Zemni Photography Blog

Category: 2: Informing Contexts

  • Thomas Struth

    Thomas Struth (born 11 October 1954) is a German photographer who is best known for his Museum Photographs series, family portraits and black and white photographs of the streets of Düsseldorf and New York taken in the 1970s. Struth currently lives and works between Berlin and New York.

    http://www.thomasstruth32.com/bigsize/index.html

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Struth

    In German.

    Urban

    Dusseldorf

    http://www.thomasstruth32.com/bigsize/photographs/duesseldorf/index.html

    In 1976, as part of a student exhibition at the Academy, Struth first showed a grid composed of 49 photographs taken from a centralized perspective[4] on Düsseldorf’s deserted streets, each of them obeying a strict logic of central symmetry. The compositions are simple and the photographs are neither staged nor digitally manipulated in post-production. Strong contrasts of light and shade are also avoided, Struth preferring the greyish, uninflected light of early morning. This serves to enhance the neutral treatment of the scenes.

    Unconscious Places

    Through 1979, he continued to photograph the streets in Düsseldorf and also for the first time in other European cities including Cologne, Munich, Brussels, Charleroi and Paris. After the concentrated experience of working in different parts of New York City, the process of identifying locations which expressed most clearly the nature of the city became more precise. Struth now worked with greater precision and economy. He spent more time looking for the single location which could “summarise a city” and made comparatively few photographs in each city—no more than five in Charleroi, for example, or ten in Munich.

    Towards the end of 1979 Struth travelled to Paris to visit Thomas Schütte, a fellow student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, who had a residency in Paris. Schütte suggested looking at the Beaugrenelle project in Paris, a huge urban development for mixed commercial and residential use with several distinctive high-rise towers built on the banks of the Seine in the 1970s.

    http://www.thomasstruth32.com/bigsize/photographs/unconscious_places_1/index.html

    Struth recalls wanting to “work with distance, to keep an open and innocent gaze, to work without any personal narrative or experience of the city.” He was struck by the anonymity of the architecture, the complete lack of any visible historical continuity and identity in a conurbation shaped by the rupture of colonialism and its consequences.

    http://www.thomasstruth32.com/bigsize/photographs/unconscious_places_2/index.html

    China and Japan

    “For a visual artist, the gaze is critical. And the gaze has to do with the distance between your own entity and what is in front of you. The pronounced cultural distance of Japan from Europe, the unfamiliarity of my experience there, helped me to arrive at a more precise observation and understanding of my own culture.”

    http://www.thomasstruth32.com/bigsize/photographs/japan/index.html#
    New Pictures from Paradise

    The first eight of the Paradise pictures were made in the tropical rainforest in Daintree in the northeast of Australia in 1998. Struth then made several works in Yunnan province in China, on the island of Yakushima in Japan, and in the forests of Bavaria, Germany, in 1999.

    http://www.thomasstruth32.com/bigsize/photographs/new_pictures_from_paradise/index.html

    See also family portraits

  • British Landscape Photography

    ‘Landscape for Everyone’, published in John Taylor (1994) A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination.

    In this piece Taylor discusses the ways in which symbolism of the ‘timeless’ and ‘infinitely different and varied’ English landscape was used during World War II to encourage patriotic emotion and resistance against German ‘industrialisation gone riot’. In 1940 many restrictions were imposed on movement around the countryside and measures were taken to make the geography ‘illegible’ to any invading force. At the same time “the mythic history of the country ‘unconquered for a thousand years’ was central to patriotic propaganda which imagined England to be magical, and centred on the village, the squire and the sense of a community close to the past and to nature. This variegated but close-knit aspect of the English landscape meant that it would ‘triumph’ even if the enemy invaded. ‘ (p198)

    Images of the countryside in books and magazines like ‘Picture Post’ emphasised its wholeness ‘belonging to everyone’, underplaying pre-war class conflicts over rights of access. Pictures of ‘sublime’ mountains now had city children evacuees to emphasise the disruption of ‘nature’. Particular landmarks took on symbolic meaning – people looking up for signs of threat and salvation at the cliffs of Dover.“The cliffs at Dover came to stand for a complete ring of natural bulwarks. Moreover, the white cliffs remained unsullied. The barrier of the cliffs also stood in for a message of farewell and recognition as airmen, and troops later, left them behind and returned to them as a marker of what was to be the absolute and inviolate boundary of the country.” 

    What really strikes me on re-reading this article after the Brexit campaign, is how these same images of the British countryside are still manipulated as a symbol of independence and freedom. European regulation and migrants coming in and taking over our green and pleasant land. Whereas heartlands of Brexit like East Anglia – which felt like a very hostile place and not at all ‘my country’ (though I am white British and lived here all my life though partly French) would come to a complete standstill without the (very exploited) migrant labour. Big farms (some owned by Arab princes it seems) replacing this Eastern European labour with technology is likely to be far more environmentally disruptive, let alone removal of the many EU environmental protections seen as ‘red tape’.

    This is more than a romantic need to hark back to some mythical past in the midst of chaotic change (which has always occurred, starting with prehistoric forest clearances, let alone Viking and medieval carnage, then the Tudor enclosures). A means by which privileged classes in the countryside can protect their interests through creating a common identity of ‘countryfolk’.  It also reflects the need of urban populations (including those living in areas of serious deprivation) to think that somewhere else is cleaner and more healthy – lungs somewhere else to make the urban pollution and waste somehow sanitised and acceptable (despite all the scientific evidence that our whole lifestyle needs urgently to change).

     

     

  • Stephen Shore

    Form and Pressure: Analyses alternative formal structures. In particular images based on one-point perspective, with the vanishing point in the centre of the image. When 3-dimensional space is collapsed into a flat picture, objects in the foreground are now seen, on the surface of the photograph, in a new and precise relationship to the objects in the background.juggling ever increasing visual complexity. But at the same time, I recognized that I was imposing an order on the scene in front of me. Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar – it is inconceivable. This order is the product of a series of decisions: where to position the camera, exactly where to place the frame, and when to release the shutter. These decisions simultaneously define the content and determine the structure. As I approached the intersection for a second time, I asked myself if I could organize the information I wanted to include without relying on a overriding structural principle, the way I did the day before. I asked myself if I could structure the picture in a way that communicated my experience standing there, taking in the scene in front of me. Sometimes I have the sense that form contains an almost philosophical communication – that as form becomes more invisible, transparent, it begins to express an artist’s understanding of the structure of experience. From Galilee to the Negev

    Biography

    Wikipedia Stephen Shore was interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a photographic darkroom kit at age six from a forward-thinking uncle. He began to use a 35 mm camera three years later and made his first color photographs. At ten he received a copy of Walker Evans’s book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. His career began at fourteen, when he presented his photographs to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Recognizing Shore’s talent, Steichen bought three. At seventeen, Shore met Andy Warhol and began to frequent Warhol’s studio, the Factory, photographing Warhol and the creative people that surrounded him. In 1971, at the age of 24, Shore became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Shore then embarked on a series of cross-country trips, making “on the road” photographs of American and Canadian landscapes. In 1972, he made the journey from Manhattan to Amarillo, Texas, that provoked his interest in color photography. Viewing the streets and towns he passed through, he conceived the idea to photograph them in color, first using 35 mm hand-held camera and then a 4×5″ view camera before finally settling on the 8×10 format. In 1974 a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) endowment funded further work, followed in 1975 by a Guggenheim grant and in 1976 a color show at MoMA, NY. His 1982 book, Uncommon Places, was a bible for the new color photographers because, alongside William Eggleston, his work proved that a color photograph, like a painting or even a black and white photograph, could be considered a work of art —————————————–
    About the MOMA exhibition ‘How to See’. A retrospective looking at different ways in which Shore’s photography reflects different conscious ways of seeing.

    In some photographs he wanted to show what the experience of seeing looks like, taking ‘screenshots’ of his field of vision, seeing things the way he sees them – subject in the centre, converging verticals etc. Other photographs are creating a view for the viewer to explore, portraying how we see our environment when consciousness is heightened . These are have high structural density as an examination of interrelationships between the different elements .

    In some of his landscapes he also reproduces the way the eye sees – the way it seems like the eye changes focal distance on a 2D landscape surface is an illusion produced by different sharpness through the image.
    Review of iBooks produced as print on demand. He did a book a day of what everyday life was like on days when significant events were being reported in the news.

  • Robert Adams

    Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.

    Robert Adams is a photographer who has documented the extent and the limits of our damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures, both reasons to despair and to hope.

    “The goal,” he has said, “is to face facts but to find a basis for hope. To try for alchemy.”

    His work, especially from the 1960s through the 1970s, focuses on the suburban sprawl and the environmental degradation in Colorado, reflecting the broader changes taking place across the American West. Adams’ photographs are not just images but narratives of the time, capturing the transformation of natural landscapes into urban and suburban developments. They serve as a record of the sacrifice of natural beauty for consumer culture’s demands, characterized by housing developments and shopping malls (Sandeen, E., 2009).

    looking beyond the mere physicality of landscapes to understand their deeper significance and the stories they tell.

    Rather than offering escape, Adams inspires new ways of seeing by asking viewers to acknowledge and care for the world in all its imperfection. 

    Ansel Adams’ photographs celebrate the untouched beauty of American wilderness. Robert Adams’ work, in contrast, shows the impacts of development and urbanization. including human-altered landscapes as subjects worthy of artistic consideration. This contrast underscores a broader debate in environmental photography about the role of the artist in documenting nature and human impacts on it.

    Reflecting on the duality of beauty and desolation found in the landscapes he photographs, Adams has pointed out the complexity of finding aesthetic value in places marked by environmental degradation. His work is a testament to the persistent beauty of the natural world, even in the face of human interference, and serves as a reminder of what is at stake (Sandeen, E., 2009).

    Miguel Guitart Vilches, for example, discusses Adams’ deliberate choice to document the transformation of Colorado’s landscape by human activity, rather than its untouched beauty. This decision highlights Adams’ intent to reveal the ordered chaos created by human intervention and to explore the potential connections between the original landscape and its altered state (Vilches, M. G., 2013).

    ‘More people currently know the appearance of Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon from looking at photographic books than from looking at the places themselves; conservation publishing has defined for most of us the outstanding features of the wilderness aesthetic. Unfortunately…the same spectacular pictures have also been widely accepted as a definition of nature, and the implication has been circulated that what is wild is not natural.’

    ‘Attention only to perfection…invites…for urban viewers – which means most of us – a crippling disgust; our world is in most places far from clean…This leaves photography with a new but not less important job: to reconcile us to half wilderness’

    Dunaway p22

    Robert Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937, and moved to Colorado as a teenager, in each place enjoying the out-of-­doors, often in company with his father. At age twenty-five, as a college English teacher with summers off, he learned photography, choosing as his first subjects early prairie churches and early Hispanic art, subjects of unalloyed beauty. After spending time in Scandinavia with his Swedish wife, Kerstin, however, he realized that there were complexities in the American geography that merited exploration.

    Beauty in Photography

    Robert Adams’s Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981) presents a series of essays that articulate Adams’s philosophy on photography, aesthetics, and the value of beauty in art.

    • conviction that beauty remains an essential, though often overlooked, criterion for evaluating photographs and their significance both as art and as a reflection of the world.
    • the pursuit of beauty in photography is not merely about capturing pleasant or traditionally attractive subjects. Instead, he suggests that beauty encompasses a sense of rightness or harmony in the relationship between the subject, the photographer, and the viewer.
    • the photographer’s role is one of reverence and humility before the world, rather than domination over it.
    • art does not need to be revolutionary or overtly political to be meaningful. Instead, he advocates for a view of art that embraces subtlety and the contemplation of the ordinary.
    • photography should be deeply attentive to the world as it is, finding beauty and significance in everyday scenes and landscapes.
    • an appreciation of beauty does not ignore the world’s suffering but rather affirms the value of life in the face of it.

    “At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are”

    Adams, 1981

    “To be an artist is not to be a member of a secret society; it is not to be endowed with a capacity for high moral outrage; it is to see what is there” .

    Adams, 1981

    “No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film”

    Adams, 1981

    In summary, Beauty in Photography articulates a philosophy of photography that centers on the pursuit of beauty as an expression of harmony, respect, and attentiveness to the world. Adams argues that beauty is essential for both the survival and enrichment of the human spirit, urging photographers to approach their work with humility and openness to the profundity of ordinary life. Through his essays, Adams defends traditional values in photography, not as a retreat into the past, but as a timeless and deeply humanistic approach to art and life.

    What Can We Believe Where?

    Summer Nights, Walking

    The New West

    Turning Back

    American Silence

    https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/american-silence-photographs-of-robert-adams.html

    References:

    • ADAMS, Robert. 1996. Beauty in Photography. London: Aperture.
    • ADAMS, Robert. 2010. What Can We Believe Where? Photographs of the American West. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery.
    • ADAMS, Robert. 2017. Cottonwoods. Gottingen: Steidl.
    • ADAMS, Robert. 2023 re-issue. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture.
    • Sandeen, E. (2009). Robert Adams and Colorado’s Cultural Landscapes: Picturing Tradition and Development in the New West. Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 16, 116-97. Link to paper
    • Sandeen, E. (2009). Robert Adams and the ‘Persistent Beauty’ of Colorado Landscapes. History of Photography, 33, 55-70. Link to paper
    • Vilches, M. G. (2013). Reshaping Robert Adams’ Landscape. Zarch: Journal of interdisciplinary studies in architecture and urbanism. Link to paper
    • Mirakhor, L. (2014). Resisting the Temptation to Give Up: James Baldwin, Robert Adams, and the Disavowal of the American Way of Life. African American Review, 46, 653-670. Link to paper

    https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103KQP

    Google Images

    His  books include:

    • The New West
    • From the Missouri West
    • Summer Nights
    • Los Angeles Spring
    • To Make It Home
    • Listening to the River
    • West From the Columbia
    • What We Bought
    • Notes for Friends
    • California
    • Summer Nights
    • Walking, Gone?
    • What Can We Believe Where? 
    • The Place We Live.

    Adams has also written a number of critical essays on the art of photography, including Beauty in Photography, Why People Photograph and most recently, Along Some Rivers.

  • Toshio Shibata

    The photographs of Toshio Shibata achieve a unique harmony by focusing on the interweaving and equilibrium of natural forces with man-made objects and structures.

    The question of beauty is personal of course. And the places I photograph are actually quite ordinary. They may be found in locations where the surroundings (mountains, sea, and sky) are unquestionably beautiful. But the things I photograph are not always beautiful in themselves.

    To me, beauty is not the only reason for taking photographs. There are various reasons to click the shutter – for example form, texture, and graphical interest, depending on the situation. Whether viewers see my works are beautiful or not, I hope they will have feeling and inspire the viewer’s imaginative power…I want people to see my works freely with their own eyes, perceiving something deeper from the entire work, its movement, structure, texture.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p195.

    At the moment of taking a picture, I almost don’t see details. I concentrate on the overall structure, forms and movement, and before I lose sensation I capture this as soon as I can. In many cases, I only notice details later in the enlarged print; sometimes I only see it when someone points it out…

    In printing, I can transform detail into a strong weapon.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p196.

    I think of my subjects like still lifes, separate from their surroundings. I aim to remove the subject from history and stories related to the land. In this way, I try to create images that are open to various interpretations. By eliminated the skies that exist in our real world, I hope to eliminate emotion or sentiment. Even though there are no clouds in my photographs, I feel strong sympathy with the idea of ‘”equivalents” – the idea to be free and reset subject matter from literal interpretation.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p199.

    Using a large format camera, he eliminates most references to scale, sky, and horizon while providing crisp detail and texture. Long exposures capture water’s strength and innate grace as it spills, crashes, and glides over constructed sluices and channels. Arching paths of highways are seen carving into mountainsides and sheer cliff faces are transformed into repeating patterns as they are interlaced with human engineering.

    Works in Black and White


    https://deadbeatclubpress.com/en-gb/products/toshio-shibata-day-for-night

    As the title Day For Night implies, the book shows a progression through a sequence of night-time photographs into a set of images made in the day. But in Shibata’s camera light and darkness swap roles. Intense light sources, both indoor and outdoor, make the nocturnal scenes even stranger than they would be if enveloped in darkness. The daylight pictures depict heavy masses of constructed earth and stone in a world that is anything but bright and airy. In the pivot between day and night lies a foreboding tunnel that subsumes both the luminous and the murky.

    “The title gives another layer to the book, I knew that technique since my childhood through watching ‘Rawhide’ on TV but until now I’d never seen my own work with such an eye.”

    The title “Boundary Hunt” refers to the intersection between natural and human landscapes. Landscape fragments – nets against landfalls, piles of stones, encrusted metal, blocks of cement – are set together with large monumental dams that are made to look small, skyless crops of combinations of landscape elements like trees against rocks and waterfalls. With the occasional dwarfed person with their back to the viewer.

    This large paper back flexible book is a series of polaroid snapshots shot between 2000 and 2004 in Japan and the United States.

    “The imperfection of the Type 55 film border has always fascinated me. When I look at the resulting image, I find myself on the boundary between a photograph and an art drawing”

    from Toshio Shibata’s afterword (included in English).

    The second video (Italian) discusses the importance of minimalism and negative space in Shibata’s black and white work, and Japanese photography in general. Arguing that the use of grey-black and white gives a sense of ‘morbidezza’, a word that in Italian art combines the senses of sensitivity/fragility with perishability/impermanence/death. The book has one photo on the right hand page of each spread, apart from one foldout panorama of multiple versions of the same image towards the end. This design emphasises the meditation on fragility.

    ‘Falling Water’ is a series of black and white images of dam infrastructure across Japan and the USA.

    “About two decades ago, I had the opportunity to photograph a set of photos for the large vertical book DAM. To view my subject in vertical way gave me the impression that I was losing delicate materials in the photo. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t make the assignment in time. However, I continued photographing dams, and the result is this book.”

    Available at https://beyondwords.co.uk/falling-water

    Colour

    The book Painting reveals 16 unpublished colour photographs by Toshio Shibata, a Japanese photographer who is known for his rigorous and meticulous compositions. The representation of intimate yet spectacular landscapes — natural, and especially artificial — are at the core of Shibata’s work. In keeping with the tradition of painting that Shibata studied in his early years in 1968, this book celebrates the abstraction of beauty. It has been designed in a concertina format that can also be turned into a suspended object — just like a kakemono, a Japanese unframed scroll painting made on paper or silk and displayed as a wall hanging.

    http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/artists/toshio-shibata

    • Nihon tenkei (日本典型) / Photographs by Toshio Shibata. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1992. ISBN 4-02-256508-X.
    • With Yoshio Nakamura (中村良夫, Nakamura Yoshio). Tera: Sōkei suru daichi: Shashinshū (テラ: 創景する大地: 写真集) / Terra. Tokyo: Toshi Shuppan, 1994. ISBN 4-924831-12-3.
    • Landscape. Tucson, Ariz.: Nazraeli, 1996. ISBN 3-923922-46-9.
    • Toshio Shibata: October 11, 1997 through January 4, 1998. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997. ISBN 0-933856-51-2.
    • Shibata Toshio Visions of Japan. Kyoto: Korinsha, 1998. ISBN 4771328056.
    • Type 55. Tucson, Ariz.: Nazraeli, 2004. ISBN 1-59005-075-4.
    • Dam. Nazraeli, 2004. ISBN 1-59005-081-9.
    • Juxtapose. Kamakura, Kanagawa: Kamakura Gallery, 2005.[1]
    • Landscape 2. Portland, Ore.: Nazraeli, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59005-238-9. Color photographs.
    • Still in the Night. Koganei, Tokyo: Soh Gallery, 2008. Black and white night views, 1982–86 of expressways in Japan. Captions and text in Japanese and English.
    • Randosukēpu: Shibata Toshio (ランドスケープ: 柴田敏雄). Tokyo: Ryokō Yomiuri Shuppansha, 2008. ISBN 978-4-89752-285-2. Black and white and color photographs.
    • Contacts, Poursuite Éditions, 2013, ISBN 978-2-918960-70-6

  • Origins of the Picturesque and aesthetic consumerism

    In the second half of the eighteenth century, definitions of types of landscape or view, seen from an aesthetic or artistic point of view distinguished between:

    • the sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains)
    • the beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights.

    See discussion in Part 1 Beauty and the Sublime

    In between came the picturesque, views seen as being artistic but containing ‘pleasing’ elements of wildness or irregularity. Together with Gothic and Celticism it became part of the romantic aesthetic of the growing numbers of leisured middle classes.  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 who flooded areas like the Lake District sketched or painted using Claude Glasses  or used the camera lucida.

    The word picturesque, meaning literally “in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture”, was a word used as early as 1703 (Oxford English Dictionary), and derived from an Italian term pittoresco, “in the manner of a painter”. Prime examples are French landscape painters like Claude Lorrain. 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) and proposed a number of “principles of picturesque beauty”. 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 advocating more organic shapes to views and structures such as follies and grottos.

    After 1815 when Europeans were able to travel again after the wars, Italy became a favourite destination for picturesque-hunters and artists. This reinforced ideas of the ‘picturesque’ in the sense of a view that has been ‘perfectly’ composed according to compositional and perspective theories (eg leading lines, golden mean) that were key developments in art in Renaissance Italy). Grand theories of wild natural beauty gave way to the tamer and more commercialised picturesque of the mid 19th century using these broad principles. These ideas also underlie standard compositional prescriptions in many books and magazine articles on techniques of landscape photography today.

    See Posts:

    Gilpin’s theory of the picturesque

    Francis Frith’s poscards.

    and weblinks:

    Susan Sontag describes this commercialisation of the picturesque as ‘aesthetic consumerism’ (Sontag, 1977, p.24). As Malcolm Andrews (1999) remarks, there is “something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, ‘capturing’ wild scenes, and ‘fixing’ them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing room walls”. They ignore the complex social, political and economic interests and conflicts between classes, conservation and industrialisation, commercial interests and local people, those living and working in the countryside and those who simply enjoy it for leisure or regard it as part of their heritage.

    Fay Godwin suggests that ignoring the different interests and conflicts exacerbates polarisation of interests between users of the countryside: “I am wary of picturesque pictures. I get satiated with looking at postcards in local newsagents and at the picture books that are on sale, many of which don’t bear any relation to my own experience of the place… The problem for me about these picturesque pictures, which proliferate all over the place, is that they are a very soft warm blanket of sentiment, which covers everybody’s idea about the countryside… It idealises the country in a very unreal way.”
    (Fay Godwin 1986 South Bank Show Produced and directed by Hilary Chadwick, London Weekend Television quoted Alexander 2013 p84.)

     3.1: Reflecting on the picturesque

    Going beyond the picturesque requires thinking very carefully about what one is trying to say about ‘landscape’ and why. It also raises aesthetic challenges about how to communicate this in terms of following or subverting conventional theories of composition and the likely interpretation by different viewers.

  • The Beautiful and the Sublime

    “The Sublime” radio 4 podcast In our time

    Concepts of beauty

    “Beauty and art were once thought of as belonging together, with beauty as among art’s principle aims and art as beauty’s highest calling” Beech 2009 p12

    “Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life mat be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning” Adams 1996 p25

    “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” Edmund Burke 1757.

    Beauty is very much an aspect of aesthetics or more simply our ‘senses’; sensuous music and sounds, textiles and textures, pleasant flavours and smells. There are essentially two perspectives:

    1) beauty as  ‘objective’ universal within human nature. Mathematical and geometric evaluations of pieces of music, human features and pictorial composition have been used to support this view.

    2) beauty as subjective ‘taste’  ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’. As personal and/or a matter of cultural identity, what is beautiful to one group of people may be vulgar and repulsive to another.

    Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), was regarded as the antithesis of sublime since it exemplified classical beauty through its formal harmony, elegance and subtle luminosity.

    Modernist debates and Marxist critiques of beauty have made it a political matter – a bourgeois preoccupation and tool of repression.

    Dadaists Otto Dix (1891-1969) satirised images of conventional, romantic notions of beauty and fascist ideals of perfection in his politically challenging paintings made around the dawn of the Second World War.

    Conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp‘s urinal placed in gallery context.

     Concepts of the sublime

     “the sublime is associated with awe, danger and pain, with places where accidents happen, where things run beyond human control, where nature is untameable.”
    Liz Wells

     Longinus (c300AD) passage about poetry and rhetoric in ‘The True Sublime’ in Book 7 of the Peri Hypsous: For by some innate power the true sublime uplifts our souls; we are filled with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaunting joy; just as though we had ourselves produced what we had heard.

    Kant, Hegel, johann sciller.

    Etymology: 1580s, “expressing lofty ideas in an elevated manner,” from Middle French sublime (15c.), or directly from Latin sublimis “uplifted, high, borne aloft, lofty, exalted, eminent, distinguished,” possibly originally “sloping up to the lintel,” from sub “up to” + limen “lintel, threshold, sill” (see limit (n.)). The sublime (n.) “the sublime part of anything, that which is stately or imposing” is from 1670s.

    British Art and the Sublime Christine Riding and Nigel Llewellyn

    The English word derives from a conjunction of two Latin terms, the preposition sub, meaning below or up to and the noun limen, meaning limit, boundary or threshold. Limen is also the word for ‘lintel’, the heavy wooden or stone beam that holds the weight of a wall up above a doorway or a window. This sense of not only striving or pushing upwards but also against an overbearing force is an important connotation for the word sublime. By the seventeenth century, the word in English was in use both as an adjective and as a noun (the sublime) with many shades of meaning but invariably referring to things that are raised aloft, set high up and exalted, whether they be buildings, ideas, people, language, style or other aspects of or responses to art and nature.
    By about 1700 an additional theme started to develop, which was that the sublime in writing, nature, art or human conduct was regarded as of such exalted status that it was beyond normal experience, perhaps even beyond the reach of human understanding. In its greatness or intensity and whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, by the time of the Enlightenment, the sublime was generally regarded as beyond comprehension and beyond measurement.

    Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757 broke the idea of the sublime down into seven aspects, all of which Burke argued were discernible in the natural world and in natural phenomena:

    • Darkness – which constrains the sense of sight (primary among the five senses)
    • Obscurity – which confuses judgement
    • Privation (or deprivation) – since pain is more powerful than pleasure
    • Vastness – which is beyond comprehension
    • Magnificence – in the face of which we are in awe
    • Loudness – which overwhelms us
    • Suddenness – which shocks our sensibilities to the point of disablement
    The ‘romantic sublime’ was a particularly common theme throughout 18th and 19th century painting with religious and spiritual overtones. Sublime was a term that was used in art writing alongside adjectives such as ‘awful’, ‘dreadful’ and ‘terrible’, which today tend simply to denote ‘less than ideal’ but which in the 1700s were understood explicitly as expressions of awe, dread and terror, and were associated with the sublime as standard elements in aesthetic discourse. Sublime landscape painters, especially in the Romantic period, around 1800, tended to take subjects such as towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms, rough seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches that, if actually experienced, would be dangerous and even life-threatening.


    John Martin

    JMW Turner

    Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the sea of the fog / above the mist 1818 

    James Ward:  Gordale Scar 1812-1814

    Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) defines the sublime as not just an aspect of aesthetics, but of psychoanalysis. He related it to his idea of ‘the uncanny’ which refers to a feeling of discomfort when seeing something that is simultaneously familiar and alien. ‘Das Unheimliche’ not just in terms of location, but in terms of identity. The un-settlement, or cognitive dissonance that can result from an encounter with the uncanny is what can stir the sense of the sublime.

    So becomes something that occupies the imagination. Something that triggers a psychoactive response in an individual.

    Philip Shaw ‘Modernism and the Sublime’

    Lucio Fontana (1950s) punched holes (or buchi) through his canvases, the aim being literally to break through the surface of the work so that the viewer can perceive the space that lies beyond. Fontana regarded this gesture as a means of disclosing the unlimited space of the sublime, announcing ‘I have created an infinite dimension’. In some works slashes executed with a razor seem to erupt outwards, conveying the force of the original assault towards the viewer in a way that is both energetic and terrifying.

    Mark Rothko   Robert Rosenblum in‘The Abstract Sublime’ (1961) writes: ‘the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths’. Rothko’s biographer James Breslin writes: ‘Rothko … constantly felt the imminent danger of being ‘smothered’ by encroaching physical, social, or domestic circumstances. His new paintings created a breathing space. Yet these paintings do not seek simply to ‘transcend’ the walls of an unalterable external reality by soaring upward into either an untrammelled freedom or a vaporous mysticism. Rather, by (in Rothko’s words) pulverising the verge of dissolution – his works free us from the weight, solidity, and definition of a material existence, whose constricting pressures we still feel. Rothko combines freedom and constraint and if these paintings create ‘dramas’ with the shapes as the ‘performers’ they stage a struggle to be free.’

    “in many cultures, a confrontation of the sublime is a requisite rite of passage. Within my project, Threshold Zone (2008) I explored and attempted to rationalise my own response to both man-made and naturally formed underground spaces. I felt curious, and was determined to make some work in these spaces, but I was also acutely phobic of being underground, particularly when working alone. These spaces were generally physically unfamiliar to me, yet my mind was filled with familiar fairytales and contemporary narratives relating to the dangers that lurk below ground in the darkness. I channelled these feelings into a creative strategy, in which I placed my camera in a space referred to as ‘twilight’ or ‘threshold zone’ of a cave that receives some daylight, and the ‘dark zone’ that receives none. The resulting, highly contrasting images which are presented as back-lit light-boxes, I hope illustrate my encounter with the sublime’ Jesse Alexander 2013 p 40.

    The sublime radio 4 Podcast In our time

     Exercise 1.6 The contemporary abyss

    Since the very beginning of photography, the city has provided opportunities for the photographer: landscape and other subject matter.

  • Preconceptions about Landscape

    TASK:Abandon technique. Pick up a pencil and draw a very rough sketch of a ‘landscape’ picture or brainstorm.

    I found this quite difficult because I have been doing landscape drawings and paintings for OCA Fine Art courses (See my Landscape Art and Prints on Zemniimages). These have broadened my own preconceptions of what landscape can be to anything from figurative panoramas, through expressionist close-up to near complete abstraction. Though this diversity is not yet reflected in my photography – one of the reasons I find this course exciting.

    • what shape is the picture? 19C conventions were usually landscape format with broad vistas. But some late 19C landscapes and also earlier drawings were much more focused on particular elements in portrait format eg trees. Japanese and Chinese landscapes were also  often vertical. There can also be very long thin panoramas, or tall thin verticals also.
    • what sort of terrain is depicted? 19C conventions and also Chinese and Japanese landscapes were concerned with mountains, trees, flat fields, sky, water, river. Sometimes cottages, houses, castles. 
    • what is in it?  Are there people? 19C conventions and before generally used landscape as a backdrop to religious or historical paintings. ‘Landscape paintings’ in both Western and Asian traditions generally had one or two people or a small group of people dwarfed by the natural elements. Sometimes they are excluded altogether eg  Monet’s waterlillies and abstract landscapes like Richter. 
    • how are the subjects arranged? According to rule of thirds composition. Pleasing. But might have high, low or central horizons, and diagonals and triangular relationships or swirling circles.
    • how might you describe the ‘mood‘ of the picture. Awestruck, calm, Turner’s turbulence.  David’s mystique. Whistler’s mistiness. Colour and dramatic distortions in Hockney.

     Rosalind Krauss ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View

    Compares two versions of the same image by Timothy O’Sullivan ‘Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake (Nevada)’

    1868 photograph which later became a celebrated example of art photography for its abstract composition, and contrast between mistiness of the water and the detail of the foreground – ‘Twentieth century sensibility welcomes…as a model of the mysterious, silent beauty to which landscape photography had access during the early decades of the century’ ‘the mysterious beauty of the image is in this opulent flattening of its space’.

    1875 lithograph published in King Survey Report as a geological study. This increased the detail and thereby removed the mystery.

    She argues that different types of image are legitimate for different types of discourse. She examines the transition in painting, and a little later in photography, from early 18C landscape with feelings of depth that had been commissioned particularly to hang in houses of patrons, to flattened perspectives more suitable for displaying on larger exhibition gallery walls. ‘Transformation after 1860 into a flattened and compressed experience of space spreading laterally across the surface’. Voiding of perspective but with sharp value contrasts. Serial landscapes like Monet’s haystacks.

    But is an issue if the effects and our appreciation of a work does not relate to the original intention of the artist? eg in the case of O’Sullivan if what we value today are effects caused by the limitations of the photographic process that O’Sullivan would have changed if he could.

    Many 19C images were also intended to be viewed through stereoscopes. Shutting out surroundings to focus on the ‘view’ or sequence of ‘views’. Makers of stereo views often structured the image around a vertical marker in the fore-or middle-ground to center the space. Copyright was often with the companies, not with the photographer.

    Atget – need to understand the number, sequencing and repetition in relation to the way they were used and cataloguing systems. He himself did not give an artistic evaluation. What does this imply for our evaluation of his photography as art?

    When does a ‘view’ become a ‘landscape’?

  • Awoiska van der molen

    Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. Between 2000 and 2003, van der Molen made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city. Since 2009, she has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom. 

    Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molens photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing; expressing these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.

    ???

    She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places:

    Sequester (2014) “photographed throughout the whole of Europe” including the volcanic Canary Islands,contains monochromatic “landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey”.

    Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molen’s photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Awoiska van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing. She plays out these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.

    https://www.awoiska.nl/books#sequester

    Blanco 

    (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees.

    “Spending long periods of time in solitude in remote landscapes, Awoiska van der Molen slowly uncovers the identity of the place, allowing it to impress upon her its specific emotional and physical qualities. Using her personal experience within the landscape for her creative process, she instinctively searches for a state of being in which the boundary between herself and her surroundings blur”.  

    Anna Dannemann, The Photographers’ Gallery | Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2017.

    The Living Mountain 

    (2020) is “a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit.”

    ‘Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world’. 

    https://www.awoiska.nl/books

  • ‘Late’ Photography

    TASK

    1. Read David Campany’s essay ‘Safety in Numbness’ (see ‘Online learning materials and student-led research’ at the start of this course guide). Summarise the key points of the essay and note down your own observations on the points he raises.

    ‘”There is a sense in which the late photograph, in all its silence, can easily flatter the ideological paralysis of those who gaze at it without the social or political will to make sense of its circumstance…If the banal matter-of-factness of the late photograph can fill us with a sense of the sublime, it is imperative that we think through why this might be. There is a fine line between the banal and the sublime, and it is a political line.” Campany p 192.

    Campany reaches this conclusion first through a discussion of Meyerowitz’s photographs Aftermath and the BBC documentary in ‘Reflections on Ground Zero’.

    [wpdevart_youtube]A8hN-aNWWBE[/wpdevart_youtube]

    He questions the trend towards ‘photographing the aftermath of events – traces, fragments, empty buildings, empty streets, damage to the body and damage to the world’ and the way it has come to be prevalent in photojournalism as a response to the overwhelming use of video now as a record of unfolding events. Partly due also to the fact that photographers are now rarely allowed access to conflict sites – unlike for example in VietNam. One could add also since Campany’s 2003 article the ubiquitous use of mobile video phones by people involved in events now able to upload them almost instantaneously as a more ‘democratic’ and immediate (if often shakily filmed) perspective and record on what is happening.

    He argues that it is the stillness of late photography that gives it its power – more memorable than events on the move. While its privileged status may be imagined to stem from a natural capacity to condense and simplify things, the effects of the still image derive much more from its capacity to remain open. It is that openness that can be paralysing ‘In its apparent finitude and muteness it can leave us in permanent limbo, suspending even the need for analysis and bolstering a kind of liberal melancholy that shuns political explanation.’

    2. Look at some of Meyerowitz’s images available online from Aftermath: World Trade Centre Archive (2006). Consider how these images differ from your own memories of the news footage and other images of the time. Write a short response to the work (around 300 words), noting what value you feel this ‘late’ approach has.

    Meyerowitz’s images were taken as the officially sanctioned record of the impact of the attack, partly as a memorial for the relatives but also a historical record. Their monumental ‘sublime beauty’ in the colours and the large cinematic format are apocalyptic – resonant of the paintings of artists like John Martin and Turner. Like much other ‘late photography’ there are few people. Those that are there are dwarfed by the enormity of the buildings, machinery and the hell volcanic fires. Meyerowitz claims that he did not make the images ‘I was told how to photograph it by the thing itself‘. As Campany points out, that means that he is not questioning his own background and assumptions that inevitably underlie his photographic skills and practice.

    His approach is very different from that of another on-site photographer – a policeman John Bott. His images have more people in, and are more participatory social documentary of the clear-up activities.

    John Botte’s photos of Ground Zero

    Unlike Meyerowitz he did not get official permission – as he had done a lot of photography as part of his police work he had been asked to photograph the clear-up work by his boss. This was now leading to various legal complications. His health was seriously damaged by the photography work and he did not profit from the photos he took – proceeds being given to charity.

    [wpdevart_youtube]vp5Zi16IRDg[/wpdevart_youtube]

    I agree with Campany that the monumental aesthetic beauty in Meyerowitz’s images seems to anaesthetise and paralyse any political questioning of why the event occurred, and whether and why that particular type of historical record was needed. I was in India conducting an NGO workshop at the time of the attacks and first saw the news with colleagues. On the one hand they had all been through much more serious natural disasters – Gujarat Earthquake and periodically severe monsoon floods – where many more thousands of people had been killed both by the disaster itself, and then lack of emergency aid in the follow-up. Much of that unreported in the Western press. On the other hand, in the light of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, there was also high anti-American feeling. It was only when I got back two weeks later that I saw images at home.

    I think that the apocalyptic nature seem to almost glorify the unintended martyrdom of the victims – matched by praise of the way in which the survivors lay their mourning images then get up and move on. They raise no questioning of events in the countries from which Al Quaeda perpetrators come, including but not only American actions, and how the conflict can really be resolved. To me they look very much like images I saw on the TV in Sudan some years later with the US ‘shock and awe’ opening of the Iraq War. But very different from the interviews with people on Al Jazeera Arabic channel of the impact. That time in video footage, some of it live.

    This lack of questioning is not however inherent in ‘late photography’, but in the selection of the effects one photographs and their contextualisation in other images or documents that might portray a multiplicity of complex perspectives – even where a clear message in unlikely to be appropriate of effective.

     
    ————————————-

    !!To be updated from Landscape Photography

    In his 2003 essay, David Campany comments that:

    “One might easily surmise that photography has of late inherited a major role as undertaker, summariser or accountant. It turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened totting up the effects of the world’s activity.” (‘Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problem of “Late Photography”’ (in Campany (ed.), 2007)
    This ‘aftermath’ approach dates back to the war photographers of the American Civil War and the Crimean War (1853–56), because of technological limitations of the time. Because of the large plate cameras and slow emulsions, it was not possible to photograph actual combat. Their images focused instead on portraits of soldiers, camp scenes and the aftermath of battles and skirmishes. Their images could not yet be reproduced en masse in the illustrated press, but some of these photographs were used as the basis for woodcut engravings for publications such as The Illustrated London News and Harper’s Weekly.

    Although technology today makes it possible – though still difficult –  to capture the heat of war and atrocities, this is not necessarily the most effective way of portraying the horrors of violence.
    Examples of photographers using the ‘late’ approach in contemporary landscape include:

    • Joel Meyerowitz’s Aftermath images of Ground Zero in New York
    • Richard Misrach ‘s images of the American Desert show the aftermath of human activity but in a beautified distilled large format.
    • Sophie Ristelhueber ‘s aerial images of the Afghan conflict show the scars left on the landscape
    • Paul Seawright Hidden cold ‘objective’ images of battle sites and minefields in Afghanistan
    • Willie Doherty made very evocative images of the left detritus from conflicts during the Troubles and in the present day.

    Other photographers have focused on the precursors – the tension in anticipation of violence.  “not the ‘theatre of war’ but its rehearsal studio” (Campany, 2008, p.46). :

    • An-My Lê’s (to do) series 29 Palms (2004) documents US marine training manoeuvres at a range used to prepare soldiers ahead of deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq.
    • Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in Chicago (2005) (to do) examine an Israeli military training ground
    • Paul Shambroom’s project Security (2003−07) studied the simulated training sites that are used by the US emergency services and Department of Homeland Security, nicknamed ‘Disaster City’ and ‘Terror Town’.
    • Sarah Pickering in UK has photographed training grounds for the fire and police service. Her images contain no people, aiming to seem like a film set ready for the action.

    See Post on Landscape Photography blog: 3.3: ‘Late Photography’