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Odds and Ends. By Marie Quéau.
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Photographs by Marie Quéau
Area Books, 2021. 180 pp., 8¾x11".
Of Odds and Ends, Marie Quéau writes that she “fundamentally undertook [the] work as an obituary for our planet.” The idea is provocative. If an obituary is a notice, a public declaration of someone’s death with an accompanying biographical synopsis, the notion of creating one for the earth, sampling images from its more than four billion year history, represents a fascinating (if not extraordinarily daunting) curatorial task.
Filled with the smoke of still-blazing or just-extinguished fires and strewn with the detritus of decommissioned airplanes, Odds and Ends does not exactly seem to be engaged with that task; its imagery resembles a vignette more than a biography — a summary not of the planet’s whole history but rather of the period that Quéau perceives to be its ending.
The project may not have the precise character of an obituary, but it certainly feels adjacent to one. It is, without a doubt, a book about death, a visual forecast of the Anthropocene’s impending conclusion. Having spent some time with the book, though, I am left wondering: What else might this be? Who (or what) might it be mourning?
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Aside from her description of the work as an obituary, Quéau has elsewhere called Odds and Ends a “poem without men.” Maybe elegy, then, might be an appropriate categorization. The book opens with an ethereal poem from Amélie Lucas-Gary that shows a protagonist named Lucie wandering a surreal and desolate Earth, detailing the types of planetary destruction that will follow in Quéau’s photographs. The language of the poem and the visual language of the photographs share a tendency toward abstraction; their linkage, in content as well as form, suggests that Lucie is the protagonist, “Who loves the crevices of this crushed world / Where disaster’s facets can be seen, / And its intense core.” Such a love for the world is what makes its smoldering worth grievance, and the book an enactment of that grief.
The book is populated with images of artifacts, some even with tags posted in the ground, like in the investigation of a crime scene. (These are, perhaps, the titular “odds”). Many appear to be taken from inside laboratories, including one image of human skull fragments glued together into their original shape. One arresting photograph shows a grave-shaped hole in a rock, illuminated by a halo of light. The visual quality of these images is austere and forensic, a compendium of pieces of evidence. Humans, though mostly absent, evince a presence through their gloved hands, and life surfaces in the forms of new growth, a couple of apes, and a several-page sequence of full-bleed photographs of water. Earth is persisting and renewing itself throughout the book; what seems to have been mostly extinguished is humanity. The photographs might be an effort by the remaining few to take account of the scope of the destruction and diagnose what went wrong, like an autopsy of humanity.
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My effort to recategorize this book as something other than an obituary is likely me getting mired in a semantic distinction — it operates on many planes and is likely all of those possibilities at once. It is a complex but stark portrayal of where the trajectory we are on could lead us, for even if they represent an imagined future, they are photographs made with the material of what has already past. They show an ending that is already unfolding. How ubiquitous it becomes is left to us.
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Zach Stieneker holds a BA in English and Spanish from Emory University. Following graduation, he spent several months continuing his study of photography in Buenos Aires, Argentina.