Category: Beauty and Sublime
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Fay Godwin
Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 – 27 May 2005) was a British photographer known for her black-and-white landscapes of the British countryside and coast. Official website British Library archive: including approximately 11,000 exhibition prints, the entire contents of her studio, and correspondence with some of her subjects. Google images detailed overview of her work from…
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Hiroshi Sugimoto
website Google images from Wikipedia: Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death. Sugimoto is also deeply influenced by the writings and works…
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Peter Henry Emerson
As I stood admiring just before sunrise, the reed-tops bending under their beautiful crystal heads, rooks came flying from a wood near by, and a vast flock of peewits darkened the sky. As the yellow sun arose in frosty splendour mists began to rise on the river, and there followed a brief spell of magic…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…