HIDDEN – PRESENCE IN ABSENCE “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge so suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”– Dick Cheney, 1998 (Then CEO, Halliburton. Now Vice-President, USA).

The great American curator John Szarkowski once wrote about a lecture given by the American photographer Lee Friedlander in Graz. The taciturn Friedlander was irritating his audience by saying nothing about the dozens of slides he was projecting except to note the location where each photograph was taken. Eventually, someone voiced the question: why did Mr Friedlander feel it necessary to give this somewhat prosaic information with each slide he showed – and was it so relevant that he had made the image he was showing in Chatanoogoo, or Tulsa? Friedlander thought for a moment and replied that if he had not been in that particular city he would not have been able to make that particular photograph.

This use of the word ‘particular’ illustrates something fundamental about photography. It is anchored to the particular, a particular scene, thing or person at a particular place at a particular time. Photography is particular, literal, concrete. That is its glory but also its limitation, especially if a photographer wants to photograph history – and paradoxically, there is no better subject with which a photographer can engage than history.

In his project, Playing Fields, Jens Liebchen is interested in one particular aspect of today’s Great Game, although we hear relatively little about it in comparison to the players’ primary preoccupation – the Middle East and the current disaster in Iraq. But as in the Middle East, the main issue in the area investigated by Liebchen is oil. As in the Middle East, there is a potentially dangerous clash between the Occident and the Orient. And as in the Middle East the leading player, inevitably, is the United States, with China and Russia as the other protagonists. A new Great Game is being played out in the region known as the Caspian Basin.

When the former USSR broke up in the 1990s, the southern Soviet states around the Caspian Sea suddenly became of strategic importance in the geopolitical game. The equation is a simple one: countries once ruled by Moscow’s iron fist – such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Stalin’s homeland, Georgia – are ‘free’ once more. They sit at an interface between the Christian and Islamic worlds, between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. That could hardly fail to attract the attention of the United States. For America, there is the enticing prospect of establishing military bases hard by the backdoors of Russia, China and Iran, and gaining the primary geopolitical influence in this sensitive region. Furthermore, the Caspian Basin, an area at least half as large in area as the United States, is rich in oil, natural gas, and other mineral resources. It is estimated to be the world’s third largest gas and oil field, but the largest in terms of untapped natural energy.

But what was Jens Liebchen to photograph? He could have shot oil derricks or some of the environmental blight caused by the oil industry, but that seemed too literal a statement, especially for an artist and not a reportage photographer. When he asked an expert on the region, Professor Stephen Reyna of the University of New Hampshire and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, the answer was brief. “You will see nothing,” he was told.

But Liebchen was looking to make work relating to the playing out of the Great Game in the Caspian Basin, and make us think about its implications, even if at first glance his photographs appear to have little to do with it. He has attempted to conjure up a metaphor for what is happening in the area, seeking to make visible the invisible by photographing the invisible, or more precisely by photographing the nearly invisible: the disregarded, the ephemeral, the ubiquitous, the fleeting. In short, Jens Liebchen has decided to make use of one of photography’s abiding traits, its transfigurative power, where the close, forensic scrutiny of an ordinary object can yield a multiplicity of interpretive clues for sifting by the cultural archaeologist, or the open-minded, perceptive viewer.

The politics of the Caspian basin – barring unwelcome distractions like human rights and religious tensions – revolve around energy. So one of the metaphorical leitmotifs permeating Playing Fields revolves around the primary source of natural energy and, as it happens, the starting point for photography – light from the sun. He has used sunlight and shadow to articulate the difference between light (energy) and shade (lack of energy), articulating the basic reason why the superpowers are scrabbling over the Caspian. A rectangular shaped shadow on the ground, or a triangular patch of light in a shaded area, are frozen by the camera and lose their ephemeral nature becoming not only solid and permanent but as persuasive symbolically as oilrigs. They look like trapdoors set into the earth, leading to the lower regions where the oil and gas at the centre of the game are located.

As in his earlier book, DL07, where nothing was what it seemed and ‘new’ pictures were conjured out of the most innocuous situations, Liebchen employs a similar strategy in Playing Fields, yet one that is quite different in its effect. Here, he uses ordinary items of street furniture such as a pole or a box – to suggest the nefarious intentions of the oil companies and their technological disregard for the environment. Street furniture is seen everywhere and is usually disregarded – except by photographers, for whom it is suggestive of many things. For Liebchen it is the visible sign of modern technological systems, communications, power and energy, nominally benign and of benefit to mankind, but also potentially sinister as in the case of surveillance. Usually, Liebchen photographs these enigmatic pieces of urban infrastructure in juxtaposition with scrofulous bits of landscape, a clear pointer to the environmental issues involved in the extraction of these products required so desperately by the industrial nations.

All Liebchen’s images are vertical in format, and he has made a particular point of incorporating strong horizontal and vertical elements, the vertical ‘penetrating’ the horizontal as an oil derrick penetrates the ground. The formality is deliberate. In photographing ‘nothing’, one is inevitably thrown back on the formal, and the more Liebchen’s images approach the abstract, the more one tends to look for their metaphorical references, the more one questions their apparent literality. In only one image is there any sign at all of the photographer’s nominal subject, where a drilling platform is seen out at sea, beyond a vertical pole which makes yet another reference to the business of drilling.

The fact we can see nothing of the Great Game in Liebchen’s pictures does not mean it is not there. It is present by its very absence, an emptiness that might be described as infernal. Walter Benjamin, who first termed the emptiness in Eugène Atget’s pictures as ‘infernal’, concluded that it betokened the scene of a crime. To many, the Great Game is a crime, and certain crimes have been, and are being committed in its pursuit. Pressing human rights issues in the Caspian region tend to be conveniently ignored while the oil is flowing.

But the emptiness, the nothingness in Liebchen’s imagery is also redolent of the fact that even in democratic countries the people have little say, little idea even of what is being done in their name. “You will see nothing.” Even the players frequently find the Great Game has a momentum and rules of its own, rules that can change with bewildering speed. Frequently – as we have since seen in New Orleans – the geopoliticians and the multinational CEOs are not so much playing the game, as the game is playing them. When I began to think about this piece, hurricane Katrina was merely a threatening weather system, somewhere far out at sea. Now it will undoubtedly impact the future of the Caspian Basin. The ominous present alluded to in Jens Liebchen’s eloquent photographs is clearly also an ominous future.