“Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, ‘closure’. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession… What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones…”
Iain Sinclair
Stephen Gill (b. 1971, Bristol, UK) became interested in photography in his early childhood, thanks to his father and interest in insects and initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his microscope.
Photographs of single birds in everyday locations. The birds themselves are photographed very small, so the viewer has to search through the images of urban decay to find them.
The Landscape brings together for the first time a collection of McCullin’s landscape photography, primarily set against the stormy backdrop of Somerset, where he now resides. The imagery of his home county, ravaged by storms, projects the associations of a battlefield or the views of one intimate with scenes of war.
The book also features landscape images from throughout his career taken in Syria, Iraq, Indonesia and India.
If you look again at McCullin’s landscapes, you start to sense the figure who made the pictures, invisible behind the lens, stepping forward with nothing but his own shadow – in the marsh, against the snow, along the causeway, over the brow. By now, he is stripped of all superfluities. He is not a man in repose, who lingers lazily. He is striding into the wind, as always.
Mark Holborn ‘One Man Walking’ introduction The Landscape p9
John Gossage (born 1946) is an American photographer working from Washington DC. His artist’s books and other publications use his photographs to explore the interplay between landscapes, urban environments, and the unseen or overlooked aspects of the places that are part of our everyday lives. His work not only captures the aesthetic of these locations but also invites viewers to consider the deeper stories and histories embedded within them. His work is noted for under-recognised elements of the urban environment such as abandoned tracts of land, debris and garbage, and graffiti, and themes of surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power.
“I am a humanist, like most of us are, I can’t really step back to see the beauty and order of all this; closeness brings chaos and dread in this case. We have done harm to the place we live, I’m told, but it seems to me that we have done the most harm to ourselves and our best-laid plans. The planet has a plan to fix this, if we don’t.”
Should Nature Change 2019
I have absolutely no idea what I am doing any more and am totally sure of it. And that’s how it works’
Life and work
Gossage was born in Staten Island, New York City in 1946 and at an early age became interested in photography, leaving school at 16 and taking private instruction from Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovitch and Bruce Davidson. He later moved to Washington, D.C. to study, and subsequently received a grant from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art which allowed him to remain in the city and refine his photographic technique. He has shown his photographs in solo and group exhibitions since 1963.
After a number of years with Nazraeli Press his usual publisher is now Loosestrife Editions and Steidl. He has taught at the University of Maryland, College Park and curated several photographic exhibitions.
John Gossage’s first monograph, The Pond (1985), has been republished to great acclaim.
His other notable books include Stadt Des Schwarz (1987); LAMF (1987); There and Gone (1997); The Things That Animals Care About (1998); Hey Fuckface (2000); Snake Eyes (2002); Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004); Putting Back the Wall (2007); The Secrets of Real Estate (2008); and The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler/Map of Babylon (2010); The Code ( 2011); She Called Me by Name (2012); The Actor (2011); Who Do You Love (2014); Nothing (2014); and pomodoii a grappolo (2015).
For Vimeo limited access versions of most of these books see: Vimeo Photobookstore.
Gossage photographed a small, unnamed pond between Washington, D.C., and Queenstown, Maryland, between 1981 and 1985.
The title was intended to recall Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, but Gossage advocated a more all-embracing view of the landscape, exploring the less idealized spaces that border America’s cities and suburbs. Although many of the images in The Pond appear unruly or uncared for, Gossage found moments of grace and elegance in even the most mundane of places.
A few years after being photographed the pond had dried up.
The pond is a literary monologue, a narrative landscape book, character development — all of it. … It’s set in Queenstown, but a few of the shots were actually taken in Berlin. I won’t tell which ones. I wanted to speak metaphorically about nature and civilization, which I realized halfway through my project. It’s a work of documentary fiction. The sites are universally trivial. There are many ponds, and that one may not even be there anymore.
The book is different [from the exhibition] in that it’s a narrative. You start at page one and move your way through. I was surprised because I really liked the show once I saw it. It’s given me new things to think about — things I haven’t digested yet.
John Gossage interviewed in Katherine Boyle (2021)
the sense one gets from the kind and placement of the trash around Gossage’s pond is that it wasn’t necessary to put it there, and the effect of doing so could not have been completely unanticipated; a few of the culprits may have been only willfully ignorant, but most were surely worse – those of us (I think we all do it, with varying degrees of indirection) who disfigure the landscape as a way of striking at life in general.…
Though Gossage’s study of nature in America is believable because it includes evidence of man’s darkness of spirit, it is memorable because of the intense fondness he shows for the remains of the natural world. He pictures everything – the loveliness of gravel, of sticks, of scum gleaning the water… He doesn’t even hesitate to photograph what we admire already (which is riskier, it being harder to awaken us to what we think we know), abruptly pointing his camera straight up at circling birds, and, later, over to a songbird on a wire.
Gossage does not use his survey of wood around a lake to stress an indictment; the off-road landscape through which he leads us is a mixture of the natural one and our junk, but his focus is not so much on the grotesqueries of the collage as on the reassurances of nature’s simplicities.
It’s all about the ordinary now, the little things at the edge of your consciousness, the “signs” all around you.…
Everyone everywhere now has a small thing that has changed for them. The big things, those things that always happen to someone else, the other people, the ones on the news. The earthquakes, the floods, the fires, the disasters, are all still there in their grand scale. But it’s that the birds that used to come to your backyard are no longer there is what keeps you up at night.
What I have been photographing for [Should Nature Change] are moments when the normal slips, and the disorder starts. Subtle things that whisper to you that things have started to change and in all likelihood not for the best. Nature looks slightly different, it’s a bit warmer, there is a fire at the edge of town, a few of the people much younger than you have a different look in their eyes — remember the dinosaurs?
Black and white pictures of the country I come from and at this point in my life, work to understand. The Times They Are A-Changin when I was younger I thought that song was about something different.
Gilpin’s Essay on Prints (1768) defined picturesque as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture” (p. xii). Gilpin began to expound his “principles of picturesque beauty”, based largely on his knowledge of landscape painting. During the late 1760s and 1770s Gilpin travelled extensively in the summer holidays and applied these principles to the landscapes he saw, committing his thoughts and spontaneous sketches to notebooks. William Gilpin’s work was a direct challenge to the ideology of the well established Grand Tour, showing how an exploration of rural Britain could compete with classically oriented tours of the Continent. The irregular, anti-classical, ruins became sought after sights.
Gilpin’sviews were articulated particularly in his guide to Observations on the River Wye 1770:
“We travel for various purposes – to explore the culture of soils, to view the curiosities of art, to survey the beauties of nature, and to learn the manners of men, their different politics, and modes of life. The following little work proposes a new object of pursuit; that of examining the face of the country by the rules of picturesque beauty; opening the sources of those pleasures which are derived from the comparison.”introduction (Gilpin, [1782] 2005, p.17)
While Gilpin allowed that nature was good at producing textures and colours, it was rarely capable of creating the perfect composition. Some extra help from the artist, perhaps in the form of a carefully placed tree, was usually required.
‘Nature is always great in design; but unequal in composition…Nature gives us the material of landscape: woods, rivers, trees, lakes, ground, and mountains; but leaves us to work them up into pictures, as our fancy leads…I am so attached to my picturesque rules, that if nature gets it wrong, I cannot help putting her right…the picture is not so much the ultimate end, as it is the medium, through which the ravishing scenes of nature are excited in the imagination.’
Gilpin’s work on watercolour technique emphasised both texture and composition were important in a “correctly picturesque” scene:
The texture should be “rough”, “intricate”, “varied”, or “broken”, without obvious straight lines.
The composition should work as a unified whole, incorporating several elements: a dark “foreground” with a “front screen” or “side screens”, a brighter middle “distance”, and at least one further, less distinctly depicted, “distance”.
A ruined abbey or castle would add “consequence”.
A low viewpoint, which tended to emphasise the “sublime”, was always preferable to a prospect from on high.
In contrast to other contemporary travel writers, such as Thomas Pennant, Gilpin included little history, and few facts or anecdotes. He described ways that the scenes could be improved upon, according to his vision of picturesque beauty. He directed readers to the specific spots he believed would yield the most picturesque vantage point of a given location.
Although he came in for criticism and satire eg in Jane Austen, Gilpin’s views were very influential in painting and related media, and particularly garden design, encouraging landscape architects to introduce more organic shapes to views and structures such as follies and grottos. Others, most notably Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price (1794 An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful) and Thomas Johnes, developed Gilpin’s ideas into more comprehensive theories of the picturesque and apply these more generally to landscape design and architecture.
Improved road communications and travel restrictions on continental Europe saw an explosion of British domestic tourism in the 1780s and 1790s. Many of these picturesque tourists were intent on sketching, or at least discussing what they saw in terms of landscape painting. Some sketched freehand the scenes Gilpin described, and others employed the camera lucida – the precursor to the compact camera – as an aid to responding visually to Gilpin’s picturesque descriptions. Gilpin’s works were the ideal companions for this new generation of travellers; they were written specifically for that market and never intended as comprehensive travel guides.
Gilpin asked: “shall we suppose it a greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue a trivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties of nature?”. The little brown ‘viewpoints’ icons on Ordnance Survey maps are a legacy of Gilpin.
Roger Fenton (28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers.
Roger Fenton was born in Crimble Hall, then within the parish of Bury, Lancashire, on 28 March 1819. His grandfather was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and banker, his father a banker and Member of Parliament. Fenton was the fourth of seven children by his father’s first marriage. His father had 10 more children by his second wife.
In 1838 Fenton went to University College London where he graduated in 1840 with a “first class” Bachelor of Arts degree, having studied English, mathematics, Greek and Latin. In 1841, he began to study law at University College, evidently sporadically as he did not qualify as a solicitor until 1847, in part because he had become interested in studying to be a painter. Fenton visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in London in 1851 and was impressed by the photography on display there. He then visited Paris to learn the waxed paper calotype process, most likely from William Fox Henry Talbot, its inventor. By 1852 he had photographs exhibited in England, and travelled to Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg making calotypes there, and photographed views and architecture around Britain. His published call for the setting up of a photographic society was answered with its establishment in 1853; the Photographic Society, with Fenton as founder and first Secretary, later became the Royal Photographic Society under the patronage of Prince Albert.
In 1855 Fenton was sent to the Crimean War as the first official war photographer. He had the endorsement of the Duke of Newcastle, secretary of state for war, and the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The resulting photographs may have been intended to offset the general aversion of the British people to an unpopular war and to counteract the occasionally critical reporting of correspondent William Howard Russell of The Times. The photographs were to be converted into woodblocks and published in the less critical Illustrated London News. Fenton took Marcus Sparling as his photographic assistant, a servant and a large van of equipment. Due to the size and cumbersome nature of his photographic equipment, Fenton was limited in his choice of motifs. Because the photographic material of his time needed long exposures, he was only able to produce pictures of unmoving objects, mostly posed pictures; he avoided making pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers.
Fenton also photographed the landscape, including an area near to where the Light Brigade—made famous in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”—was ambushed. His Versions of Valley of the Shadow of Death, with and without cannonballs is a seminal image in war photography but also a controversial one because the two versions that exist show that Fenton repositioned the cannon balls in the second version to make the image more compelling. In letters home soldiers had called the original valley “The Valley of Death”, and Tennyson’s poem used the same phrase, so when in September 1855 Thomas Agnew put the picture on show, as one of a series of eleven collectively titled Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts in a London exhibition, he took the troops’—and Tennyson’s—epithet, expanded it as The Valley of the Shadow of Death with its deliberate evocation of Psalm 23, and assigned it to the piece; it is not the location of the famous charge, which took place in a long, broad valley several miles to the south-east. In 2007 film-maker Errol Morris went to Sevastopol to identify the site of this “first iconic photograph of war”. He identified the small valley, shown on a later map as “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, as the place where Fenton had taken his photograph. Two pictures were taken of this area, one with several cannonballs on the road, the other with an empty road. Opinions differ concerning which one was taken first. Morris concludes that the photo without the cannonballs was taken first, but he remains uncertain about why balls were moved onto the road in the second picture—perhaps, he notes, Fenton deliberately placed them there to enhance the image. The alternative is that soldiers were gathering up cannonballs for reuse and they threw down balls higher up the hill onto the road and ditch for collection later. Other art historians, such as Nigel Spivey of Cambridge University, identify the images as from the nearby Woronzoff Road. This is the location accepted by the local tour guides.
Despite high temperatures, breaking several ribs, and suffering from cholera, in all Fenton managed to make over 350 usable large format negatives. An exhibition of 312 prints was soon on show in London, in the gallery of publisher Thomas Agnew. Sales were not as good as expected, possibly because the war had ended.
In 1858 Fenton made studio genre studies based on romantically imaginative ideas of Muslim life, such as Seated Odalisque, using friends and models who were not always convincing in their roles.
Although well known for his Crimean War photography, his photographic career lasted little more than a decade, and in 1862 he abandoned the profession entirely, selling his equipment and becoming almost forgotten by the time of his death seven years later. He was later formally recognised by art historians for his pioneering work and artistic endeavour. In recognition of the importance of his photography, Fenton’s photos of the Crimean war were included in the Life collection, 100 Photos that Changed the World.
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), for example, was active in New York in the late 1890s and was
initially a practitioner in the ‘artistic’ sense of documentary photography, trying to emulate
or deliver what drawing and painting had been delivering. Photography was viewed as a
replacement for painting so the thinking was that the practices and values of art should be
subsumed within photography. However the new century, especially after World War I, saw a
growing respect for photography as an independent medium that could offer something different
and this was reflected in the work undertaken by Stieglitz in documenting the ephemeral nature
of everyday life.
In the image above, Stieglitz portrays the crudity of a fledgling transport system. The destination
board – Harlem – tells us that this is harsh winter weather in a poor area of the city. The image
shows how much effort the driver and horses have to put in to be able to operate under such
conditions – note the steam coming off the horses. Stieglitz was prepared to wait for four hours
to capture this image. He wanted something different and he got it.
Stieglitz was very concerned about the initial
treatment of immigrants arriving in large numbers
from Ireland and Europe, hoping for a warm
welcome but receiving the opposite. The authorities
were concerned about typhoid and other infectious
diseases and most immigrants were held in isolation
for weeks before being allowed into America.
For a biography of Steiglitz visit: www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stgp/hd_stgp.htm
Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye (1999), a Masters of Photography documentary video about
the ‘new way of seeing’ that Stieglitz wanted to bring to American photography:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YhwYgdtphE
Some early women photographers did do serious topographical work in the late nineteenth and early 20C:
Evelyn Cameron,
Laura Gilpin,
Frances Benjamin Johnson
Elizabeth Ellen Roberts
Artistic photography, continuing the ‘genteel’ occupations for lady sketchers and watercolourists, was also conducted by:
Anna Atkins
Julia Margaret Cameron
Lady Hawarden
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake
But their work was more closely aligned with the family album, documentary and performance, rather topographic. (ibid, p.188).
Feminist discourse since the 1970s has rejected the monopoly of the male gaze and articulated the female point of view in relation to the landscape. Social and technological developments have also made serious photographic excursions into the landscape considerably more accessible (Wells, 2011, p.189). A number of female photographers have, in one form or another, engaged with feminist politics in relation to the landscape and the concept of nature, as well as the male gaze.
For interesting feminist and other modern approaches see:
Helen Sear’s series Grounded (2000), in which she digitally combines photographs of skies with images of animal hides photographed at a museum.
Jo Spence subverts classical depictions of nude female figures within idealised settings.
Elina Brotherus
Karen Knorr
Susan Trangmar
Sian Bonnell
Barbara Kruger
Joan Fontcuberta Bodyscapes (2005) employ three-dimensional imaging software used for military applications to render landscape images of close-up photographs of his own body.
Landscape photography and printmaking draws on a long tradition of landscape art that can inform different styles and approaches for my own work. I want to work more on the underlying theory of landscape composition and bridging elements, perspective etc. Abstraction. To make my landscape photography and printmaking more conscious of the influences on my work and thereby able to subvert and question to create something new.
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction of landscapes, natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects.
The word “landscape” entered the modern English language as landskip (variously spelt), an anglicization of the Dutch landschap, around the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art, with its first use as a word for a painting in 1598. Within a few decades it was used to describe vistas in poetry, and eventually as a term for real views. However the cognate term landscaef or landskipe for a cleared patch of land had existed in Old English, though it is not recorded from Middle English. Landscape views in art may be entirely imaginary, or copied from reality with varying degrees of accuracy. If the primary purpose of a picture is to depict an actual, specific place, especially including buildings prominently, it is called a topographical view. Such views, extremely common as prints in the West, are often seen as inferior to fine art landscapes, although the distinction is not always meaningful; similar prejudices existed in Chinese art, where literati painting usually depicted imaginary views, while professional court artists painted real views, often including palaces and cities.
The earliest forms of human art depict little that could really be called landscape, although ground-lines and sometimes indications of mountains, trees or other natural features are included. The earliest “pure landscapes” with no human figures are frescos from Minoan Greece of around 1500 BCE. Hunting scenes, especially those set in the enclosed vista of the reed beds of the Nile Delta from Ancient Egypt, can give a strong sense of place, but the emphasis is on individual plant forms and human and animal figures rather than the overall landscape setting.
The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present form its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism.
Chinese and Japanese traditions
!!Possibly I will do a separate post on this as Japanese ink landscapes and monochrome styles have been important influences on my Black and White photography and printmaking.
Zhan Ziqian, Strolling About in Spring, a very early Chinese landscape, c. 600. Landscape as a subject in itself
In East Asia famous practitioners of imaginary landscapes were highly respected, including several Emperors of both China and Japan. They were often also poets whose lines and images illustrated each other.
The Chinese ink painting tradition of shan shui (“mountain-water”), or “pure” landscape, in which the only sign of human life is usually a sage, or a glimpse of his hut, uses sophisticated landscape backgrounds to figure subjects, and landscape art of this period retains a classic and much-imitated status within the Chinese tradition. As in Roman traditions these typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, backed with a range of spectacular mountains. Sometimes they showed only a distant view, sometimes waterfalls, mist or dead ground bridged the gap between a foreground scene with figures and the distant panoramic vista.
Western tradition
It seems from literary evidence that some rough system of perspective, or scaling for distance was first been developed in Ancient Greece in the Hellenistic period, although no large-scale examples survive. Roman landscapes from the 1st century BCE onwards, especially frescos of landscapes decorating rooms, have been preserved at archaeological sites of Pompeii, Herculaneum and elsewhere, and mosaics. These typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, generally backed with a range of spectacular mountains, often including sea, lakes or rivers to bridge the gap between a foreground scene with figures and a distant panoramic vista.
History painting came to require an extensive landscape background where appropriate and for several centuries landscapes were regularly promoted to the status of history painting by the addition of small figures to make a narrative scene, typically religious or mythological. In Kenneth Clark’s analysis, underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches:
the acceptance of descriptive symbols
curiosity about the facts of nature
creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature
belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved.
In early Western medieval art interest in landscape disappears almost entirely, kept alive only in copies of Late Antique works such as the Utrecht Psalter; the last reworking of this source, in an early Gothic version, reduces the previously extensive landscapes to a few trees filling gaps in the composition, with no sense of overall space.A revival in interest in nature initially mainly manifested itself in depictions of small gardens such as the Hortus Conclusus or those in millefleur tapestries. The frescos of figures at work or play in front of a background of dense trees in the Palace of the Popes, Avignon are probably a unique survival of what was a common subject.Several frescos of gardens have survived from Roman houses like the Villa of Livia.
During the 14th century Giotto di Bondone and his followers began to acknowledge nature in their work, increasingly introducing elements of the landscape as the background setting for the action of the figures in their paintings. Early in the 15th century, landscape painting was established as a genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often expressed in a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert. Luxury illuminated manuscripts were very important in the early development of landscape, especially series of the Labours of the Months such as those in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which conventionally showed small genre figures in increasingly large landscape settings. A particular advance is shown in the less well-knownTurin-Milan Hours, now largely destroyed by fire, whose developments were reflected in Early Netherlandish painting for the rest of the century. The artist known as “Hand G”, probably one of the Van Eyck brothers, was especially successful in reproducing effects of light and in a natural-seeming progression from the foreground to the distant view.This was something other artists were to find difficult for a century or more, often solving the problem by showing a landscape background from over the top of a parapet or window-sill, as if from a considerable height.
Italian Renaissance
Landscape backgrounds for various types of painting became increasingly prominent and skilful during the century. The period around the end of the 15th century saw pure landscape drawings and watercolours from Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Fra Bartolomeo and others, but pure landscape subjects in painting and printmaking, still small, were first produced by Albrecht Altdorfer and others of the German Danube School in the early 16th century.
Landscapes were idealized, mostly reflecting a pastoral ideal drawn from classical poetry which was first fully expressed by Giorgione and the young Titian, and remained associated above all with hilly wooded Italian landscape, which was depicted by artists from Northern Europe who had never visited Italy, just as plain-dwelling literati in China and Japan painted vertiginous mountains. Though often young artists were encouraged to visit Italy to experience Italian light, many Northern European artists could make their living selling Italianate landscapes without ever bothering to make the trip. Indeed, certain styles were so popular that they became formulas that could be copied again and again. Salvator Rosa gave picturesque excitement to his landscapes by showing wilder Southern Italian country, often populated by banditi.
Dutch Landscape
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565: Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors
Joachim Patinir in the Netherlands developed the “world landscape” a style of panoramic landscape with small figures and using a high aerial viewpoint, that remained influential for a century, being used and perfected by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The Italian development of a thorough system of graphical perspective was now known all over Europe, which allowed large and complex views to be painted very effectively.
The publication in Antwerp in 1559 and 1561 of two series of a total of 48 prints (the Small Landscapes) after drawings by an anonymous artist referred to as the Master of the Small Landscapes signalled a shift away from the imaginary, distant landscapes with religious content of the world landscape towards close-up renderings at eye-level of identifiable country estates and villages populated with figures engaged in daily activities. By abandoning the panoramic viewpoint of the world landscape and focusing on the humble, rural and even topographical, the Small Landscapes set the stage for Netherlandish landscape painting in the 17th century. After the publication of the Small Landscapes, landscape artists in the Low Countries either continued with the world landscape or followed the new mode presented by the Small Landscapes.
Rembrandt, The Three Trees, 1643, etching
Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw the dramatic growth of landscape painting, in which many artists specialized, and the development of extremely subtle realist techniques for depicting light and weather. There are different styles and periods, and sub-genres of marine and animal painting, as well as a distinct style of Italianate landscape. Most Dutch landscapes were relatively small, but landscapes in Flemish Baroque painting, still usually peopled, were often very large, above all in the series of works that Peter Paul Rubens painted for his own houses. Landscape prints were also popular, with those of Rembrandt and the experimental works of Hercules Seghers usually considered the finest.
The Dutch tended to make smaller paintings for smaller houses. Some Dutch landscape specialties named in period inventories include the Batalje, or battle-scene; theManeschijntje, or moonlight scene; the Bosjes, or woodland scene; the Boederijtje, or farm scene,and the Dorpje or village scene.Though not named at the time as a specific genre, the popularity of Roman ruins inspired many Dutch landscape painters of the period to paint the ruins of their own region, such as monasteries and churches ruined after the Beeldenstorm.The popularity of landscapes in the Netherlands was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious painting in a Calvinist society, and the decline of religious painting in the 18th and 19th centuries all over Europe combined with Romanticism to give landscapes a much greater and more prestigious place in 19th-century art than they had assumed before.
Claude Lorrain, Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682. The landscape as history painting.
Compositional formulae using elements like the repoussoir were evolved which remain influential in modern photography and painting, notably by Poussin and Claude Lorrain, both French artists living in 17th century Rome and painting largely classical subject-matter, or Biblical scenes set in the same landscapes.
French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830sJean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other painters in the Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that would become the most influential in Europe for a century, with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for the first time making landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting.
English landscape: 19th Century
In England, landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits, typically suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner, though mostly painted in London by an artist who had never visited his sitter’s rolling acres; the English tradition was founded by Anthony van Dyck and other mostly Flemish artists working in England. In the 18th century,watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality, with both a buoyant market for professional works, and a large number of amateur painters, many following the popular systems found in the books of Alexander Cozens and others. By the beginning of the 19th century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscapists, showing the wide range of Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer. However all these had difficulty establishing themselves in the contemporary art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits.
The 18th century saw the rise of the topographical print, often intended to be framed and hung on a wall. These depicted more or less accurately a real view in a way that landscape painting rarely did. Initially these were mostly centred on a building, but over the course of the century, with the growth of the Romantic movement pure landscapes became more common. Landscapes in watercolour became a distinct specialism, above all in England.
Constable:
frequent use of the Golden ratio to position horizons at one or two thirds levels in paintings
uses a lanes, roads and other devices to lead the eye into the picture
interest in plays of light and naturalistic colour
linear as well as aerial perspective
use of triangles and implied triangles on foreground objects like carts, boats etc.
later starts to experiment with dynamic and impasto brushstrokes, as precursor to Impressionists
Turner tends to have his horizons lower, or non-existent. And makes lots of use of dramatic swirls for storms, and brilliant sunsets. But still positions vertical elements and objects around the thirds line.
Romantic movement
The Romantic movement intensified the existing interest in landscape art, and remote and wild landscapes, which had been one recurring element in earlier landscape art, now became more prominent. Caspar David Friedrich had a distinctive style, influenced by his Danish training, where a distinct national style, drawing on the Dutch 17th-century example, had developed. To this he added a quasi-mystical Romanticism.
TheTrees in the Moonlight Use of diagonals and muted colours.
Two Men by the Sea at Moonrise Use of strong horizontals with central horizon line. Silhouettes against an oval pool of light. ‘High Dynamic Range’.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog/Mists, 1818. A classic image of German Romanticism. Strong contrast in colours and between foreground and background with dramatic silhouette. Quasi symmetrical balance between right and left side of the image. Diagonals leading to the centre figure.
Alec Soth websiteYou Tube videos – many!Alec Soth (born 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States) is an American photographer, notable for “large-scale American projects” featuring the midwestern United States. His photography has a cinematic feel with elements of folklore that hint at a story behind the image. His work tends to focus on the “off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America” according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. He is a member of Magnum photo agency.
Soth has had various books of his work published by major publishers as well as self-published through his own Little Brown Mushroom.
Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004)
Alec Soth used the great Mississippi river in a series was made over a period of five years. This brings together Soth’s much more long-standing personal relationship with the river. Like the path of the river itself, the subject matter and style of Soth’s ruthlessly edited series meanders, traversing American cultures, and dips intimately, yet somehow respectfully, in and out of strangers’ lives. The river itself rarely features in the final edit, and allusions to the Mississippi’s industrial and social heritage are subtly suggested.
Vimeo of book
Read an interview with Soth and see the images at: http://seesawmagazine.com/soth_pages/soth_interview.html
Broken Manual. Göttingen: Steidl, 2010. ISBN 978-3-869301-99-0. With Lester B. Morrison.
Brighton Picture Hunt. Photographs by Carmen Soth, edited by Alec Soth. Brighton: Photoworks, 2010. ISBN 978-1903796429.
From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2010. ISBN 978-0-935640-96-0. Catalogue of a retrospective exhibition curated by Siri Engberg. Foreword by Olga Viso; texts by Geoff Dyer, “Riverrun”; Britt Salvesen, “American History”; Barry Schwabsky, “A Wandering Art”; a poem by August Kleinzahler, “Sleeping it off in Rapid City”; and Soth in conversation with Bartholomew Ryan, “Dismantling My Career”. Includes separate book The Loneliest Man in Missouri by Soth, inserted into back cover.
Ash Wednesday, New Orleans. Kamakura, Japan: Super Labo, 2010.
One Mississippi. Nazraeli Press, 2010.
The Auckland Project. Photographs by Soth and John Gossage. Radius Books, 2011.
Rodarte. Photographs by Soth and Catherine Opie. JRP|Ringier, 2011.
Ping Pong Conversations: Alec Soth with Francesco Zanot. Rome: Contrasto, 2013. ISBN 978-8869654091. Transcripts compiled from conversations between Soth and Zanot, with new and previously published photographs by Soth. Zanot contributes an introduction, “Alec Soth: the Recycling of Photography”.
