convey information but don’t or can’t because at these sites there is so little left to see. The absence of content is reminiscent of abstraction, but the work is not about that. The places are empty now because the buildings were dismantled and carried away because people wanted to forget convict origins, especially female convict origins since they were [considered] the lowest of the low. I also like the way that the emptiness of those sites and the deadpan aesthetic of the photographs echo one another, so it’s an expressive or aesthetic relationship as well. Photography’s being historically a “minor art” also makes it good for the subjects that interest me.

GB: You have also worked in video and installation. Is the word “photographer” one that you embrace or reject?

AF: Photography is not the only way that I work, though it is still a medium that I am closely associated with. I use the word sometimes to describe what I do. It doesn’t offend me, but more often, I just say that I am an artist.

GB: We seem to be in an era of big pictures. Could you say something about the importance of scale to your own work?

AF: Artists feel that if their pictures aren’t big, nobody will look at them. And that’s possibly true, given how many images there are. For me, though, that kind of immediate, powerful impact is not so desirable, since it’s the fact of being overlooked or invisible that’s drawn me to the subject in the first place. I would prefer for the audience to spend more time with the images. With the photographs of the convict ground, I scaled them up and made many images that are similar, but the intention was always ironic, to play the size and the number against the lack of anything to see.

GB: What is the role of the viewer in your work? To what degree do you preconceive that viewer as you make the work? What is the ideal response to a given body of your work? What is the responsibility of an artist to society today?

AF: I don’t envisage any particular audience when I’m making the work. In one sense, I make the work to satisfy myself, to make life more intelligible and bearable. On the other hand, because I am interested in history, nationality, and culture, I’d like to reach a bit beyond a contemporary art audience. As for responsibility to society, artists clearly do have one, but we are not alone in that. There are many ways to exercise responsibility, and I’m not sure that artists carry more responsibility than anyone else. It’s become a bit strange to me that people look to artists to be responsible before the people who have real power. But they do...

GB: How do you see your work in relation to an international discourse on photography? Do you see yourself as a local artist, responding to specifically Australian concerns and traditions, or do you work with international trends and issues in mind? Do you think your work is legible to a non-Australian audience?

AF: Mine is a slightly paradoxical situation, in that the concerns of much of my work are local but there is nothing distinctively Australian in the imagery. It doesn’t particularly look like Australia, but it is located there quite specifically. Maybe this is a corner that I’ve worked myself into. On the other hand, like many Australians, I travel a lot, and the contemporary art world is so global now that it would be hard to escape its [influence] even if one wanted to. I have started to make some work in London as well as in Sydney. I feel about equally local and global.