The discourse around photography has a long historical convergence with the language of the trace. Theorists of the photograph—from Benjamin, Sontag, and Barthes, to name but a few—have used the language of the trace to describe the uncomfortable nature of the photographic object. It is, many have said, something of a haunting—a promise of presences whose real nature is one of absence. This, of course, is held to be the nature of the photograph, regardless of its subject matter. But how, we might ask, is this chain of signification further problematized when the subject matter itself is marked by a materiality of traces. Such is the problematic these photographs—photographs made in the flood plane stretching to the East of St. Louis—present to us. It is, to continue the framework from above, a double haunting, a double indexing, of absent presences.

As a landscape, this flood plane—known as the American Bottom—is quite simply, a difficult landscape to see. “Forbidding both to the eye and hand,” writes the author of an 1881 history of the region. And with this forbidding, also understood as a withholding, closure is deferred . Which is to say, it is an irreducible landscape. Irreducible to any one of the easy theoretical and aesthetic categorizations that inhabit our ways of thinking through landscapes—natural/manmade, human/non-human, productive/waste. It is a landscape that, through the visible presence of traces and active processes of reinscription, resists easy closure.

More than almost any landscape in the country, the American Bottom has been cast in contradictory terms. A tally of the language found on these walls might make this apparent:

This language is not so much a logical paradox, as it is a mark of the complicated ways landscapes mean. For it is in the meaning of this landscape, rather than any more-or-less accurate description, that these text diverge.

The photographs in this exhibition were made over numerous slow and deliberate visits to the American Bottom by the authors. Slow and deliberate because it is quite simply a landscape that demands this mode of encounter. The text, interspersed as unreliable windows of description, is all taken from historical writing reflecting on this very territory as well. County histories (those ubiquitous boosterish documents of the 19th century) interlace with the words of actual settlers and with the cutting eye of Charles Dickens’ American Notes, among other sources. These two modes of encounter, then, mingle on the wall as an unfinished and unresolved descriptive impulse