J. J. Long

Occurrence and development of folding related to normal faulting within a mechanically heterogeneous sedimentary sequence: a case study from Inner Moray Firth, UK

Abstract Folds associated with normal faults are potential hydrocarbon traps and may impact the connectivity of faulted reservoirs. Well-calibrated seismic reflection data that image a normal fault system from the Inner Moray Firth basin, offshore Scotland, show that folding was preferentially localized within the mechanically incompetent Lower–Middle Jurassic pre-rift interval, comprising interbedded shales and sandstones, and within Upper Jurassic syn-rift shales. Upward propagation of fault tips was initially inhibited by these weak lithologies, generating fault propagation folds with amplitudes of c. 50 m. Folds were also generated, or amplified, by translation of the hanging wall over curved, convex-upward fault planes. These fault bends resulted from vertical fault segmentation and linkage within mechanically incompetent layers. The relative contributions of fault propagation and fault-bend folding to the final fold amplitude may vary significantly along the strike of a single fault array. In areas where opposite-dipping, conjugate normal faults intersect, the displacement maxima are skewed upwards towards the base of the syn-rift sequence (i.e. the free surface at the time of fault initiation) and significant fault propagation folding did not occur. These observations can be explained by high compressive stresses generated in the vicinity of conjugate fault intersections, which result in asymmetric displacement distributions, skewed towards the upper tip, with high throw gradients enhancing upward fault propagation. Our observations suggest that mechanical interaction between faults, in addition to mechanical stratigraphy, is a key influence on the occurrence of normal fault-related folding, and controls kinematic parameters such as fault propagation/slip ratios and displacement rates.

In the contact zone: W. G. Sebald and the ethnographic imagination

In this essay, I address the question of Sebald’s interactions with ethnography from three interlinked perspectives. I begin by analysing Sebald’s reading of ethnographic texts in the 1970s and 1980s, using his own annotated copies of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Norbert Elias, and then situate this reading within the context of Sebald’s professional life during the same period. I go on to examine the comments on ethnography and related forms of representation that occur in Sebald’s literary criticism of the 1980s. These imply a critique of many of ethnography’s central practices: the ‘salvage paradigm’, the participant observer, and the effects of power produced by representing an unfamiliar Other to a metropolitan audience. I close by tracing the transformations of ethnographic discourse in ‘Max Ferber’ (the last story of Die Ausgewanderten / The Emigrants (DA/TE)) and in The Rings of Saturn (RS), and show that Sebald’s prose involves a partial adoption and partial critique of ethnographic representation.

Taking time : Paul Kranzler and the photography of slowness.

Theorists of social acceleration have highlighted the tendency of social processes to speed up, both in Western societies, and increasingly also in the developing world. In this vein, theorists seeking to differentiate the postmodern from the modern note the disappearance of Ungleichzeitigkeit or non-simultaneity, and its replacement by a fully synchronous and quasi-ahistorical present. Through an investigation of contemporary photography in the German-speaking world, and with particular reference to the work of Austrian Paul Kranzler, I question the views advanced by theorists of acceleration and the postmodern. In thematic and formal readings of Kranzler’s books Land of Milk and Honey [Salzburg: Fotohof Edition, 2005] and Brut [Salzburg: Fotohof Edition, 2010], this article argues that Ungleichzeitigkeit remains a fundamental aspect of Western societies, and needs to be fully taken into consideration if we are to understand the political economy of time in capitalist late modernity.

Faces. Antlitz and Gesicht in the Weimar Republic Photobook

It is widely accepted that the Weimar Republic witnessed an upsurge in interest in physiognomy. However, once physiognomy is allied with the technical media, the situation is complicated by an ambiguity that arises as to where the signifying power lies: is it in the face, or is it in the representation? Starting from this question, the present article investigates two sets of photographic books, each including examples from the left and right of the political spectrum, that invoke physiognomy in their titles or their visual practice. It emerges that while publications from the left tend to be more overtly critical of physiognomy and subvert it in various ways, the verbal and photographic discourse of rightwing publications also tends to undermine the claims of physiognomy in one way or another. Physiognomy thus emerges as a practice that is both politically manipulable and epistemologically highly unstable, whose enlistment in support of a variety of political positions goes hand in hand with a critique from within.