The Visible Face of Things
The world as we know it is constantly evolving and may become unrecognizable in generations to come. Various forces, including nature, politics, and society contribute to the immediate shifts in what we consider familiar. Peter Holliday’s primary focus is on the northern environment and its inhabitants, emphasizing how place and nature shape their lives. Topography has a profound impact and plays a significant role in shaping the future through socio-political factors. Peter’s work serves as a reminder that the land existed there before us and will persist long after we are gone. The deep stillness of the north, the intensity of the sound of nature, and the revelation of one’s aspirations come to life through the lens Peter presents in his work.
In this interview, we discuss how the environment of Peter's home country, the land of his childhood, has early on shaped his connection and curiosity toward the environment and its effect on human history. As Peter explains, “From a very young age, I already understood that this landscape was not simply Scottish but that it presented the horizon of many other worlds, some of which had not existed for thousands of years.” We also talk about his projects: Borealia, A Path in the Snow, and Where The Land Rises. Themes that emerge in connection to the projects deal with the relationship between land and human ambitions, land and politics, and land and ecology, highlighting the intrinsic challenges and threats we face as a society.
Peter Holliday is a Scottish photographer who explores relationships between humankind and the environment. He earned his MA in Photography from Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki. He is a host of The Land Behind, a podcast that delves into the connections between art, culture, and the environment.
Words by Nastasia Khmelnitski
‘Looking back, I can see how the camera offered a way for me to make sense of the otherness latent within the place I recognised most immediately on the surface as my home.’
My Narrative
When choosing photography as the path you wanted to pursue, what helped you decide on the narrative to explore and to focus on the environment, topography, and the emotional connection and relationship of humans with it?
I grew up in rural Scotland. From a very young age, I already understood that this landscape was not simply Scottish but that it presented the horizon of many other worlds, some of which had not existed for thousands of years. The landscape where my life began, the Roman Empire, once ended. On the bank of the river in which I swam as a child lie the traces of a site archaeologists have described as one of the best-preserved earthwork forts in the entire Empire. I spent countless days during my youth playing hide and seek in its trenches.
I have since learned that the photographic pioneer George Washington Wilson made some of the earliest landscape pictures at the fort in the 19th century. Not only is this the landscape where I first encountered the historical character of the place before I had yet been taught a formal definition of landscape, it is also the environment where I exposed my first images when I began photographing my surroundings as a teenager. The lessons I learnt from this environment are no doubt implicit within all the images I have made since. Looking back, I can see how the camera offered a way for me to make sense of the otherness latent within the place I recognised most immediately on the surface as my home.
‘Today, as the ice caps melt at an unprecedented rate, the delineation between the Arctic and the sub-Arctic grows increasingly unstable. Once perceived as a remote frontier, since the 20th century, the Far North has become increasingly militarised.’
Borealia (ongoing)
In Borealia, you go back to explore the connection of people inhabiting a land to their environment and the effect one has on the other. Let me quote your text from Instagram connected to the image of the crooked crucifix, “I experienced holiness here I have witnessed in just a few other places. With the only other signs of life being the fresh polar bear tracks in the snow and the walrus skeletons on the beach, I watched the void stretching into the distance fill with memories more ancient than the seascape before me.” What is the main theme you research in Borealia?
Where is the Far North, and what does it look like? What are the ecological anxieties and political suspicions that shape our perception of this landscape, and what do they reveal about our own historical moment? Borealia is a working title to bring together these considerations.
Myths about the Far North have persisted for millennia. When the Dutch cartographer Willem Barentsz set sail on his first of three voyages in search of the Northeast Passage in the summer of 1594 it was still widely believed that weather conditions improved the further north one travelled. Instead, Barentsz’ expedition reached Novaya Zemlya before being stopped by impassable ice conditions. The mythology surrounding Barentsz’ eventual discovery of Svalbard and his subsequent death on Novaya Zemlya in 1597 later inspired the imagination of 19th century painters, including Christiaan Julius Lodewyck Portman, Eugène Lepoittevin, and François-Auguste Biard. Our expectations of the contemporary Far North are, in part, an inheritance of their idealisations.
Today, as the ice caps melt at an unprecedented rate, the delineation between the Arctic and the sub-Arctic grows increasingly unstable. Once perceived as a remote frontier, since the 20th century, the Far North has become increasingly militarised. When Barentsz first sighted Novaya Zemlya, he could never have imagined that its terrain would be used centuries later as a testing ground for the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. Not only do these histories bring into question our idealisations of the Far North during a moment of deepening ecological anxiety and political suspicion, they present a challenge to traditional definitions of the Arctic region as a barren and untouched wilderness. It’s also important to remember that the Far North has been home to various cultures and communities long before the arrival of European explorers and settlers.
‘From my own perspective as a photographer, I perceive an urgent need to use the power of new media to deepen the way we, as artists and researchers, empathise and share ideas with each other in an economic climate increasingly devastating for arts, culture, and nature.’
The Land Behind
You launched the podcast, The Land Behind, about a year ago, speaking with local photographers about their work. What were the most striking or interesting themes you discovered from the episodes and conversations you had?
From my own perspective as a photographer, I perceive an urgent need to use the power of new media to deepen the way we, as artists and researchers, empathise and share ideas with each other in an economic climate increasingly devastating for arts, culture, and nature. This is why, in 2023, I began creating The Land Behind as a forum to amplify the voices of photographers, visual artists, philosophers, anthropologists, and other individuals involved in artistic practice, cultural research, and environmental discourse.
Since the podcast is not limited by a single environment, it aims to bring together perspectives from across multiple disciplines so that we might learn to see better the relationship that exists between art, culture, and nature. Many of these conversations touch on ethical issues concerning the natural environment and our place in it. In a recent discussion with the author and researcher Kat Hill, we explore what mountain bothies can teach us about the histories of places. In another conversation with the philosopher Alphonso Lingis, I had the opportunity to ask him how important photography has been to the development of his thought. I’ve also had the pleasure to speak to the anthropologist Tim Ingold, whose thinking on landscape perception has been an important point of reference in my own artistic research. Hearing from the artist Sian Davey about her photographic practice as a former psychotherapist was also very interesting.
‘In a world of increasing ecological crises, competing nationalisms, and closing frontiers, the image of nature as a shared meeting place between other ways of being, both human and non-human, is in urgent need of having to be revisited.’
A Path In The Snow (ongoing)
What is striking about the project and your choice of perspective for the narrative is the parallel between your journey and the decision to relocate from Scotland to Finland and the story of Mikel Utsi, who made a journey from Lapland, a province in Sweden, to Scotland with his reindeer. It emphasizes the definition of the concept of ‘home’ as fluid and expands its value not only for humans but also, in Utsi’s case, for the animals that traveled with him.
What have you discovered about yourself and your journey through the research you made about Utsi? What could be the direction you will expand the narrative to as the project is ongoing?
It is the questions we ask ourselves as photographers that open up the landscapes where our answers are to be sought. My series A Path in the Snow documents an ongoing journey that began with the question concerning why there are reindeer in Scotland. In particular, it is a response to the journey travelled by Mikel Utsi, a man from Swedish Lapland who emigrated to the Scottish Cairngorms with his reindeer in the 20th century, setting a precedent for contemporary rewilding projects.
When I first started thinking about this history, I had only recently moved to Finland to continue my studies. Having just arrived in this new terrain, I was generally interested in what it means to understand one’s situation in dialogue with horizons foreign to one’s own. The genesis of A Path in the Snow was, therefore, as much a reflection on a person who helped shape Scotland’s contemporary cultural landscape as it was a desire to learn more about the Nordic environment I found myself in.
In a world of increasing ecological crises, competing nationalisms, and closing frontiers, the image of nature as a shared meeting place between other ways of being, both human and non-human, is in urgent need of having to be revisited. Commemorating horizons that remain culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and even zoologically foreign to our own not only afford us new ecologies to understand the character of our own environmental responsibility, it refines our sensitivity towards a view of nature that might not yet be visible to us from our own finite perspective, opening the possibility of having the world revealed to us in entirely new and unexpected ways.
‘The pre-eruption landscape may be a world I never knew. Still, its memory is legible on the facial expressions of many of the inhabitants I spoke to.’
Where The Land Rises
In this project, you focus on the effect of the eruption of Eldfell in 1973 on the local environment and the lives of people living in the Heimaey area. We encounter the concept of ‘home’ and the distortion of it due to the natural disaster that changed it for humans and wildlife. What I especially love in the project is the intertwined portraits that help create the narrative and establish the connection to the place through the perception of the other.
What is your learning from the connection to people you met on the island about the loss that some still remember and some might not even witness and their connection to the land? What did you learn from the encounters with people while visiting this land? In what way did it enrich the project?
The landscape of Heimaey reminds us that the earth we inhabit is always emerging for us in new, surprising, and sometimes disturbing ways. When the eruption of Eldfell began without warning in the early hours of 23rd January 1973, most residents were asleep. An immediate evacuation began. When the islanders were finally able to return to Heimaey six months later, entire streets had disappeared from the map. Nonetheless, the intriguing aspect of the eruption lies in the inhabitants’ successful efforts to protect their homes from total destruction by managing the impact of the lava flow by spraying it with cold seawater to form a protective dyke. The pre-eruption landscape may be a world I never knew. Still, its memory is legible on the facial expressions of many of the inhabitants I spoke to. One resident, aged 15 at the time of the eruption, described the event as “the night everything disappeared.” Another told me, “When we finally returned there was no Before the eruption, the eastern shore was the most beautiful part of the island. Now it is ugly.”
The philosopher Alphonso Lingis has spoken of the weight of the world as something we feel in our bodily sensibility. On Heimaey’s terrain, you are not only met by the visible face of things, you move through an environment that imposes upon the body the burden of its fragility. The volcano ahead, the clouds above, the lava below, the houses emerging from beneath a layer of ash, the waves crashing on the shore, the bitter wind against which the face is always exposed, not only do these features evoke the sense of a history far more ancient than the life of the body, they foretell a world that will not last forever. The volcano represents something that disrupts the order of human existence, precisely because it tears us apart from the false expectation that the world as we know it will always be here.
