Still lives with past lives
Spending time in former mining towns, his work captures eerie human wastelands
Dillon Marsh’s photographs are devoid of humans, yet the presence of humans is palpable in each frame. The Cape Town-based photographer, who says his work is concerned with “various aspects of how humans interact with the world around them”, has a knack for concision in conveying the effect human habitation has had on specific locales.
Diamonds Aren’t Forever, a series that looks at the aftermath of diamond mining in the twin West Coast towns of Alexander Bay (South Africa) and Oranjemund (Namibia), conveys so much about the social and physical engineering that accompanies mining by looking at the vacant spaces created by its aftermath.
This approach is recurrent through much of Marsh’s work, which pierces through the idyll of suburban and rural South African life: disguised cellphone towers in their environs, a river as it runs through different neighbourhoods or abandoned farm houses against their parched rural landscapes.
Travelling to Namibia’s border with South Africa to photograph towns that had been sealed off to the public, Marsh produces photographs that can be split into two distinct wholes: the empty, forlorn houses of Oranjemund and the windswept garages of Alexander Bay, complete with the decaying carcasses of auto body shells.
In both sets of images, the harsh, sandy terrain, the broken windows and the wilting fauna create the sense of the elements coming not to reclaim human inventions but the vainglorious egos of their creators.
“A lot of the towns had these recreational places as well that had been instituted by the mine,” says Marsh. “So there were yacht clubs, golf courses and things like that that the mine had provided for the residents of the town but a lot of these have become defunct basically. I look at how people interact with the environment and how the environment interacts with man-made things as well.”
Marsh works in a mode he refers to as typology, which gives his oeuvre a conceptual cohesiveness that perhaps betrays an activism inherent in his work, an activism that Marsh is not willing to admit to in conversation. For What It’s Worth, for example, uses landscape and computer-generated imagery to compare the output of a particular mining house or site with the environmental impact of excavating a particular mineral.
It is with diamond mining that these incongruences hit at you the most. If compressed into a dense mass, the 14.5-million carats (extracted out of Kimberley’s Big Hole) would amount to probably a metre in diameter, Marsh says.
“With each various element there was a different outcome,” says