Zemni Photography Blog

Category: Theory and Concepts

  • Eeva Karhu

    https://www.personsprojects.com/news/eeva-karhu-polku–paths

    https://www.purdyhicks.com/exhibitions/89-eeva-karhu-finding-the-path-within/works/

    ‘My camera is my eye. It captures moments between what I’m viewing and me. I record the time that I will soon pass through while I experience the timelessness of its passing. I walk a circle which path has neither beginning nor end. I photograph this path where each beginning is the horizon of the last one. By layering all these photographs together they form one image that documents my journey. In a sense I record time and in so doing, I continue its movement forever.

    I study this cyclic movement. I take part in it and imitate it, by walking the same circle route during one year. While walking, my feet find the rhythm of the way. A monotonic beat is unleashing my thoughts. Knowledge of the past and the future is dropping onto the path; bit by bit the present reveals its timeless essence’.

    Through the layered structure of her photographs, Eeva Karhu reflects on time and its cyclic nature, using multiple exposures as her technique for recording time’s passage. Her art engages in the study of perception and cognition. The human eye and memory are not like a camera, which records everything unselectively, because the experiences relayed by our visual receptors are always coloured by our emotions and other sensory impressions.

  • Don McCullin

    The Landscape brings together for the first time a collection of McCullin’s landscape photography, primarily set against the stormy backdrop of Somerset, where he now resides. The imagery of his home county, ravaged by storms, projects the associations of a battlefield or the views of one intimate with scenes of war.

    The book also features landscape images from throughout his career taken in Syria, Iraq, Indonesia and India.

    If you look again at McCullin’s landscapes, you start to sense the figure who made the pictures, invisible behind the lens, stepping forward with nothing but his own shadow – in the marsh, against the snow, along the causeway, over the brow. By now, he is stripped of all superfluities. He is not a man in repose, who lingers lazily. He is striding into the wind, as always.

    Mark Holborn ‘One Man Walking’ introduction The Landscape p9

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2018/oct/02/don-mccullin-landscape-photography-in-pictures

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/jul/16/new-horizons-the-living-landscapes-of-don-mccullin-in-pictures

  • John Gossage

    John Gossage (born 1946) is an American photographer working from Washington DC. His artist’s books and other publications use his photographs to explore the interplay between landscapes, urban environments, and the unseen or overlooked aspects of the places that are part of our everyday lives. His work not only captures the aesthetic of these locations but also invites viewers to consider the deeper stories and histories embedded within them. His work is noted for under-recognised elements of the urban environment such as abandoned tracts of land, debris and garbage, and graffiti, and themes of surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power.

    “I am a humanist, like most of us are, I can’t really step back to see the beauty and order of all this; closeness brings chaos and dread in this case. We have done harm to the place we live, I’m told, but it seems to me that we have done the most harm to ourselves and our best-laid plans. The planet has a plan to fix this, if we don’t.” 

    Should Nature Change 2019

    I have absolutely no idea what I am doing any more and am totally sure of it. And that’s how it works’

    Life and work

    Gossage was born in Staten Island, New York City in 1946 and at an early age became interested in photography, leaving school at 16 and taking private instruction from Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovitch and Bruce Davidson. He later moved to Washington, D.C. to study, and subsequently received a grant from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art which allowed him to remain in the city and refine his photographic technique. He has shown his photographs in solo and group exhibitions since 1963.

    After a number of years with Nazraeli Press his usual publisher is now Loosestrife Editions and Steidl. He has taught at the University of Maryland, College Park and curated several photographic exhibitions.

    John Gossage’s first monograph, The Pond (1985), has been republished to great acclaim.

    His other notable books include Stadt Des Schwarz (1987); LAMF (1987); There and Gone (1997); The Things That Animals Care About (1998); Hey Fuckface (2000); Snake Eyes (2002); Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004); Putting Back the Wall (2007); The Secrets of Real Estate (2008); and The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler/Map of Babylon (2010); The Code ( 2011); She Called Me by Name (2012); The Actor (2011); Who Do You Love (2014); Nothing (2014); and pomodoii a grappolo (2015). 

    For Vimeo limited access versions of most of these books see: Vimeo Photobookstore.

    For full list of his work see Wikipedia references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gossage#References

    For details of books published by Steidtl: https://steidl.de/Artists/John-Gossage-0921316154.html

    The Pond

    Gossage photographed a small, unnamed pond between Washington, D.C., and Queenstown, Maryland, between 1981 and 1985.

    The title was intended to recall Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, but Gossage advocated a more all-embracing view of the landscape, exploring the less idealized spaces that border America’s cities and suburbs. Although many of the images in The Pond appear unruly or uncared for, Gossage found moments of grace and elegance in even the most mundane of places.

    A few years after being photographed the pond had dried up.

    The pond is a literary monologue, a narrative landscape book, character development — all of it. … It’s set in Queenstown, but a few of the shots were actually taken in Berlin. I won’t tell which ones. I wanted to speak metaphorically about nature and civilization, which I realized halfway through my project. It’s a work of documentary fiction. The sites are universally trivial. There are many ponds, and that one may not even be there anymore.

    The book is different [from the exhibition] in that it’s a narrative. You start at page one and move your way through. I was surprised because I really liked the show once I saw it. It’s given me new things to think about — things I haven’t digested yet.

    John Gossage interviewed in Katherine Boyle (2021)

    the sense one gets from the kind and placement of the trash around Gossage’s pond is that it wasn’t necessary to put it there, and the effect of doing so could not have been completely unanticipated; a few of the culprits may have been only willfully ignorant, but most were surely worse – those of us (I think we all do it, with varying degrees of indirection) who disfigure the landscape as a way of striking at life in general.…

    Though Gossage’s study of nature in America is believable because it includes evidence of man’s darkness of spirit, it is memorable because of the intense fondness he shows for the remains of the natural world. He pictures everything – the loveliness of gravel, of sticks, of scum gleaning the water… He doesn’t even hesitate to photograph what we admire already (which is riskier, it being harder to awaken us to what we think we know), abruptly pointing his camera straight up at circling birds, and, later, over to a songbird on a wire. 

    Gossage does not use his survey of wood around a lake to stress an indictment; the off-road landscape through which he leads us is a mixture of the natural one and our junk, but his focus is not so much on the grotesqueries of the collage as on the reassurances of nature’s simplicities.

    Adams, Robert (24 February 2013). “Robert Adams on John Gossage’s ‘The Pond’ (1986)”
    John Gossage
    • New York: Aperture, 1985. ISBN 9780893812065. With an essay by Denise Sines. Edition of 2000 copies.
    • New York: Aperture, 2010. ISBN 9781597111324. With a preface by Toby Jurovics and an essay by Gerry Badger.

    Exhibition: John Gossage: The Pond, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 2010/2011

    Should Nature Change?

    It’s all about the ordinary now, the little things at the edge of your consciousness, the “signs” all around you.…

    Everyone everywhere now has a small thing that has changed for them. The big things, those things that always happen to someone else, the other people, the ones on the news. The earthquakes, the floods, the fires, the disasters, are all still there in their grand scale. But it’s that the birds that used to come to your backyard are no longer there is what keeps you up at night.

    What I have been photographing for [Should Nature Change] are moments when the normal slips, and the disorder starts. Subtle things that whisper to you that things have started to change and in all likelihood not for the best. Nature looks slightly different, it’s a bit warmer, there is a fire at the edge of town, a few of the people much younger than you have a different look in their eyes — remember the dinosaurs?

    Black and white pictures of the country I come from and at this point in my life, work to understand.
    The Times They Are A-Changin when I was younger I thought that song was about something different.

    John Gossage Artist’s Statement https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/disorder/john-gossage

    References

    1.   Adams, Robert (24 February 2013). “Robert Adams on John Gossage’s ‘The Pond’ (1986)”. Retrieved 2021-07-20.
    2. Katherine Boyle (2021-12-23) [2010-09-02]. “Nature On Display: John Gossage, ‘The Pond,’ at Smithsonian American Art Museum”. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. ISSN 0190-8286. OCLC 1330888409.
    3. Looking Up Ben James – A Fable Book review by Gerry Badger https://www.1000wordsmag.com/john-gossage/
    4. Links to Interviews: https://americansuburbx.com/?s=John+Gossage

    Photography Archives

    1. “Artist Info – John Gossage, 1946”. www.nga.gov. Retrieved 2020-05-12.
    2. “John Gossage”. The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved 2020-05-12.
    3.  “”Gossage””. The Menil Collection. Retrieved 2020-05-12.

  • Gilpin’s Theory of the Picturesque

    Gilpin’s Essay on Prints (1768) defined picturesque as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture” (p. xii).  Gilpin began to expound his “principles of picturesque beauty”, based largely on his knowledge of landscape painting. During the late 1760s and 1770s Gilpin travelled extensively in the summer holidays and applied these principles to the landscapes he saw, committing his thoughts and spontaneous sketches to notebooks. William Gilpin’s work was a direct challenge to the ideology of the well established Grand Tour, showing how an exploration of rural Britain could compete with classically oriented tours of the Continent. The irregular, anti-classical, ruins became sought after sights.

    Gilpin’s views were articulated particularly in his guide to Observations on the River Wye 1770:

    “We travel for various purposes – to explore the culture of soils, to view the curiosities of art, to survey the beauties of nature, and to learn the manners of men, their different politics, and modes of life. The following little work proposes a new object of pursuit; that of examining the face of the country by the rules of picturesque beauty; opening the sources of those pleasures which are derived from the comparison.”introduction (Gilpin, [1782] 2005, p.17)

    While Gilpin allowed that nature was good at producing textures and colours, it was rarely capable of creating the perfect composition. Some extra help from the artist, perhaps in the form of a carefully placed tree, was usually required.

    ‘Nature is always great in design; but unequal in composition…Nature gives us the material of landscape: woods, rivers, trees, lakes, ground, and mountains; but leaves us to work them up into pictures, as our fancy leads…I am so attached to my picturesque rules, that if nature gets it wrong, I cannot help putting her right…the picture is not so much the ultimate end, as it is the medium, through which the ravishing scenes of nature are excited in the imagination.’

    Gilpin’s work on watercolour technique emphasised both texture and composition were important in a “correctly picturesque” scene:

    • The texture should be “rough”, “intricate”, “varied”, or “broken”, without obvious straight lines.
    • The composition should work as a unified whole, incorporating several elements: a dark “foreground” with a “front screen” or “side screens”, a brighter middle “distance”, and at least one further, less distinctly depicted, “distance”.
    • A ruined abbey or castle would add “consequence”.
    • A low viewpoint, which tended to emphasise the “sublime”, was always preferable to a prospect from on high.

    In contrast to other contemporary travel writers, such as Thomas Pennant, Gilpin included little history, and few facts or anecdotes. He described ways that the scenes could be improved upon, according to his vision of picturesque beauty. He directed readers to the specific spots he believed would yield the most picturesque vantage point of a given location.

    Although he came in for criticism and satire eg in Jane Austen, Gilpin’s views were very influential in painting and related media, and particularly  garden design, encouraging landscape architects to introduce more organic shapes to views and structures such as follies and grottos. Others, most notably Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price (1794  An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful) and Thomas Johnes, developed Gilpin’s ideas into more comprehensive theories of the picturesque and apply these more generally to landscape design and architecture.

    Improved road communications and travel restrictions on continental Europe saw an explosion of British domestic tourism in the 1780s and 1790s. Many of these picturesque tourists were intent on sketching, or at least discussing what they saw in terms of landscape painting. Some sketched freehand the scenes Gilpin described, and others employed the camera lucida – the precursor to the compact camera – as an aid to responding visually to Gilpin’s picturesque descriptions.  Gilpin’s works were the ideal companions for this new generation of travellers; they were written specifically for that market and never intended as comprehensive travel guides.

    Gilpin asked: “shall we suppose it a greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue a trivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties of nature?”. The little brown ‘viewpoints’ icons on Ordnance Survey maps are a legacy of Gilpin.

  • Roger Fenton

    Roger Fenton (28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers.

    Roger Fenton was born in Crimble Hall, then within the parish of Bury, Lancashire, on 28 March 1819. His grandfather was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and banker, his father a banker and Member of Parliament. Fenton was the fourth of seven children by his father’s first marriage. His father had 10 more children by his second wife.

    In 1838 Fenton went to University College London where he graduated in 1840 with a “first class” Bachelor of Arts degree, having studied English, mathematics, Greek and Latin. In 1841, he began to study law at University College, evidently sporadically as he did not qualify as a solicitor until 1847, in part because he had become interested in studying to be a painter. Fenton visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in London in 1851 and was impressed by the photography on display there. He then visited Paris to learn the waxed paper calotype process, most likely from William Fox Henry Talbot, its inventor. By 1852 he had photographs exhibited in England, and travelled to Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg making calotypes there, and photographed views and architecture around Britain. His published call for the setting up of a photographic society was answered with its establishment in 1853; the Photographic Society, with Fenton as founder and first Secretary, later became the Royal Photographic Society under the patronage of Prince Albert.

    In 1855 Fenton was sent to the Crimean War as the first official war photographer. He had the endorsement of the Duke of Newcastle, secretary of state for war, and the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The resulting photographs may have been intended to offset the general aversion of the British people to an unpopular war and to counteract the occasionally critical reporting of correspondent William Howard Russell of The Times. The photographs were to be converted into woodblocks and published in the less critical Illustrated London News. Fenton took Marcus Sparling as his photographic assistant, a servant and a large van of equipment. Due to the size and cumbersome nature of his photographic equipment, Fenton was limited in his choice of motifs. Because the photographic material of his time needed long exposures, he was only able to produce pictures of unmoving objects, mostly posed pictures; he avoided making pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers.

    Fenton also photographed the landscape, including an area near to where the Light Brigade—made famous in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”—was ambushed. His Versions of Valley of the Shadow of Death, with and without cannonballs  is a seminal image in war photography but also a controversial one because the two versions that exist show that Fenton repositioned the cannon balls in the second version to make the image more compelling. In letters home soldiers had called the original valley “The Valley of Death”, and Tennyson’s poem used the same phrase, so when in September 1855 Thomas Agnew put the picture on show, as one of a series of eleven collectively titled Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts in a London exhibition, he took the troops’—and Tennyson’s—epithet, expanded it as The Valley of the Shadow of Death with its deliberate evocation of Psalm 23, and assigned it to the piece; it is not the location of the famous charge, which took place in a long, broad valley several miles to the south-east. In 2007 film-maker Errol Morris went to Sevastopol to identify the site of this “first iconic photograph of war”. He identified the small valley, shown on a later map as “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”, as the place where Fenton had taken his photograph. Two pictures were taken of this area, one with several cannonballs on the road, the other with an empty road. Opinions differ concerning which one was taken first. Morris concludes that the photo without the cannonballs was taken first, but he remains uncertain about why balls were moved onto the road in the second picture—perhaps, he notes, Fenton deliberately placed them there to enhance the image. The alternative is that soldiers were gathering up cannonballs for reuse and they threw down balls higher up the hill onto the road and ditch for collection later. Other art historians, such as Nigel Spivey of Cambridge University, identify the images as from the nearby Woronzoff Road. This is the location accepted by the local tour guides.

    Despite high temperatures, breaking several ribs, and suffering from cholera, in all Fenton managed to make over 350 usable large format negatives. An exhibition of 312 prints was soon on show in London, in the gallery of publisher Thomas Agnew. Sales were not as good as expected, possibly because the war had ended.

    In 1858 Fenton made studio genre studies based on romantically imaginative ideas of Muslim life, such as Seated Odalisque, using friends and models who were not always convincing in their roles.

    Although well known for his Crimean War photography, his photographic career lasted little more than a decade, and in 1862 he abandoned the profession entirely, selling his equipment and becoming almost forgotten by the time of his death seven years later. He was later formally recognised by art historians for his pioneering work and artistic endeavour. In recognition of the importance of his photography, Fenton’s photos of the Crimean war were included in the Life collection, 100 Photos that Changed the World.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Alfred Stieglitz

    Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), for example, was active in New York in the late 1890s and was
    initially a practitioner in the ‘artistic’ sense of documentary photography, trying to emulate
    or deliver what drawing and painting had been delivering. Photography was viewed as a
    replacement for painting so the thinking was that the practices and values of art should be
    subsumed within photography. However the new century, especially after World War I, saw a
    growing respect for photography as an independent medium that could offer something different
    and this was reflected in the work undertaken by Stieglitz in documenting the ephemeral nature
    of everyday life.
    In the image above, Stieglitz portrays the crudity of a fledgling transport system. The destination
    board – Harlem – tells us that this is harsh winter weather in a poor area of the city. The image
    shows how much effort the driver and horses have to put in to be able to operate under such
    conditions – note the steam coming off the horses. Stieglitz was prepared to wait for four hours
    to capture this image. He wanted something different and he got it.

    Stieglitz was very concerned about the initial
    treatment of immigrants arriving in large numbers
    from Ireland and Europe, hoping for a warm
    welcome but receiving the opposite. The authorities
    were concerned about typhoid and other infectious
    diseases and most immigrants were held in isolation
    for weeks before being allowed into America.
    For a biography of Steiglitz visit: www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stgp/hd_stgp.htm
    Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye (1999), a Masters of Photography documentary video about
    the ‘new way of seeing’ that Stieglitz wanted to bring to American photography:
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YhwYgdtphE

  • Landscape and Gender

    Some early women photographers did do serious topographical work in the late nineteenth and early 20C:

    • Evelyn Cameron,
    • Laura Gilpin,
    • Frances Benjamin Johnson
    • Elizabeth Ellen Roberts

    Artistic photography, continuing the ‘genteel’ occupations for lady sketchers and watercolourists, was also conducted by:

    • Anna Atkins
    • Julia Margaret Cameron
    • Lady Hawarden
    • Lady Elizabeth Eastlake

    But their work  was more closely aligned with the family album, documentary and performance, rather topographic.  (ibid, p.188).

    Feminist discourse since the 1970s has rejected the monopoly of the male gaze and articulated the female point of view in relation to the landscape. Social and technological developments have also made serious photographic excursions into the landscape considerably more accessible (Wells, 2011, p.189). A number of female photographers have, in one form or another, engaged with feminist politics in relation to the landscape and the concept of nature, as well as the male gaze.

    For interesting feminist and other modern approaches  see:

    • Helen Sear’s series Grounded (2000), in which she digitally combines photographs of skies with images of animal hides photographed at a museum.
    • Jo Spence subverts classical depictions of nude female figures within idealised settings.
    • Elina Brotherus
    • Karen Knorr
    • Susan Trangmar
    • Sian Bonnell
    • Barbara Kruger
    • Joan Fontcuberta Bodyscapes (2005) employ three-dimensional imaging software used for military  applications to render landscape images of close-up photographs of his own body.

     

  • Urbex

    Beauty in Decay: On-line slideshows to music


    Short documentary video

    I do not find this as powerful as the still shot slideshows.

     
    Read on-line http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4ixdny_download-beauty-in-decay-urbex-free-books_news

  • Alec Soth

    Alec Soth website You Tube videos – many! Alec Soth (born 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States) is an American photographer, notable for “large-scale American projects” featuring the midwestern United States. His photography has a cinematic feel with elements of folklore that hint at a story behind the image.  His work tends to focus on the “off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America” according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. He is a member of Magnum photo agency. Soth has had various books of his work published by major publishers as well as self-published through his own Little Brown Mushroom.

    Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004)

    Alec Soth used the great Mississippi river in a series was made over a period of five years. This brings together Soth’s much more long-standing personal relationship with the river. Like the path of the river itself, the subject matter and style of Soth’s ruthlessly edited series meanders, traversing American cultures, and dips intimately, yet somehow respectfully, in and out of strangers’ lives. The river itself rarely features in the final edit, and allusions to the Mississippi’s industrial and social heritage are subtly suggested. Vimeo of book Read an interview with Soth and see the images at: http://seesawmagazine.com/soth_pages/soth_interview.html

    Publications  (Wikipedia list)

    • Sleeping by the Mississippi. Photographs by Alec Soth, essays by Patricia Hampl and Anne Wilkes Tucker. Göttingen: Steidl, 2004.
    • Niagara. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006. ISBN 978-3865212337. Photographs by Alec Soth, essays by Richard Ford and Philip Brookman.
    • The Image To Come: How Cinema Inspires Photographers. Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
    • Fashion Magazine. Paris: Magnum, 2007. ISBN 978-2-9524102-1-2.
    • Dog Days, Bogotá. Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
    • Sheep. Oakland: TBW Books, 2008.
    • Last Days of W. St. Paul, Minnesota: Little Brown Mushroom, 2008.
    • Dog Days Bogota. Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. ISBN 978-3-865214-51-5.
    • Broken Manual. Göttingen: Steidl, 2010. ISBN 978-3-869301-99-0. With Lester B. Morrison.
    • Brighton Picture Hunt. Photographs by Carmen Soth, edited by Alec Soth. Brighton: Photoworks, 2010. ISBN 978-1903796429.
    • From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2010. ISBN 978-0-935640-96-0. Catalogue of a retrospective exhibition curated by Siri Engberg. Foreword by Olga Viso; texts by Geoff Dyer, “Riverrun”; Britt Salvesen, “American History”; Barry Schwabsky, “A Wandering Art”; a poem by August Kleinzahler, “Sleeping it off in Rapid City”; and Soth in conversation with Bartholomew Ryan, “Dismantling My Career”. Includes separate book The Loneliest Man in Missouri by Soth, inserted into back cover.
    • Ash Wednesday, New Orleans. Kamakura, Japan: Super Labo, 2010.
    • One Mississippi. Nazraeli Press, 2010.
    • The Auckland Project. Photographs by Soth and John Gossage. Radius Books, 2011.
    • Rodarte. Photographs by Soth and Catherine Opie. JRP|Ringier, 2011.
    • Postcards From America. Photographs by Soth, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Mikhael Subotzky, and Ginger Strand. Magnum, 2011.
    • La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Edizioni Punctum, 2011.
    • Looking for Love. Berlin: Kominek Bücher, 2012.
    • Ping Pong Conversations: Alec Soth with Francesco Zanot. Rome: Contrasto, 2013. ISBN 978-8869654091. Transcripts compiled from conversations between Soth and Zanot, with new and previously published photographs by Soth. Zanot contributes an introduction, “Alec Soth: the Recycling of Photography”.
    • Songbook. Göttingen: Steidl, 2015. ISBN 978-1910164020.
      ——————————————–

    Photobooks by Alec Soth

  • Landscape Perspectives: pictorialism to modernism

     Landscape Art

    Since the very beginnings of human art, artists have been concerned with the relationship between human beings and their environment. That relationship has been perceived and portrayed in different ways in different cultures, all of which have potential to inform current photographic images particularly with the advances and freedom offered by digital cameras and processing.

    • Cave paintings: many early cave paintings were an attempt to tame the human environment, and particularly the animals in them. Many of these paintings simplified form, captured movement and superimposed images over time in a way whose power can only really be appreciated when visiting these very first art galleries. These painting are in warm earth colours and black because those were the pigments available.
    • Chinese and Japanese landscape: show a diversity of approaches to the relationship between people and their environment. Some were produced for the elite, many by monks as part of their religious practice and combined with calligraphy. Confucianism stressed human ability to control the landscape in an ordered and hierarchical manner. Taoism sees human beings as part of the landscape, needing to bend and flow with forces of nature. Zen Buddhism depicted the solitary human being confronted with  unfathomable reality or flash of momentary enlightenment. Many of these images are black and white ink, others are in colours including blues and greens.
    • Indian and Persian miniatures : these were produced for a wealth elite showing the control over nature in gardens and idealised views. They are in full colour, including silver and gold.
    • Western landscape painting: in Western Art interest in landscape came quite late as the poor relation to religious and historical art. But from  18th century artists used the sophisticated techniques made possible by oil paint to depict dramatic plays of light on landscape backgrounds. Form the late 19th century landscape art, partly in reaction to the rise of photography, started to free itself from adherence to strict compositional rules and colour conventions and experiment with different ways of using paint to convey emotions and feelings.

    See page on Landscape Art

    Landscape photography

    Landscape photography, much longer than fine art, has continued to be constrained in traditions, conventions and preconceptions mostly derived from 19th Century Western art. Many people have very particular ideas about what may or may not be considered a piece of landscape art and these ideas are reflected in much of the photographic establishment eg rules and assessment by judges in landscape photography competitions and Royal Photographic Association qualifications . These preconceptions include:

    • suitable subject matter: eg do we include or cut out evidence of human industrial activity?
    • composition: eg canvas ratio and orientation, compositional depth, use of leading lines, golden ratio or rule of thirds.
    • where and how we see images of the landscape: eg what is appropriate for large or small prints as fine art in galleries, illustration in books, advertising or on-line.

    Exercise 1.1 Preconceptions 

    Exercise 1.2 Photography in the museum or in the gallery

    Early landscape photography

    From Alexander 2013 OCA material pp 23-36. To be rewritten, properly integrated and linked and follow up on these photographers (work out how to deal with copyright issues in linking images)

    Early photography was related closely to painting.

    Camera lucida and camera obscura already used by artists like Vermeer to get ‘photographic realism’. Also popular with upper class Victorian travellers.

    William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800-1877) calotype process. frustration at being unable to draw or paint with any degree of accuracy that the positive-negative analogue process underpinning modern photography was conceived. While in Lake Como in Italy on his grand tour of Europe in 1833, Fox Talbot decided he would find a way to fix the image within the camera lucida. –  Calotype allowed mass production.

    Niepce (1765-1833) and Daguerre (1787-1851)

    Early photography was only accessible to those with quite specialist knowledge of optics and chemistry ( with the economic implications) and so was considered part of science. Fulfilled purpose of illustration, journalism, produce mementos, criminal mug shots and method of scientific inquiry eg eugenics.

    Many painters made use of photography like Monet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Seurat. Also modern artists like Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter.

    Eugene Atget (1857-1927) amassed an archive of many thousands of glass plate negatives with views of the street life and architecture of Paris.

    Discussion of whether or not Atget’s photos merits a place in art galleries given he himself did not demonstrate artistic judgement in the wat he catalogued hos work see

    Rosalind Krauss ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’. Vs To Papageorge in Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography 2011

    Pictorialism

    “Pictorialism” is only an exaggeration of what the photograph thinks of itself. Barthes 1982 p31

    Link to Wikipedia

    Link to Google Images

    The norm within pictorialism was, and remains, the production of singular, one-off pieces, designed to convey the maker’s mood at the moment it was made and to satisfy the eyes of the viewer.

    Some early photographers believed that in addition to its practical applications as an objective recording or objects, photography also had potential as a means of expressing subjective  impressions – as pictures.

    Brotherhood of the Linked Ring

    founded by Henry Peach Robinson. Philosophy that a photographic print could be considered as a work of art, despite the need for some kind of camera and related chemistry.They split from the organisation that would become the Royal Photographic Society because the organisation was too preoccupied with the scientific rather than the artistic side. RPS then adopted pictorialism.

    Printing process:  Instead of applying the photosensitive coatings to the surfaces of their prints as evenly and uniformly as possible to give continuous tones, pictorialists left visible brushstrokes and marks on the print surface. Bromoil, cyanotype and gum bichromate processes rendered images with less clarity and giving them more atmosphere like drawing, pastels and painting.

    Multiple negatives and first photomontages:  allowed the production of images that, especially in early days, could not have been produced indoors in low light, and it also made possible the creation of highly dramatic images, often in imitation of allegorical paintings.

    • Oscar Rejlander (1857-75) painter who saw the potential offered by photography. The Two Ways of Life (1857) allegorical scenario on a grand scale
    • Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) Fading Away. (1858)  a typical sentimental narrative. Some of Robinson’s photographs were of twenty or more separate photographs combined to produce one image.

    Modernist approaches

    Wikipedia Modernism

    Link to Google images

    Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) strongly believed in a purer way of seeing, more akin to human vision. He accumulated a large body of work on traditional rural practices around the Norfolk Broads. Emerson championed technical excellence whilst working from life, in the field. He departed from making softer, stylised photographs and began to make images that were sharply focused throughout the image. ‘Democracy’ of the frame, where all of the subjects are on an equal footing in terms of their relation to other elements in the picture, and in their importance to the formation and interpretation of the scene. MetMuseum images.

    Photo-Secessionists. US ‘straight photography’

    ambition for photography to ‘secede’ from previously accepted ideas about photography serving purely practical purposes. Chose impressionistic style. Challenged pictorialism. Radical shift towards celebrating photography for what it really was.

    Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) became editor if American Amateur Photographer 1893 and set up Camera Work in 1902.

    1912 The Steerage depicts with clear photographic realism a group of refused would-be immigrants boarding the SSKaiser Wilhelm II to return to Europe. Image encapsulated an abstract collection on forms and tones alongside a sense of emotional response he felt towards the scene he witnessed. It retained the pictorialsis’ desire to render an emotional response within a photograph, but Steiglitz believed he had achieved this by embracing photography’s unique ability to reproduce optical clarity captured in a split second.

    Edward Steichen (1879-1973)

    Smaller apertures and visualisation.   F/64 group formalised 1932. Dispersed 1935. The name referred to the minimum aperture of the lens which yields the greatest depth of field and best optical quality throughout the image. Using a 10″ x 8″ large format cameras (sometimes called ‘plate cameras’ which take a single image at a time as opposed to being loaded with film on which multiple frames can be shot). Negatives ‘contact-printed’ onto a sheet of high-quality commercially available photographic paper. The contact print is a precise analogy of the negative as made by the photographer.

    It is different from enlarging images taken in smaller formats by projecting the image onto paper, which allows for greater manipulation of the print.

    for the f/64 photographers, mastering exposure in the camera was essential to the creative process. Real artistry in photographic technique and pre-visualisation of the image. This approach differs significantly from the idea of roaming eye fixed to a camera viewfinder, waiting for pctures to jump i to it.understanding of different lenses of different focal lengths.knowledge of exposure to manage the different tones in a scene,

    Edward Weston (1886-1958) an aspiring artist who survived by taking portraits professionally and churning out unchallenging picturesque pictorial works. After a meeting with Steiglitz, Weston changed direction, he took to the precisely composed, sharp and very photographic aesthetic as a valid form of artistic expression, and brought it back home to California. Crops into image to make more abstract.

    dunes, oceano (1936) image explores much more than simply the texture and form of the landscaoe.

    Ansel Adams (1902-1984) best known for his landscapes of Yosemite National Park. Exceptional technical skill. But The formal elements (eg use of perspective and composition) are mostly an extension of painterly traditions.

    Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) natural forms but more experimental in use of photography. Expanded photographic way of seeing by further cropping into views to make a more abstract photograph.

    Paul Strand (1890-1976)