Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Surveys

Category: Documentary

  • Surveys

    Alongside pictorial landscape photography during the later part of the 19th Century ‘topographic’ or ‘proto-documentary’ approaches arose making use of the ability of the camera to record external phenomena.  This coincided with a rapid rise in industry, imperialism and means of communication, notably the print media and telegraphy. The photographic process was believed to eliminate any subjectivity on the part of the photographer. Photographs provided a means to communicate, with unparalleled realism, the far-flung corners of the country and the world.

    BRITISH SURVEY MOVEMENT

    Anxiety and nostalgia for the countryside as industrialisation progressed led to attempts to record the disappearing countryside and communities:

    National Photographic Records Association established by Sir Benjamin Stone in 1897. Now held in the VandA

    John Thomson (1837-1921)

    Francis Frith (1822-98)

     UNITED STATES

    Photographers were commissioned by companies and entrepreneurs to document their industrial work as it encroached into the country, particularly more remote areas. 1868-1869 Andrew Joseph Russell was commissioned to document part of the Union Pacific Railroad. Carleton Watson produced technically accomplished and classically composed images for mining and lumber companies as well as the railroad company.

    This representative scheme…presents the possibility of a double salvation – a return to unspoiled innocence and an opportunity to profit from the violation of innocence (Snyder discussing Watkins’ images  in Mitchell ed 2002 p189 q Alexander 2013 p54)

    Timothy O’Sullivan’s (1840–82) images on the other hand ignores pictorial conventions and is bleaker and more challenging, representing the land as alien, inhospitable and unwelcoming.

    Ian Jeffrey (1981, p.60 q Alexander 2013 p 54) makes an interesting comparison to European traditions:

    “The surveyors chose high vantage points and uninterrupted lines of vision, and what they show appears at a distance, accessible to lines of sight alone. If their pictures have foregrounds they are marginal, or they begin at some distance away as though the camera registered its views at a remove from the earth. European landscapists, such as George Washington Wilson, Francis Bedford and William England, who were all active in these years, tended, by contrast, to mediate distant views by means of foreground detailing, seated figures and the like. American landscapes allow no such ease of access; they remain unapproachable, things seen across a gap, or even across a ravine as O’Sullivan’s picture of the Cañon de Chelle suggests… Perhaps in the face of such vast and unfamiliar places there was no alternative, no well-worn track or resting place which might make a viewer feel at home.”

    2.1 : ‘Territorial Photography’

  • Doug Rickard

    A New American Picture

    [wpdevart_youtube]X9cAK2LJWQY[/wpdevart_youtube]

    [wpdevart_youtube]v=5e1a_D6xXrY[/wpdevart_youtube]

    Vimeo

    Doug Rickard (born in San Jose, California, 1968) studied U.S. history and sociology at UC San Diego. He is the founder of American Suburb X and These Americans, aggregating websites for essays on contemporary photography and historical photographic archives.

    Over a period of two years 2009 – 2010 Rickard became immersed in the comprehensive image archive of Google Street View to virtually drive through some of the most economically depressed areas of America – the unseen and overlooked roads, bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated, and abandoned. The virtual eye enables him to go places that would be difficult otherwise. Collectively, these images present a startling photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised, providing deeply affecting evidence of the American Dream inverted.

    “I think that I chose pictures that partially represented those biases and media-affected notions of place, and yet I explored immensely these American places, a thousand hours or more, gaining an understanding of the conditions.” Political and social perspective ‘drive-by’ photography.manipulates to heighten sense of isolation – people cordoned off in terms of lacking a voice, from power.

    In Google Street View, the absence of an engaged eye through which to interpret its images can lend them an eerie quality. “The height gives a feeling of looking down on the scene, and this affects the emotional read and subtext of the work,” There are different types of google cameras. High resolution tends to be for tourist areas. Some lower resolution for less ‘attractive’ areas.  He finds the digital pixellation poetic. Rickard said. “Also, Google’s blurring of the faces and the lo-fi nature of the images changed the individuals into symbols or emblems and representative of larger notions, such as race and class, instead of personal stories that would have wanted to emerge with recognition.” His appropriation of these images, he said, is what makes them a valid form of photography. “I wanted to represent the inverse of the American Dream, and yet the work is also very personal and subjective, colored by my choices and selection,” he said. “The very definition of photography is expanding. Personally, I am ecstatic about it, and I see a massive frontier that is unfolding to feed and fuel my obsessions.”

    Issue is cropping and editing from a sea of digital images. He looks for stories and ‘decisive moment’ – the colour of Shore and Egglestone. Composition where things line up. He rephotographs the machine-made images as they appear on his computer screen, framing and freeing them from their technological origins.  Experimenting with geometry and distortions.

    A limited-edition monograph of A New American Picture was published by White Press/Schaden in 2010. It was named a best book of 2010 by photo-eye magazine and is now out of print. This edition brings Rickard’s provocative series, including more than forty new images, to a wider audience. His images have become part of an international conversation .In 2011, A New American Picture was included in the annual New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A solo exhibition is planned for fall 2012 at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

  • 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

  • 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.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • 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.
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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwEMqgLSVrM

    Photobooks by Alec Soth

  • Psychogeography and the ‘Edgelands’

    Psychogeography is essentially the broad terrain where geography – in terms of the design and layout of a place – influences the experience, i.e. the psyche and behaviour, of the user.  It has walking as a central component (Alexander 2013 p74)

    Guy Debord (1931–94) leader of The Situationist International defined psychogeography as follows:

    “Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.”
    (http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html quoted Alexander 2013 p74)

    Psychogeography in literature has a long history.   London, as imagined by writers including William Blake (1757–1827), Daniel Defoe (1659–1731), Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), have all been identified as a place where early traces of psychogeography can be found.

    It has also veered between being:

    • a mode of artistic expression
    • associated with Marxist ideology and political and social change.

    Two inter-linked terms that are key to understanding psychogeography:

    • The dérive is a key method of psychogeographical enquiry. The literal translation from the French is ‘drift’ and a dérive is a spontaneous, unplanned walk through a city, guided by the individual’s responses to the geography, architecture and ambience of its quarters.The dérive can be seen as one strategy to help bridge the gap between the actual, physical observations of the stroller and their subconscious. Similar techniques have been used in geography, sociology and anthropology as a means of research that opens up possibilities and new questions based on direct observation.
    • The flâneur (a term that originates from Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin) is essentially the protagonist of the dérive, but more generally the ‘gentleman stroller’ (as Baudelaire put it) who enjoys the aesthetic pleasures of the sights and sounds he experiences. The emphasis here is more on the aesthetic interpretation of the observer and emotional responses to the views and events that unfold. The flâneur has been identified in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd (1840) and in the shady figure lurking in the corner of Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Listen to Philip Pullman discussing Manet’s painting in depth.
    • Brassai (1899-1984) flaneur
    • Robert Adams
    • Mark Power
    • Moriyama

    However, alternative arbitrary methodologies have also been employed, championed initially by the Situationist movement as a necessary means – as they would see it – to subvert capitalist ideas about correctly engaging and functioning within the city. Other strategies included:

    • the production of alternative maps, such as Debord’s The Naked City (1957), which attempted to facilitate users to experience the city according to their emotional state and responses.
    • Robert MacFarlane’s simple alternative strategy of tracing a circle around the rim of a glass on a map and walking it, you can leave yourself open to new subject matter and unthought-of creative possibilities (see MacFarlane in Coverley, 2010, p.9).

    The genre of street photography is often taken (and often mistaken) as evidence of psychogeography today. But although psychogeographical enquiry has traditionally been associated with the city, in more recent years it has expanded beyond its traditional boundaries, and is nowadays less associated with left-wing politics, having returned to a literary position.

    • Iain Sinclair:  fictional and non-fictional literary responses. In the book (and accompanying film) London Orbital (2002), Sinclair chronicles his epic walk along the M25 which encircles the capital, taking him to golf courses, retail and business parks, and other generic spaces.
    • Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ book Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (2011), celebrates subjects as diverse as shipping containers, landfill sites and wooden pallets.
    • Some have identified the urban sport of parkour (or ‘freerunning’) and even the Occupy movement with psychogeography.

     2.6 Psychogeography and Edgelands

  • 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

  • Typologies

    TASK

    Read Sean O’Hagan’s Guardian article on the New Topographics exhibition and publication and watch a You Tube video of Lewis Baltz talking about his work.

    Write down your own responses to the work of any of the practitioners O’Hagan mentions in his article, and describe your thoughts on typological approaches.

    Conclusions for my own work eg ‘Christmas 2014’ or Assignment 2 and Assignment 4 Safari?

    • I need to think very carefully about what I am trying to say about my surroundings and ‘suburbia’ – am I interested in dramatic perspectives, finding the sublime or beautiful, or about human interactions and ‘sense-making’?
    • How might I show this through for compiling typographies or other forms of narrative? What sorts of structured grids or conceptual juxtapositions might I make?
    • How might my approach differ if I am working in a different culture where there are sensitivities about stereotypes against a backdrop of colonial exploitation?

    “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” 1975

    See overview of the exhibition, overview on New Topographics with video discussions, and links to each photographer:

    Robert Adams:  Minimalist plains landscape aesthetic with muted melancholy.

    Lewis Baltz: his photographs convey sadness, disappointment, and anger at how we have used the landscape..It becomes hard to distinguish construction from destruction

    Joe Deal: homes newly constructed against the desolate landscape of the American Southwest. I really like his later images in West to West with their square format and minimalist line.

    Frank Gohlke: Bold and dramatic skies or sky/foreground contrast. Pictures of grain elevators as sublime in machinery. I really like the drama in these images.

    Nicholas Nixon: His images are mostly high view images showing complexity of roadways and textured skyscrapers. Although they have a formal beauty, I do not find them as effective in terms of message or emotion as other images in the exhibition. I prefer his portraits eg the Browns sisters and Close Up.

    John Schott: His 20 images of motels are more human than most of the images in the exhibition. They are not homogenised or standardised; they have distinctive architectural features and are not owned by corporate chains. Cars are parked rather than being a threat.

    Stephen Shore: I like the colour and like in his shots of streets and parking lots. And the way he experiments with perspective and tries to see what happens when you try to take a photograph with no perspective structure.

    Henry Wessel, Jr: I like his treatment of light, and also the idea of the ‘flaneur’ who shoots images first, and thinks later in order to get something new and less studied.

    Bernd and Hilla Becher:  typologies of industrialisation. Although I find the idea of typologies interesting (see below) I find the subject matter less inspiring.

    There is a core message of the exhibition as a whole about ‘ecological citizenship’: we need to notice and appreciate what is around us – human colour and nature in the ‘semi-wilderness’. The everyday and apparently banale can also be beautiful. We must preserve and protect what is valuable in it . Not relegate ‘conservation’ and perceptions of beauty to an ever-shrinking small protected area of idealised wilderness. All our human environment is important.’

    Thoughts on typological approaches

    Typologising is an innate human instinct as we attempt to differentiate and order objects in the world around us to try and make sense of the chaos. In some contexts they have an obsessive attraction as for example in coin or stamp collecting. At the same time typologising can lead to stereotyping and closing off possibilities as we ignore differences and assume that because objects have certain characteristics in common, they are automatically the same in other respects as well.

    The actual term ‘typology’ was coined by Augustus Pitt Rivers who was interested in the evolution of different tools and mechanical implements used by man [sic]. Pitt Rivers collected different ‘types’ of one kind of tool across centuries and sorted them into series, which he believed demonstrated the tool’s logical progression – for example, stick, spear, musket.

    Typological approaches to photography are an extension of the process of photography itself – collecting images based on certain  criteria of selection and putting them together as narratives for the purpose of comparison and/or narrative.  They build on documentary recording in archaeology (artefacts) and anthropology (physical racial types) and natural sciences that became part of photographic practice in nineteenth century. Within photography its origins can be traced back to the questionable nineteenth-century experiments in eugenics and criminology of Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) and Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), respectively. August Sander’s 1929 series of portraits entitled ‘Face of Our Time’   sought to record of social types, classes and the relationships between them in German society between the two World Wars.

    In relation to landscape photography the term ‘Typology’ was first used to describe the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher documenting dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959. Each photograph was taken with the same large format camera, from the same angle, at approximately the same distance and then photographs were combined into grids. Key photographic typologists such as Thomas Struth (studies of cities), Thomas Ruff (giant passport photos), Thomas Demand (desolate empty cities and bleak interiors) and Gillian Wearing.

    Typologies are also used in commercial catalogues and becoming increasingly important in the context of date-driven websites etc. where it is important to make one website or one set of images stand out from the rest.

    Typologies are potentially extremely interesting as an area of enquiry and exploration in photography. On an aesthetic level they can propose different structural relationships and patterns and also highlight aspects of perception. On a conceptual and/or political level, they can lead the viewer to question assumptions and look deeper into presumed similarities and differences.

    Individual: selection and identity:

    • What objects qualify as ‘the same type’, by what criteria? Which criteria of similarity are to be emphasised?
    • What differences are identified? how and why are other objects different enough to not be of the same type? what particular differences are to be emphasised?

    System: juxtaposition, pattern, narrative

    • How are the objects to be presented together? Grid (dimensions?, circles? diamond etc?) ? Linear filmstrip? Sequential in time?
    • In what order? As a progression of difference? To emphasise contrast? By time of occurrence or capture?

    Resources:

    Greg Foster-Rice and John Rohrbach ‘Reframing the New Topographics’ 2013 University of Chicago Press

    Photographic Typologies: The Study of Types: Beth Caird, 2012 

    David Campany’s ‘Almost the same thing: some thoughts on the collector-photographer’ in Dexter, E. & Weski, T. (eds.) (2003) Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph. London: Tate Publishing

  • Bernd and Hilla Becher

    Typological method

    The Bechers’ grids pose questions about the nature of photography – as documentary collections of images of the world. They use a consistent technique (they used a 10” x 8” camera) applied to similar, or specific types of subjects – particularly functional industrial structures. The subtle individualities of these emerge through meticulous visual scrutiny of each, combined with repetition and juxtaposition as a pattern of the whole.

    Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (2011, p.194) describe the visual effect of one of their collections:

    “The effect of this repeated pattern was very powerful. A single cooling tower may look beautiful, but nine cooling towers on one sheet looks like a series of ancient monoliths, or temples, or plinths for statues of long forgotten gods.”

    At the very least, the Bechers’ typologies stand for deeper concerns about the essence of photography, particularly about ideas relating to the medium and its practitioners as collectors – gathering, arranging and archiving visual information about the world.
    [See David Campany’s essay ‘Almost the same thing: some thoughts on the collector-photographer’ in Dexter, E. & Weski, T. (eds.) (2003) Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph. London: Tate Publishing]

    The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Blake Stimson, 1 April 2004 Tate Papers Issue 1

    The Bechers present modern industry in a manner that disavows its social, political and economic value to the beholder and, in so doing, makes it available anew via an alternative category – aesthetic value or value ‘without any interest’.

    .. the pattern of ‘rhythms and repetitions’ established between the individual pictures (and, we might add, between individual series as well) is’very much the idea of the work.’ Such, the artists have admitted, is their goal – ‘to produce a more or less perfect chain of different forms and shapes’… 

    Their system is based on a rigorous set of procedural rules: a standardised format and ratio of figure to ground, a uniformly level, full-frontal view, near-identical flat lighting conditions or the approximation of such conditions in the photographic processing, a consistent lack of human presence, a consistent use of the restricted chromatic spectrum offered by black and white photography rather than the broad range given by colour, precise uniformity in print quality, sizing, framing and presentation, and a shared function for all the structures photographed for a given series. There is another obvious rule too, although one their project might be said to systematically ignore – their industrial history is exclusively and resolutely a history of the west…. The term they generally use to describe their method is ‘typological’ and they freely state that it has ’much to do with the nineteenth century’, that is, they say, with ‘the encyclopaedic approach’ used, for example, in botany or zoology or, we might add, psychology and criminology. Indeed, we might say more broadly, their system is based precisely on the principle of the archive – its ‘dry compartmentalisation’, as Allan Sekula has put it – that so concerned Michel Foucault.

    The New Topographics

    Bernd and Hilla Becher were the only non-American contributors to New Topographics.  The Bechers’ contribution  was a grid consisting of multiple views of a coal processing plant in Pennsylvania.

    They inspired a generation of students who studied under them in the late1970s and 80s at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth.

     

  • Donovan Wylie

    Power and control are recurring themes within Wylie’s practice.

    The Maze (2004)

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    This documents the deconstruction of the notorious prison in Northern Ireland. The work is presented as a collection of three volumes, which begins with images from the centre of the prison and works outwards, as it is slowly demolished and returned to the landscape. Wylie  employs a straight, uniform technical strategy in this work which Wylie’s views are deliberately repetitive, and perpetuate the absence of individuality throughout the prison’s architecture. 

    See a sample of the work and essays from the book:
    http://www.belfastexposed.org/themedpackages/index.php?id=3&sid=110

    British Watchtowers (2007) and  Outposts (2011)

    These seem to retain more of the Bechers’ influence, with the aestheticisation of functional military installations. However, histories of earlier conflicts can be traced in both bodies of work. The system of observation posts across the hills of South Armagh in British Watchtowers dates back to Iron Age strategies for power and control. In Outposts, some of the sites of the NATO forward operating bases in Afghanistan date back to earlier conflicts.

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     Interview with Paul Seawright

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