Photographer Attila Ataner is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘LANDSCAPES OF MODERNITY’. To see Attila’s body of work, click on any photograph.

These photographs are part of a larger series, which I have worked on over the past 15 years. With these images, I attempt, in part, to translate some of my academic work on environmental philosophy into visual-photographic form, an effort to express my ideas through art rather than scholarship alone. This form of urban-architectural photography is my effort to build a personal visual record of the so-titled “Anthropocene”, which I take to be a descriptor for the period of late-stage modernity, a period wherein human constructs begin to overpower and eclipse nature itself, i.e., “nature” as that which was previously wholly self-sustaining, self-generating, self-regulating and “pristine”. I urge the viewer to reflect on the contemporary experience of living in extensively built-up, “artificial”, geometrically arranged spaces. I offer these photographs in the hope that you will feel compelled to consider the uncanny aspects of our “modern” dwelling spaces, especially our urban spaces and the buildings that surround us: namely, that they are staggeringly beautiful and yet, at the same time, brutal and oppressive. We tend to experience this kind of mixed reaction even just in confronting the sheer, mass scale of the buildings around us: for example, their overbearing, absolute density relative to our bodily stature as vulnerable individuals.

I try to explore the meaning behind the encounters we have with such vast, massive objects, which are, moreover, objects of our own making … i.e., they are entirely human as opposed to “natural” constructs. I’m attempting a kind of photographic-phenomenological account of the experience of being a contemporary urban dweller. The great advantage of photography, here, is that it concentrates the mind. In contrast to simply walking about in the downtown core of any large metropolis, where we are constantly distracted by a cacophony of sights, sounds, smells, and so on … photography allows us to contemplate the bare essentials needed when we try to wrap our minds around such colossal artefacts, and the very difficult questions that are raised alongside them.

Financial District No. 2 (Toronto, 2009)

The central idea behind “the landscape of modernity” is this: whereas once, at some point in our “pre-modern” past, we experienced nature through encounters with its many varied, spontaneously generated objects, today we confront spaces that are almost entirely artificial. In contrast to the ways in which we experienced our world in the past, today, everywhere we look, we encounter only that which we ourselves have made; only that which we have, in one way or another, conceived and constructed. Put differently, everywhere and anywhere we turn, we now encounter only ourselves (to echo Heidegger’s terminology in his well-known essay, The Question Concerning Technology). As such, we might say that humanity no longer dwells in the world as such, but rather within our own creations … only within the “human interior”, as it were. One might describe this as a state either of narcissism or a form of solipsism … but either way, even if the latter assertions were rejected, it is more difficult to deny that even just the astounding, imperious scale of the constructs that surround us tends to induce a sense of suffocating claustrophobia (at least on some intermittent occasions).

Bridgepoint Hospital No. 1 (Toronto, 2020)

Financial District No. 2 (Toronto, 2021)

Biography 

I am currently based in Toronto, Canada … but my background is Turkish-Bulgarian, and I was born in Svishtov, a small town on the Danube River. During the 80s, my family and I lived in North Africa, in Tripoli, Libya, as ex-pats. 

I learned about photography for the first time while attending an international school, the “Oil Companies School [OCS],” for the children of foreign workers, starting in Grade 6 at age 10. Remarkably, even at this early stage, I was given a comprehensive education in the basic practice of photography - including the workings of the camera, composition and aesthetic principles, developing film and other darkroom techniques, etc.. 

I continued my education in photography after coming to Canada with my family in the late 1980s.  Ever since, I have been a lifelong lover, practitioner and occasional teacher of photography. 

I am a graduate of McGill University (BA), McMaster University (MA), and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (JD). I’m a recipient of multiple prestigious scholarships and grants, as well as a published author in various academic journals. (You can access my publications via the link below.) I practiced law for a number of years, but for the sake of my health, I changed track and returned to school to do graduate-level work. 

My family and I, including my wife and our two young children, live in downtown Toronto. In addition to my photography practice, I am a part-time Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Western Ontario; my studies focus on environmental philosophy as well as the work of early-modern German philosophers, namely Kant and Hegel.

All images and text © Attila Ataner