Morganna Magee – Phenomena
Morganna Magee’s book Phenomena, made in collaboration with Orgini Edizioni, is delicate, beautiful, and human. Its clothbound cover is subtly patterned to resemble wood grain. The book is signature bound and sealed with ribbon and has gold accents on the stitching, cover and the edges of a few pages which are hand painted with a thin line of gold paint. This fragile beauty is mirrored by the book’s contents. Magee’s carefully observed and beautifully reproduced black and white photographs made on the unceded land of the Bunurong/Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nations, the foothills of the Dandenong ranges in Australia explore the symbiotic relationship between creation and destruction in nature.
Phenomena contains no introductory text or statement of the artist’s intent. Instead, when we first open the book we are met with its title, the artist’s name and a small yellow insert with a hand-drawn and unlabelled scientific diagram. This is followed by a hazy landscape photograph of trees and ferns in a wood and a close portrait of a deer at rest, lying on a bed of hay. This sequence of images and inserts with technical drawings – formally similar to the intersecting lines and shapes Magee finds in her photographs of plants and animals – continues throughout the book.
The book contains only one instance of text to help the viewer locate its subject matter, a quote from environmental writer Ben Rawlence: “Life is not the opposite of death, but a continuum. Evolutionary nature is an engine of mystery – of things we do not and cannot know. Every step is simultaneously an act of destruction and of creation, of life. There is consolation in the fact that we are always living in the ruins of what went before”.
Magee presents a world where everything is connected, intertwined, networked, growing in the shadow of that which came before.
Throughout the book, both in her images and in the additional drawings she chooses to include, Magee explores sinuous, veinous forms in nature. Branches, and to a lesser extent, webs, fur and feathers dominate her photographs. She presents a world where everything is connected, intertwined, networked, growing in the shadow of that which came before.
The woodland setting in which Magee situates Phenomena is both magical and terrifying. In a clearing in the wood small round specks, perhaps the tufted seeds of dandelions and thistles (referred to as fairies in childhood), float in the middle distance. A chromatic aberration in the top right corner of the image gives the landscape the appearance of glowing in warm light. Despite myself I can find no other word to describe this image than angelic. A few pages later the mood has darkened, black clouds hang over the landscape, those specks appear now like embers, hanging in the air above a woodland ravaged by flames or drought.
Alongside these evocative landscapes and still lifes Magee photographs animals and on one occasion a person. The animals in Magee’s work are almost always depicted alone, at rest or hiding or recently deceased. There is a moment in the book where we encounter what at first glance appears to be another of Magee’s quiet landscapes. On closer inspection however we find ourselves trapped in the gaze of a kangaroo. Its muscular torso is clenched and upright, its head is turned firmly in the direction of the photographer or viewer. This image in some ways perfectly represents the idea of photography as an embodiment of Kant’s idea of phenomena, the word which Magee borrows for the book’s title. Photography is the world as it appears to an observer, as opposed to the noumenon: the thing in itself. In this moment we confront the subjective gaze of another animal in the wilderness, its thoughts and our own are occupied by questions about the other: Who is it? What is it? Am I in danger? Should I fight? Should I run? Magee’s project reveals the symbiosis or connection between these subjectivities. Despite our understanding of the world based on our individual experiences of reality, phenomena, we occupy a shared world which is the sum of all these individual parts.
There are obvious questions about the political implications of Magee’s work. Her landscapes at times verge on post-apocalyptic and it is difficult, given her location in the world, not to question the role of environmental destruction in the formation of the environment she is working in. In particular, the darker images in the book invoke those made by photojournalists in the charred Amazon. Similarly, as the artist acknowledges in her personal statement, she is working in an area once occupied by indigenous people. Living in the ruins of what came before may be a less consolatory prospect for people whose ancestors were removed from the land by way of colonisation.
Phenomena is a subjective glance at Magee’s time spent in this landscape, making photographs, observing, and an attempt to translate and share that experience with the viewer through bookmaking.
I think, however, to read too deeply into either of these points would be a mistake. I don’t believe Phenomena is designed to provoke political discourse; its allusiveness is in part due to its unresolved nature as a photography project. It is however not necessarily useful to think about it as a photography project. Magee’s collaboration with Orgini Edizioni seems more about the bookmaking process and Phenomena appears to be a joint exploration into the photographer’s work and the book form rather than simply a vessel for delivering her images. Magee continues to make work in the landscapes depicted in Phenomena, many of the images in the book feature in her ongoing project Never It Was. Phenomena then is something else: a subjective glance at her time spent in this landscape, making photographs, observing, and an attempt to translate and share that experience with the viewer through bookmaking.
Morganna Magee
Orgini Edizioni 2023
