RAF Garth’s Ness is a former NATO LORAN A radio navigation station located in south Shetland. Active from 1961 to 1978, this gave crucial aid to ships and aircraft crossing the Atlantic [1]. Now however, all military activity is long since gone, and the site has been left to its slow decay.

When walking around the ruins here, the visitor encounters a surreal and still atmosphere. Remains such as still-intact light-bulbs or left behind machinery are still to be found, bringing the past tangibly close. Some quarters are identifiable, for instance former bathrooms or kitchens, but the purpose of other strange and dark rooms is unintelligible. Secrecy still seems to linger at RAF Garth’s Ness and a visit to these eerie and solitary remains reveals little about their alleged additional role as a ‘listening station’ in the Cold War [ibid] .

Richly coloured patina of moss, rising damp and peeling paint is everywhere, signs of nature’s decaying forces, yet strangely beautiful in this sinister place. The combination that we find at RAF Garth’s Ness of mystery, time and decay can be said to evoke a powerful sense of the sublime. Yet this site is very different from picturesque or grand gothic ruins, often described as ‘sublime’. The “…new meaning…” that seems to inhabit buildings as they start to decay, as discussed by sociologist Georg Simmel in his essay ‘The Ruin’ (1911), one where time’s logic seems to bring together human will and “…the working of non-conscious natural forces…” in a “…common root” [2] no longer seems to quite fit with the sinister new ruins at Garth’s Ness.

In fact, in these remains from our recent war-scarred history, the will of nature and the will of humans almost seem at odds. As our own potential for destructive behaviour through war (and ever-increasingly environmental damage) only seems to grow, it can be difficult today to imagine an idea of nature’s innate reason like Simmel’s - one where our actions are ultimately fleeting and part of a much larger and all-encompassing progression of nature and time. The developments in science and understanding in the last century, as well as driving the creation of modern and technologically advanced societies, have also advanced warfare. Conflicts can now be fought across huge distances through the invention of technologies such as radar and satellite navigation, and nuclear weaponry has introduced a form of destruction which involves the very atoms which make up our physical world. It is said our actions over the last centuries will leave a radioactive footprint in the earth’s geology, evidence of what may become know as the ‘Anthropocene’ era, or ‘Age of Human’ [3]. These new and chilling kinds of warfare and destruction affect our complex physical environment in many more ways than we can immediately see, and it seems we are only just beginning to understand the full implications of some of our destructive actions.

This modern world of both advances in understanding and increasing levels of chaos has also brought with it new and more complex ideas about the nature of reality and time. For example, philosopher Henri Bergson in his book ‘Matter and Memory’ (1908) proposed how a deeper understanding of differences between past and present was key in understanding the nature of matter and our perception of it. Bergson understood reality as an ‘‘…aggregate of ‘images’..." [4]. Our perception of the present moment was, he argued, largely informed by memory and past ‘memory-images’, making the present something continuously created anew by the past - continuously “an accumulation of the past in the present”.

 In today’s world, it can be said that our advanced technologies provide us with more and more ways to ‘accumulate our past in the present’. Through networks and communication technologies, our daily lives are saturated with alternative realities in places and times other than our own, and photographic images in particular shape our experience of this. Advancing in parallel with progress in science, technology and warfare over the last centuries, the photograph has allowed the modern world to capture, record and repeat itself, firstly through negatives and printed images, and today through our networked virtual environment. This means that now, as well as ‘memory-images’ (as defined by Bergson over a century ago), we now use these networks and images to continuously shape our present, leading to a strange and “double-faced” view of time as discussed by Laurence Scott [5]. In discussing the recent exhibition ‘Borrowed Time’ at Jerwood Space, London, Scott highlights the idea that our technology has led us to a strange age “defined by both innovation and nostalgia” where social media “creates a mood of eternal ‘nextness’” but also encourages us to create continuous archives of our lives –  today it seems “…Our pasts have never been more present” [ibid].

In taking photographs of Shetland’s ruined yet strangely futuristic wartime sites, I became more aware of these dualistic notions of time. My photographs of the mysterious interior spaces at RAF Garth’s Ness, when collected together, seemed to evoke a feeling of restless journeying through a strange labyrinth of crumbling doorways and corridors. In experimenting with printing these photographs on tracing paper and layering them, I sought to make images with a sense of shifting uncertainty, their contained ‘snapshot’ of reality starting to break apart or fade away in parts. Each printed image here isn't a distinct moment in time – looking through them in their translucency we already see another space unfolding behind whilst the memory of the last image still lingers.  

The form of a concertina book seemed to add to this feeling of a constantly unfolding reality, leading the viewer to look backwards and forwards simultaneously as they move through the pages and around to the start again.

A common feature of all the photographs used here, and a thread which runs through the whole book, is a distant window in each image. Illuminated by light, this seemed to give a feeling of a continuously unreachable endpoint, a glowing 'beyond' which is always distant as the viewer travels through the pages. In seeking to evoke pre-digital forms of photography in the slide- or negative-like qualities of the images in this bookwork, I considered also ideas of the strange nostalgia of our "double-faced" era [ibid]. In a world driven by the momentum of progress, it seems our present times, and increasingly our resources and natural environments, are often sacrificed for aspirational futures which are perhaps forever beyond reach, and we are left with an increasingly fragile ‘now’.

Aimee Labourne, 2016

1. ARCHAEOLOGY SHETLAND.ORG. 2016. 'Site in Focus - RAF Garth's Ness' (online). 

2. SIMMEL, Georg. 1965. 'The Ruin' (1911). In Kurt H.Wolff (ed.) Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics by Georg Simmel et al. New York: Harper & Row, 259-66.

3. DAVISON, Nicola. 2019. 'The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?' The Guardian (online). 

4. BERGSON, Henri. 1988. Matter and Memory (1908). Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books.  

5. JERWOOD / FVU AWARDS.COM. 2016. 'Laurence Scott: 'Borrowed Time' (online). 

// See also: Laurence Scott: 'Borrowed Time', talk at Jerwood Space, 4th April 2016.