NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION BASED ON T.S. ELIOT’S GREAT MASTERPIECE ILLUMINATES OUR CONTEMPORARY WASTELAND WITH COLD & UNDERSTATED FEROCITY

WORK BY AWARD WINNING PHOTOGRAPHER ADRIAAN VAN HEERDEN PAYS HOMAGE TO ELIOT’S “THE WASTE LAND” AS ITS CENTENARY NEARS

THREE YEARS FROM THE CENTENARY OF T.S. ELIOT’S MASTERPIECE “THE WASTE LAND” A BOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHY LENDS POWERFUL VISUAL IMAGERY OF LONDON

The Irish poet Bernard O’Donoghue, lecturer in medieval literature and modern poetry at Oxford University, says that Adriaan van Heerden’s new photographic collection Unreal City illuminates our contemporary wasteland with cold and understated ferocity through the prism of T.S. Eliot’s great masterpiece, The Waste Land.

Eliot wrote The Waste Land in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, with civilization apparently in ruins. As we are approaching the centenary of the first publication of this monumental literary achievement, van Heerden suggests that one does not have to look far for evidence of our current wasteland. A decade of austerity has resulted in 130,000 unnecessary deaths and 320,000 homeless people living on our streets, as wealth inequality keeps growing and property becomes more and more unaffordable, especially in London. Property development has brought uneven benefits, with tens of thousands of poorer families displaced and struggling to cope as a result of welfare cuts.

Van Heerden’s interpretation of The Waste Land in bleak but beautiful photographs shows how wealth inequality, homelessness, the waste of young lives due to crime, spiritual vacuity, political and moral failure in our contemporary society are prefigured in Eliot’s great poem. Brexit has lifted the lid on these horrors and van Heerden’s Unreal City forces us to face up to them and challenges us to do something radical to solve them, in a way that has never been done before.

In Eliot’s poem London is the Unreal City, the background against which many of the characters have their entrances and exits. Van Heerden takes us into the heart of darkness of contemporary London, forcing us to experience the harsh everyday realities of its most vulnerable inhabitants.

O’Donoghue, who wrote an essay for Unreal City, says: “When Bertrand Russell read these lines in the final section of the poem –

Falling towers

        Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

        Vienna London

        Unreal

he remembered that he once told Eliot of a nightmare in which he had a vision of London as an unreal city, its inhabitants like hallucinations, its bridges collapsing, its buildings passing into a mist. In some senses of course, as Adriaan van Heerden’s photographs richly illustrate, London is all too real, in its inequalities, materialism and the failure of its inhabitants to make meaningful contact with each other. Elsewhere Eliot said “Human kind / cannot bear very much reality”; van Heerden insists that we must acknowledge the intolerable discomforts and harshness of city reality which are not hallucinatory.”

                   “London Bridge is falling down”

According to O’Donoghue, van Heerden shows that we now live in the future of Eliot’s Waste Land, and that much of what is traumatic in our world is anticipated or described with great urgency in this prophetic document of nearly a century ago. Van Heerden’s pictures show how it is literally true, but more importantly they show the ways in which it is spiritually and figuratively true. For example, it would be easy to illustrate from the modern nightmare city literal representations of some of the most familiar lines of Eliot’s poem, such as the Dantesque passage from which he takes his title:

        Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many. (lines 60-63)

This might well have been illustrated by trudging, despondent lines of people, like in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But van Heerden’s chosen picture is much more imaginative: a street of seedy shopfronts with a single dark figure walking past.

Similarly, for line 17, “In the mountains, there you feel free” there is a picture of a tapering high-rise block of flats, an ironic image of unfree, prosaic aspiration: a subject which is returned to for line 343 of the poem: “There is not even solitude in the mountains.”

Many of these pictures illustrate the familiar modern paradox, noted by Elias Canetti and others: being lonely amid crowds.

This kind of creative mismatching is the hallmark of van Heerden’s style; the illustrations of other familiar lines from the poem manifest the same adjustments from the physically real to the abstract and vice versa. “A heap of broken images” (line 22) might invite an image of detritus; but van Heerden’s is a beautiful reflection of towers and clouds in the glass panes of the Gherkin.

His picture for “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (line 30) shows furniture discarded in a leaf-strewn walkway: an unlikely but evocative symbol of transience. We are reminded of Dr Johnson’s critical statement, admired by Eliot, about the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets: that by them “heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Johnson did not like the habit; but it describes very well Eliot’s own practice and van Heerden’s response to it.

Van Heerden follows Eliot into the city’s real, named places, often its historic churches: Saint Mary Woolnoth, Magnus Martyr, All Hallows-by-the-Tower, St Pancras Old Church. The churches are in keeping with one of his recurrent themes: the failure of religion to fulfil a spiritual or socially healing role – in Eliot’s terms, “the dead tree gives no shelter.” There are other real places too: King William Street, the Lloyds Building, Carnaby Street, Madame Tussaud’s, Canary Wharf, the Blavatnik Building – linking to another primary theme in the book: the inequalities and brutalities of a materialist, mercenary society. Most urgently real are the bus-stop where Stephen Lawrence was mortally wounded, and the burnt Grenfell Tower.

Van Heerden describes his work with Eliot’s poem as “a conversation”; but progressively as you work through the pictures, you see that it is close to the contradictory essence of Eliot’s great poem. His project is a decidedly political one, motivated by outrage at injustice and inequality. Generally, Eliot is seen as apolitical – Old Possum who keeps out of sight – or even reactionary. But it is remarkable how well the salient lines of The Waste Land lend themselves to radical perspectives.

“April is the cruellest month”

Great art, it has often been said, must not be depressing; we must not despair in the face of the futility and anarchy of our world. It has also been said that good art is always political; that is certainly true of van Heerden’s response to The Waste Land. The injustice, violence and materialism of the unreal city are squarely faced; but the city represented here is also recognisably real. Coleridge said of Charles Lamb that to him no sound was “dissonant that tells of life.” Eliot’s view of the world has sometimes been said to be disdainful or supercilious. Van Heerden shows that it also has within it a humanity to which these pictures give vivid, if harsh, reality.

Unreal City will be launched at Bonhams in London (the international fine art auction house) on Monday 2 December, 6-8 pm. The event will include a small exhibition of pictures from the collection, a drinks reception and a short speech by Bernard O’Donoghue. The event is supported by London South Bank University.

To attend this exciting event, please RSVP to Matthew Haley: +44 (0) 20 7393 3817 or email [email protected]. Places are strictly limited so early reservation is advised.

For more press information please contact

Bendigo Communications on [email protected]

or call 07970 563958

Notes to Editors:

1.           Link to Adriaan van Heerden’s webpage: www.adriaanvanheerden.com. Contact: Adriaan van Heerden, [email protected], +44 7813 306 434.

2.           Online resources are available via the following link (including high resolution files of some of the pictures from the book): https://bit.ly/avh-pr-190930.

3.           Bernard O’Donoghue was born in Cullen, County Cork, in 1945, later moving to Manchester. He studied Medieval English at Oxford University, where he is a teacher and Fellow in English at Wadham College. He is a poet and literary critic, and author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995). His poetry collections are Poaching Rights (1987); The Weakness (1991); Gunpowder (1995), winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award; Here Nor There (1999); and Outliving (2003). His work of verse translation, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was published in 2006 and a Selected Poems in 2008. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2009. His most recent poetry collections are Farmers Cross (2011) and The Seasons of Cullen Church (2016), both of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

4.           Adriaan van Heerden is an international award winning photographer whose poetic and poignant photographs have garnered accolades around the world. He came to photography via a PhD in Philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge, where his dissertation explored the fundamental roles that tragedy, humour and love play in our shared human existence and experience of the world, and he now uses photography as a means to illuminate these themes. Adriaan’s work has been exhibited in London (including Cork Street, Pall Mall, and Mayfair), Barcelona, Kyoto and Singapore, and his pictures are held in private and corporate collections in the UK, the USA and South Africa. Unreal City is his most ambitious project to date and brings together four of his main interests: philosophy, poetry, photography and politics.

5.           One of the pictures from Unreal City is currently shortlisted for the ArtGemini International Art Award. Three other pictures from the collection were shortlisted for international art awards in 2018.

6.           An estimated 320,000 people were homeless in the UK in 2018: https://www.bigissue.com/latest/social-activism/how-many-people-are-homeless-in-the-uk-and-what-can-you-do-about-it/

7.           Austerity resulted in an estimated 130,000 preventable deaths: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/01/perfect-storm-austerity-behind-130000-deaths-uk-ippr-report

8.           The book launch will take place at the Knightsbridge offices of Bonhams, on Montpelier Street, SW7 1HH.

9.           Bonhams, founded in 1793, is one of the world's largest and most renowned auctioneers, offering fine art and antiques, motor cars and jewellery. The main salerooms are in London, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, with auctions also held in Knightsbridge, Edinburgh, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney. With a worldwide network of offices and regional representatives in 22 countries, Bonhams offers advice and valuation services in 60 specialist areas. For a full list of forthcoming auctions, plus details of Bonhams specialist departments, please visit bonhams.com.

10.       Copies of the Unreal City limited edition art book can be pre-ordered at: https://bit.ly/avh-unreal-city-book.