About "Go for Gold!"

Peter D. Osborne, Senior Lecturer in Photographic History and Theory/Cultural Studies at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London, writes about "Go for Gold!" in the soon to be published essay “The Unreachable Landscape: Some Themes in Photography in England 1990 to 2007” (CAHIER FOTOGRAFIE #2): "Wuerfel’s images are complete, absolute moments in which places and objects silently await their destruction. They are, in Vilém Flusser’s terms ‘scenes’ rather than representations of ‘processes’. The process that will overwhelm them is eternally outside of them. “Photography,” writes Flusser (2002: 128), “has succeeded in carrying the image into history; but in so doing it has interrupted the (linear) stream of history.” Wuerfel’s interruptions represent something more than a reactionary nostalgia – more than the melancholy pleasure of ruins. In the history of development one kind of landscape is transformed into another. Modernity rolls on and over. It would like to live without too much past. Wuerfel’s photographs are now becoming part of a memory in which this modernity can be judged, a judgement made from the traces of the landscapes it has engulfed. They can become the unconscious of the new landscape, disturbing its Apollonian certainties, challenging what Victor Segalen (2002) once described as modernity’s diversity-reducing “regressive transformations.” They can recall modernity to what was repressed in order that it might come into being all of which will become folded inside the new spaces, and through which something of the full story, the multiple histories, of both expectation and loss might be retained and retold."