In 2017, a liquid cargo transporter Rubis and its subsidiary Rubis Mécenat entrusted the Flemish photographer Geert Goiris with a significant project: photographing twelve of its maritime and inland port sites over the course of a year. This commission, on view at FRAC Normandie-Rouen as well as at three waterfront locations in the city, poetically plays with light, abrupt colors, architecture, liquids, and reflections.
It must be a wonderful experience to travel along the Northern European coast. From Brest to Hamburg, from Le Havre to Antwerp, passing through Dunkerque and Felixstowe, Europe’s beaches border ports, docks, warehouses, and heavy industry plants. These sites signal the heritage of the dawn of our modern age and symbolize the activity of globalized exchange of commercial goods. These sites seem mysterious; they are as visible to the eye as they are impossible to access. They confront the onlooker with closed gates, and can be contemplated only from afar, with their towering smokestacks, their chapel-like cones, their oversize halls and silos rising like cathedrals with dehumanized naves.
Geert Goiris masterfully captures the various paradoxes. Transfixed, he observes in these spaces “people at work, charged with responsibilities. Most of actions, as well as products, remain out of sight. People work slowly, in sterilized, scientific environments.” One particularly impressive work shows two workers walking toward one of the sites, wearing protective jumpsuits. The chosen vantage point creates the illusion of a voyeuristic photograph, for instance taken using a telephoto lens, and reinforces the distance of the viewer with respect to the environment that is out of his control.
The supposedly dehumanized, or at least scientific character of this photograph is counterbalanced by another work, striking in its simplicity: The workday is coming to a close. Workers have just changed out of their overalls and hung them in the locker room. Two jumpsuits are hanging from hooks. Outside the frame, a worker enters, glances sideways at the camera installed on a tripod in the cramped room, hesitates whether to cross the viewfinder and finally hang a third jumpsuit. Once again, the photograph reveals a paradox. It is a silent yet bemused trace of the workers’ hustle and bustle. It could also be thought of in terms of anthropomorphic memory of workers bent over their task.
Geert Goiris plays with references to industrial photography. His oeuvre is reminiscent of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. In the 1960s and 70s, the German couple crisscrossed Europe and North America photographing silos, mines, forges, oil refineries, textile works, rubber factories, plastic plants, warehouses, water towers, and the realm of heavy metals.
Although decades separate Bernd and Hilla Becher and Geert Goiris, in the work of the Flemish photographer we find the same pipelines and platforms. However, Goiris never photographs buildings from the ground, which was the Bechers’ signature shot. Goiris, by contrast, diverts the eye from the structures through a play of colors and oppositions (concrete/iron, pipelines/the ocean). His attention to form and color definitively differentiates his work from the Bechers’.
The fascination of Peak Oil is not limited to differences in scale, to the paradox of the industrial man lost in the environment he has designed and created and which has surpassed him. Goiris looks down and his eyes glide over the wonders at our feet. From there it’s just a short step to sublimating the art of looking at what is right in front of our eyes. Photography is also at home in this shift in perception.
One of the most beautiful photographs in the series is worth all the visits to Rouen. At the Strasbourg site, the photographer came across someone plunging his face in a sea of color. The midnight-blue and purple-pink reflections make the image throb, lending it depth, softness, as well as vibration. This gem of an image closes the exhibition and offers a poetic vision of maritime industrial activities.
Arthur Dayras
Arthur Dayras is a writer specializing in photography. He lives and works in Paris.
Geert Goiris, Peak Oil
December 9 to January 18, 2018
FRAC Normandie
3 Place des Martyrs de la Résistance
76300 Sotteville-lès-Rouen
France
