Zemni Photography Blog

Category: Inspiration

  • Justin Partyka

    website

    Summer Days in the Stour Valley

    Wander the path of a winding river and it will take you deeply into the experience of landscape. Through the summer days I walked the footpaths, fields, meadows and farm tracks of this bucolic river valley. The Stour Valley remains a timeless landscape that continues to be rooted to its past. In places it has remained relatively unchanged for centuries by escaping the impact of industrial agriculture. Of course, this is “Constable Country:” the heart of English landscape art. People come to this part of East Anglia to literally step into the scenes of Constable’s paintings, but I set out to find my own way of seeing the Stour Valley. I discovered it can be a place of wonderful afternoon light and this inspired the photographs I made. These photographs largely reject the celebrated grand vistas of the Stour Valley and instead offer an alternative way of looking at this landscape. They bring attention to the particular, the peculiar, and the poetic – highlighting the hidden places and scenes that are so often overlooked. But as I worked, the spirit of Constable was always there, lingering behind me in the fields.

    [These photographs were made during the summer months of 2012-2013.]

    Some Country

    “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods….”
    (Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking,’ 1862)

    Some Country continues my commitment to photographing rural East Anglia. Following the decade long work photographing the agrarian farmers of the region (Field Work), this new ongoing series explores the contemporary rural agricultural landscape of Norfolk and Suffolk. Moving beyond the farmer’s connection to the landscape, Some Country is reveals my own connection to rural East Anglia and includes photographs from the same fields and farm tracks that I explored during childhood. Once again, these photographs show my fascination with how man shapes the landscape, but they are also photographs about memory, personal experience, and how a prolonged connection to the landscape around us, makes us and shapes us.

    Some Trees

    As I have wandered the East Anglian landscape making the photographs for Some Country occasionally I have encountered trees that are so particular in their diginity and presence in the landscape that they suggest something beyond the country and become themselves the subject of a photograph.

    Fieldwork

    Gallery

    One of England’s most rural and agricultural regions, East Anglia is a place with a long history of people working the land. Here the Romans grew their wheat and barley, and a culture of family owned agrarian farms developed and flourished, continuing an agricultural tradition with a lineage extending back to the region’s peasant farmers of the early Middle Ages. But during the last 50 years things have changed. Most of the small farms are now gone.

    These photographs are from the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. They tell the story of those that remain – the stoical small-time farmers who continue to work the fields because it is all they know. They are the forgotten people of the flatlands, whose identity is intimately shaped by the landscape that surrounds them. Theirs is a way of life that is deeply rooted in the past. Traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon. How best to plough, sow, hoe, and harvest a field to reap the best from it. The detailed histories and biographies of the local landscape. Farmers who have come and gone, from what direction the fox will come to steal a chicken, and who planted a particular oak tree and when. The old ways continue to work, so there is no need to change.

    For ten years Justin Partyka has been photographing throughout the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, exploring a world of rabbit catchers, reed cutters, and the region’s small-scale agrarian farmers. He calls them “the forgotten people of the flatlands,” who have an intimate relationship with the landscape that surrounds them. It is a way of life that is deeply rooted to the past and its traditional methods and knowledge. These photographs tell the story of these farmers and the fields they work, and clearly illustrate Partyka’s dedicated immersion into their world. His painterly use of colour and the unique qualities of the East Anglian light beautifully captures this timeless way of rural life.

    Field Work: Photographs from East Anglia is published in a limited edition of 100 signed and numbered books. Each book comes with a specially embossed slipcase and a 10 x 12

    Black Fen

    Black fen they call it round here. Black — for the peaty soil; black — for the mood of the area, for its history and for its future.
    — Mary Chamberlain, Fenwomen, 1975

    Black Fen is an ongoing series of photographs exploring the mysterious flatlands of the Fens. To drive across this landscape feels like crossing a great sea. The road undulates from the ever-shifting land, tossing the car like a small boat. Occasionally an unpaved drove branches off providing access to a house, farm buildings or fields deep in the middle of the fen. The presence of water is constant. A complex network of dykes and drains criss-crosses the fields, the murky waters rising and falling as the fenland locks and pumping stations work to prevent the water from taking back the land. All around is an abundance of crops which fight for space with an encroaching wildness of weeds and bushes that grow thick and fast out of the fertile earth. Once a place of swamps and marshes, this landscape exists because of the pioneering work of Cornelius Vermuyden and his fellow Dutch engineers, who in 1626 began draining the fens with the support of King Charles I. Today covering an area of almost 1,500 square miles in Eastern England, the Fens are one of the world’s largest areas of reclaimed land.

    Fen Women

    Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain is a classic work of oral history. It was the first book by the feminist publisher Virago Press in 1975. Fenwomen is a unique documentary of women’s lives in the village of Isleham in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It tells the story of “women as labourers and labourers’ wives, whose daily toil for the survival of themselves and their families had never been acknowledged, much less lauded.”

    This new edition of the book by Full Circle Editions features 23 new photographs by Justin Partyka specially commissioned for this publication. Taken in and around Isleham during 2010, these photographs present a portrait of the village over thirty years since the oral history was originally collected. Much has changed in the village, but as these photographs reveal, Isleham’s strong sense of place is still intimately shaped by the mysterious flat fenlands that surround it.

    Saskatchewan

    Covering an area of 251, 700 square miles, the province of Saskatchewan is almost three times the size of Great Britain, yet it has a population of only 1, 010, 146. For such a big place, the rest of the world seems to know very little about Saskatchewan, if anything at all. Even in Canada, the majority of Canadians asked about Saskatchewan have never been there and have no desire to go. Those that have driven through the province say that, “there is nothing there, just endless wheat fields.”
    Saskatchewan is the place you pass through to get somewhere else. But hidden amongst the wheat fields is a rich and diverse, deeply traditional prairie culture. It is an eclectic mix of Hutterite colonies, Indian reservations, stock car racing, and cowboys; towns and cities which rise out of the landscape with their seductive names like Moose Jaw, Big Beaver, and Buffalo Gap, along with the main industry of grain farming.
    In 2005 Saskatchewan celebrated its centennial year. But as the pioneering spirit of the province’s founders is remembered, rural life is experiencing a major decline. The many abandoned farms which scar the landscape are a testimony to this. Although Saskatchewan is still predominately agricultural, today seventy percent of the population live in towns and cities. Many years of poor grain prices, along with the dominance of corporate agribusiness are destroying the cultural landscape of the province, where 20,000 small farms have closed since 1986 alone. As DeNeen Brown highlights in a story in the Washington Post (Oct 25, 2003): ‘Towns throughout Canada’s prairies are dying slow deaths. All along the highways of Saskatchewan abandoned buildings lean against the prairie wind, which blows through the cracked windows of houses deserted by the families who traded them for a few thousand dollars or for the cars they drove away.’

    However, the people that remain and call Saskatchewan home express a deep passion for and understanding of prairie life: an acceptance of the endless space and the loneliness it brings, but also the importance of community in a world of rural isolation. And underlying it all is a deep sense of place–an intimate relationship with the inescapable open landscape which surrounds everything and everyone.

    [This project has developed into a collaboration with the Saskatchewan writer Ken Mitchell, taking the form of an image and word performance and a future book. In 2015 – 2016 Justin will be returning to Saskatchewan to make new photographs.]

  • 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.

  • Eugene Atget

    The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced documentary photography that
    was far removed from the frontier of photojournalism. During a working life that lasted from
    1890 to 1927, Atget produced 10,000 images of Paris, working with a large format 24x18cm
    wooden camera and making and coating his own large glass plate negatives. Atget cared deeply
    about the small traders, street musicians, actors, artists, ribbon sellers, etc., who were being
    squeezed out of their livings by modernisation. He also cared for the architecture of the republic,
    much of which was crumbling and in a state of squalor, just waiting to be demolished. Atget
    was motivated more by the need to re-create, preserve and document the old city’s existence
    than by a desire to create imagery for sale.
    It’s not difficult to imagine these
    works as paintings. (Compare Atget’s
    Bitumiers with Gustave Caillebotte’s The
    Floor Scrapers, for example.) You’ll find
    more Atget images in the Bridgeman
    Art Library. Follow the link on the OCA
    student website. Some of Atget’s work
    showed surrealist elements. Look at his
    famous ‘corset shop’ photograph, for
    example.
    Project Photography as art
    Water Lilies Eugène Atget. Not Paris this time, but recognisably
    in a fine art tradition i.e. Monet.
    Bitumiers

  • Frank Newbould

     

    One of the most striking campaigns in relation to the developing mythology of the British rural landscape was a series of posters painted during 1942 by Frank Newbould (1887–1951).The resemblance between Newbould’s posters and travel advertising of the time is also worth noting. Substituting strap lines encouraging would be holidaymakers to explore their country with a command to defend it was a novel strategy.

  • Marcus Bleasdale

    Marcus Bleasdale (born 1968) is a photojournalist, born in the UK to an Irish family. He spent over eight years covering the brutal conflict within the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and has worked in many other places. Much of his work is linked to fundraising for aid and human rights agencies and there is often a link to ways t donate. His videos are extremely powerful and also discuss what people can do to change the situations the are seeing.

    His images are in both black and white and colour and he also does video. They get their power because he is well informed about what he is shooting and knows why he wants hat shot and also has access to people and situations most outsiders would not. But he also has an extraordinary sense of composition and tone. Some of his images at composited (no examples available for download) but I generally find these less powerful.

    http://www.marcusbleasdale.com/sources/ipad/index.php#home

    Rape of a Nation.    http://mediastorm.com/publication/rape-of-a-nation