Witnessing and Untimely Images: Anne Ferran's 'Lost to Worlds'

Abstract

This article examines ‘Lost to Worlds’ (2008), a series of thirty photographs by the contemporary Australian artist Anne Ferran. The series depicts a historically significant site where there is almost nothing left to see. All that remains of the former nineteenth-century female factory are minor marks in the earth. By showing the viewer almost nothing, ‘Lost to Worlds’ raises a number of questions about what can be known or communicated about the past by photography. In particular, the traditional understanding of photographic witnessing is transformed by Ferran's subtle evocation of the history of a site by images of emptiness. The article considers the recent rise of scholarly interest in the idea of witnessing and how Ferran's series can provoke a deeper understanding of such depictions of the past.