Perhaps there is some kind of centrifugal force that makes boundaries and peripheral zones such fertile ground for photography. Atget and Doisneau, for example, were at times drawn to Paris’ outskirts – seeking out the districts far removed from the city’s centrepieces. Mark Power has explored the London’s suburbs that fall beyond the A-Z; Thomas Joshua Cooper has charted the shorelines that fringe the Atlantic; even John Gossage’s Berlin work, though it was completed in the heart of the capital, focused on the overlooked, neglected or denied – and thereby marginal – great fact of the Wall. Limits and border areas seem rich in possibility, capable of yielding their own sets of appearances and meanings, and inviting reflection on the centres from which they depart.

from East of a New Eden  © Alban Kakulya & Yann Mingard

Alban Kakulya and Yann Mingard’s recently published East of a New Eden is no exception. The book’s photographs are divided into three sections – ‘Landscapes,’ ‘Portraits and Infrastructures’ and ‘Satellites,’ acompanied by a series of essays, documents and graphics – all of which examine the new eastern borders of the European Union, from Estonia in the north to Romania where it meets the Black Sea. As perimeters go, it is barely there. That is, regardless of its constitutional, jurididal or cartographic presence, on the ground Europe’s eastern boundary most often does not exist. Many of the photographs of landscapes, then, are devoid of built features, or indeed human presence. Expanses of snowy wastes; distant, barely perceptible horizons; dense forestry and sparse marshlands; a sole tree in a whiteout. There are only occasional reminders of the region’s significance – a security camera scanning a field, a train passing a set of lights, an outpost, a lone sentry.

from East of a New Eden  © Alban Kakulya & Yann Mingard

Kakulya writes that the project’s genesis owes sonething to a moment in 2000 when “we happened upon an article in the newspaper Le Temps. It spoke of a ‘fortress Europe’ then under construction and of the ongoing process of expansion.” Their investigation has taken the form of individual explorations, frequently in the company of patrolling guards, of Central Europe’s border regions: one started from the Baltic, the other from the Black Sea. “Every time we encountered a scene that picqued our photographic interest, we stopped beside the border…”

from East of a New Eden  © Alban Kakulya & Yann Mingard

The often benign, ahistorical aspect of the landscapes is dispelled in the second series of pictures – ‘Portraits and Infrastructures’ which looks at (presumably unsuccessful) immigrants and security officers of various nationality. The border asserts its institutional or military presence. The bunk beds and bare walls of incarceration feature in the portraits of detainees. They peer from the open upstairs windows of Poland’s Lesznowla camp (downstairs they are barred shut). And at Slovakia’s Secvec camp, a line of men awaits orders behind a wire-topped gate. They are guards though, in uniform. They might confirm Kakulya’s observation that “the watchtowers of the European Union seem to have different functions, that of keeping immigrants out and that of asserting the Union’s hold upon the new countries, of preventing them, in some sense, from escaping.”

from East of a New Eden  © Alban Kakulya & Yann Mingard

The final section of pictures uses satellite imagery to represent the locations first depicted in ‘Landscapes.’ The use of a remotely-sensed, automatic representational schema allows Kakulya and Mingard to introduce another way of looking, literally and figuratively. Together with the essays, which address the boundary’s geography, history, archaeology and cultural meaning, East of a New Eden offers a sophisticated and receptive account of its subject. In the project’s multivalence and interdisciplinarity the authors even achieve a little border-crossing of their own.

from East of a New Eden  © Alban Kakulya & Yann Mingard

East of a New Eden
European External Borders – A Documentary Account
by Alban Kakulya & Yann Mingard
Published by Lars Muller
Available in the Foto8 online shop

(Alban Kakulya’s subsequent book, Taking Land: Crimea 2010, was published by Foto8 in January 2010)