Spaces in Crisis Photography of Abandonment, Desolation and Emptiness in the U.S.A.

Abstract

The essay explores the spatial myth of America as constructed through photography, focusing on the American West. It argues that photography has historically shaped the American myth by visualizing the frontier as a contact zone between wilderness and civilization. Using a theoretical framework grounded topological analysis, the essay juxtaposes 19th-century images of progress and expansion with contemporary photographs of desolation and abandonment, revealing a haunting return of the past through spatial configurations that challenge and perpetuate the myth differently. The essay traces the development of Western photography from Civil War-era documentation to the King Survey’s images that combined technological progress and wilderness, revealing how photography’s evidentiary power was intertwined with expansionist imperialism. It then examines the contemporary photographic representation of empty, decaying American spaces as a form of double exposure, where past progress and present abandonment co-exist and entangle topologically as one. This new perspective incorporates psychoanalytic concepts of extimacy and spatial theories such as Soja’s Thirdspace to argue for a breakdown of the binary myth of the frontier and a reconfiguration of photographic spaces as sites of lived experience and haunting. Ultimately, the analysis puts forward the notion of a photographic "ontopology," where images are not mere temporal records but spatial analogies that sustain the myth of the West through an ongoing visual dialogue.