Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Mitch Epstein

Category: Documentary

  • Mitch Epstein

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    Mitchell “Mitch” Epstein (born 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts) is an American photographer. His best known work on landscape is American Power (2009). From 2004 to 2009, Epstein investigated energy production and consumption in the United States, photographing in and around various energy production sites. This series questions the meaning and make-up of power—electrical and political. Epstein made a monograph of the American Power pictures (Steidl, 2009), in which he wrote that he was often stopped by corporate security guards and once interrogated by the FBI for standing on public streets and pointing his camera at energy infrastructure. The images also reflect the political climate of fear and paranoia across America in the wake of 9/11.

    The large-scale prints from this series have been exhibited worldwide, and a selection won the Prix Pixtet Award among others.

    Google Images for American Power 

    Epstein collaborated with his second wife, author Susan Bell, on a public art project and website based on American Power. The What Is American Power?project used billboards, transportation posters, and a website to “inspire and educate people about environmental issues.” The website: http://whatisamericanpower.com (a Flash-based display that I find somewhat annoying)

    Wikipedia review quotes:

    In his Art in America review, Dave Coggins wrote that Epstein “grounds his images…in the human condition, combining empathy with sharp social observation, politics with sheer beauty.”

    In an essay for the catalogueContemporary African Photography from The Walther Collection: Appropriated Landscapes (Steidl, 2011), Brian Wallis wrote, “Epstein has made clear that his intention is neither to illustrate political events nor to create persuasive propaganda. Rather, he raises the more challenging question of how inherently abstract political concepts about the nation and the culture as a whole can be represented photographically…But equally significant is the unique form of documentary storytelling that he has invented in American Power—colorful, sweeping, concerned, intimate, honest.”

    In the New York Times, Martha Schwendener wrote: “What is interesting, beyond the haunting, complicated beauty and precision of these images, is Mr. Epstein’s ability to merge what have long been considered opposing terms: photo-conceptualism and so-called documentary photography. He utilizes the supersize scale and saturated color of conceptualism, and his odd, implied narratives strongly recall the work of artists like Jeff Wall.”

    His other work

    (Wikipedia)

    Epstein graduated from Williston Academy, where he studied with artist and bookmaker Barry Moser. In the early 1970s he studied at Union College, New York; Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island, and the Cooper Union, New York, where he was a student of photographer Garry Winogrand.

    Epstein’s eight books include:

    •  Berlin (Steidl & The American Academy in Berlin, 2011);
    • American Power (Steidl, 2009);
    • Mitch Epstein: Work (Steidl, 2006);
    • Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 (Steidl 2005);
    • Family Business (Steidl 2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.

    1970s United States

    By the mid-70s, Epstein had abandoned his academic studies and begun to travel, embarking on a photographic exploration of the United States. Ten of the photographs he made during this period were in a 1977 group exhibition at Light Gallery in New York. Ben Lifson wrote in his Village Voice review: “Mitch Epstein’s ten color photographs are the best things at Summer Light…. At 25, Epstein’s apprenticeship is over, as his work shows. He stands between artistic tradition and originality and makes pictures about abandoned rocking-horses and danger, about middle-age dazzled by spring blossoms, about children confused by sex and beasts. He has learned the terms of black-and-white photography, and although he adds color, he hasn’t abandoned them, loving photography’s past while trying to step into its future.”

    India

    In 1978, he journeyed to India with his future wife, director Mira Nair, where he was a producer, set designer, and cinematographer on several films, including Salaam Bombay! and India Cabaret. His book In Pursuit of India is a compilation of his Indian photographs from this period.

    Vietnam

    From 1992 to 1995, Epstein photographed in Vietnam, which resulted in an exhibition of this work at Wooster Gardens in New York, along with a book titled Vietnam: A Book of Changes. “I don’t know that Mitch Epstein’s glorious photographs record all of what is salient in end-of-the-twentieth century Vietnam,” wrote Susan Sontag for his book jacket, “for it’s been more than two decades since my two stays there. I can testify that his images confirm what moved and troubled me then…and offer shrewd and poignant glimpses into the costs of imposing a certain modernity. This is beautiful, authoritative work by an extremely intelligent and gifted photographer.” Reviewing an exhibition of the Vietnam pictures for Art in America, Peter Von Ziegesar writes, “In a show full of small pleasures, little prepares one for the stunning epiphany contained in Perfume Pagoda…Few photographers have managed to make an image so loaded and so beautiful at once.”

    United States 1990s

    Having lived and travelled beyond the United States for over a decade, Epstein began to spend more time in his adopted home of New York City. His 1999 series The City investigated the relationship between public and private life in New York. Reviewing The City exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins in New York, Vince Aletti wrote that the pictures “[are] as assured as they are ambitious.”

    In 1999, Epstein returned to his hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, to record the demise of his father’s two businesses—a retail furniture store and a low-rent real estate empire. The resulting project assembled large-format photographs, video, archival materials, interviews and writing by the artist. The book, Family Business (Steidl), which combined all of these elements, won the 2004 Krazna-Kraus Best Photography Book of the Year award. In reviewing the book, Nancy Princenthal wrote in Art in America, “The family business chronicled by Mitch Epstein was a small-town retail furniture with a sideline in real estate, and his patiently plotted bell curve of its history is worthy of Dreiser….” In 2004, his work was exhibited during evening screenings at Rencontres d’Arles festival (at the in Théatre Antique), France.

    Google Images for ‘Family Business’

     

    Berlin

    In 2008, Epstein won the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters from the American Academy in Berlin. Awarded a 6-month residency, he moved to Berlin with his wife and daughter from January–June 2009. The photographs he made there of significant historical sites were published in the monograph Berlin (Steidl and The American Academy in Berlin, 2011).

     

     

     

  • Peter Kennard

    Peter Kennard (born 17 February 1949) is a London born and based photomontage artist and Senior Research Reader in Photography, Art and the Public Domain at the Royal College of Art. Seeking to reflect his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he turned from painting to photomontage to better address his political views.He has often worked in collaboration with writers, photographers, filmmakers and artists such as Peter Reading, John Pilger and Jenny Matthews.

    He is best known for the images he created for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1970s–80s. This includes “Haywain with Cruise Missiles“, a cut-and-paste photomontage of Constanble’s Haywain – a symbol of Britain’s rural idyll with American missiles used by CND to highlight the threat of installation of cruise missiles at air bases across the UK, such as Greenham Common.
    “ Photomontage may not be subtle but it is effective as a tactic when the aim is to make a point quickly and directly. We grasp immediately that Britain is under threat.” Liz Wells (2011, p.21 quoted Alexander 2013 p98)

    Because many of the left-wing organisations and publications he used to work with have disappeared, Kennard has turned to using exhibitions, books and the internet for his work.

    In “Dispatches from An Unofficial War Artist”, his 2000 autobiography, he writes about the possibilities of undertaking an aesthetic practice in relation to social change, and considers how his art has interacted with the politics of actual events.

     One of Kennard’s latest projects is 2011’s @earth, a story without words told in the language of photomontage. It takes the form of a small book priced at £9.99, published by the Tate Gallery, which Kennard believed was a reasonably cheap and accessible way of getting his message to young people outside the artworld. The book contains a variety of images from Kennard’s 40-year career and, as a result, attracts the criticism that its targets are too general. Kennard’s reply was that he wanted “to encourage people to think about their own situation and activate, but I’m not trying to tell them to do this or that. I’m just trying to show how I see the world at the moment.”

    The idea has expanded to a re-appropriation and re-distribution of his images through online platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. G8 Protest Posters is the latest of these projects that shares images “designed for protest”. Created in 2013 in reaction to the 39th G8 Summit in Enniskillen, Kennard has encouraged the public to “print, Tweet, Facebook, email and share these images as a sign of protest”. He sees online distribution sites as “a valuable addition to the dissident artists toolbox. G8 is a charade masquerading as a serious conference, my posters attempt to rip through the lies and point to the world as in fact it is.”

    He has also executed a number of guerrilla street installations and has said “if world leaders insist on assaulting our lives and livelihoods, let’s hit back by assaulting their eyes.”

    The first major retrospective of Kennard’s work will be held at the Imperial War Museum for one year from May 2015.

    Source: edited from Wikipedia

     

     

  • Local History Cambridge

    TASK

    This project is designed to develop your research skills. If you haven’t yet begun to generate some ideas for possible approaches to Assignment Three, then this exercise could be a good starting point.

    Using the internet, local library, museum or any other resources at your disposal, conduct a short investigation into a historical aspect of the area in which you live or are currently based. This could relate to industry or other narratives in the distant past, or a more recent event. Don’t spend more than half a day.

    Gather some primary sources such as copies of photographs, illustrations, maps, written/oral accounts, and write a brief account (around 300 words) describing what you’ve researched and any ideas you have about how this subject might be photographed today in a project such as Assignment Three.

    For this local history assignment – which was only supposed to take half a day – I started by doing an internet search – starting with a Google search on ‘Chesterton history’. I have lived in Cambridge since I came here as a student in 1972, and moved to East Chesterton in 1984. Witnessing very many changes. I have also selected different places on  the River Cam where I walk everyday as the subject for Assignments 5 and 6.

    I did not expect the internet search to be very enlightening – when I looked a couple of years ago there had not been much. But this time there is quite a lot – it seems that local history is a growing interest as people become more linked up through Facebook. This is now a new area of interest for me – I find it fascinating to find out more about the place where I live and when and why things have changed.

    My general findings are draft edited in the following pdf, though there is a lot more I can follow up:

    Chesterton Local History

    From my initial search I then followed up on the many links to specific areas, buildings and topics.

    I started to Grassy Corner where there seemed to be quite a lot of information as the topic for Assignment 3. I found a book with old photos and there are even separate Facebook pages for places like the traveller caravan park.

    I am planning now to incorporate local history research into my photographic submission for Assignment 5 : Bench and Assignment 6 Transitions: Bridge. I think this can be done in a number of ways:

    1. Using local history as a framework for choosing particular places – their history significance to local people
    2. Giving an insight on particular photographs and places already chosen – a backdrop to my own images, feelings and interpretation in order to contextualise my images

     

     

  • Landscape and Identity

    The concept of ‘identity’ is central to most landscape photography – the cultural, historical, ecological and industrial factors shaping identities of people and places and the ways in which the two interact. ‘Identity’ is however not fixed. Individuals and groups of people are continually trying to reconcile multiple and changing identities as a means of making sense of their place in the world. Identities are constantly manipulated and contested by others in political processes. In the same way, meanings of ‘landscape’ and symbolic associations of places are also multi-layered, changing and often manipulated in attempts to shape power relationships between people and groups of people and peoples’ control over and use of ‘nature’ and other resources.

    In deciding how to portray particular landscape/s key considerations are:

    • Who created, owns, uses and changes this landscape? How do these people relate to each other?
    • How is this ‘landscape’ distinguished from other similar places (who decides what is and what is not similar? by what criteria? why are those criteria important?)?
    • How do (different) users and inhabitants of a place feel towards (different aspects of) the landscape (pride, indifference, disrespect, fear of loss)?
    • What attitudes do (which) outsiders have towards it?

    Underlying all these considerations must also be a consideration of:

    • How are these feelings, identities and relationships manipulated, why and by whom? (See Part 3 landscape as political text)
    • Self-awareness on the part of the photographer of their own identity/ies and assumptions and power/desire (or lack of it) to manipulate and change things.

    See posts:

    Dana Lixenberg’s:  Last Days of Shishmaref
    Jacob Aue Sobol’s work Sabine (2004)

    ‘British-ness’, collective identities and the countryside

    “The concept of the countryside is a significant element of the British identity. All countries have rural areas, but Britain’s is one of its ‘unique selling points’.” (Alexander p119)

     4.2: The British landscape during World War II

    Attitudes towards social issues like renewable energy or housing policy are often polarised by ‘Not in My Back Yard’ ‘visual impact’ on the land according to rather idealised ‘picturesque’ notions of what the landscape used to/should look like.

    Personal identities and multiculturalism

    British photographers have questioned established and stereotyped images of the British landscape and its heritage. Photographers like Godwin and Darwell manipulate aesthetics of the image, beauty in texture, pattern and atmosphere to keep the viewer’s attention – then guide it to pose more challenging and shocking questions about the landscape and peoples’ relationship to it. The effort of extracting meaning in this way also makes the images more memorable. See posts:

    • Immigration and race:  Ingrid Pollard and Simon Roberts.
    • Access to the countryside:  Fay Godwin
    • Environmental pollution and degradation: John Darwell Dark Days (2001 Foot and Mouth Outbreak).
    • Relationship with animals: Clive Landen: sharp documentary style and brutal but images of death in Abyss (2001 Foot and Mouth Outbreak) and Familiar British Wildlife (series on roadkills).

    4.3 A subjective voice

  • Photography, memory and place

    “… in Photography, I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography.” (Barthes 1982,p.76)

    Photographic images affect the way we remember moments we experienced ourselves, and our impressions of things we experience via the image alone. Barthes also proposes how the photograph can act as a “counter-memory”, aggressively blocking impressions formed by our other senses as it “fills the sight by force” (ibid, p. 91 quoted Alexander 2013p107).

    Many practitioners have engaged with idead of personal memories (family albums, holidays) in one form or another:

    • Trish Morrissey
    • Gillian Wearing
    • Joachim Schmid.
    • Peter Kane goes back to places depicted in his family’s photo album and re-photographs and superimposes the images.

    Photography has also been used to explore and challenge the construction of collective memories (eg documentation of ‘early’ or ‘late’ photography as well as events unfolding)

    • Shimon Attie uses contemporary media to explore relationships between space,time, place and identity working with communities to find new ways of representing their history.
    • Jeff Wall produces large tableaux of events, or staged events, referencing the way history painting interpreted and often glorified historical events.
    • Luc Delahaye also references history painting, using large format analogue cameras to document meetings, political ceremonies and war zones.

    But as Bates cautions (see also my reaction to Meyerowitz):

    “As sites of memory, photographic images (whether digital or analogue) offer not a view on history but, as mnemonic devices, are perceptual phenomena upon which a historical representation may be constructed. Social memory is interfered with by photography precisely because of its affective and subjective status…in terms of history and memory, photographs demand analysis rather than hypnotic reverie’ (Bate The Memory of Photography pp255-256)

    The matter of ‘reality’ is an important aspect to consider in relation to all areas of photography: who is recording what, why, for whom and why?

    3.5: Local history

    3.6: ‘The Memory of Photography

  • Industrial and post-industrial landscapes

    Some activist photographers have been mainly concerned with industrial and post-industrial landscapes. Here big industry becomes the ‘new sublime’ to be feared and confronted in the hope of change and avoiding disaster.

    Other photographers have avoided any overt messages, rather asking questions to which the viewer may have different answers. These take a gentler, more ‘picturesque’ approach.

    Post-industrial spaces have also inspired a new kind of tourism: urban exploration of derelict factories and warehouses, abandoned hospitals and asylums, any kind of space that is shut up, difficult to get to (eg below ground) or in any other way off-limits or hazardous. “Leave nothing but footprints. Take nothing but photographs.”

    There are dedicated websites and chatrooms, such as

    A film discussing urban exploration: https://vimeo.com/26200018

    This has been echoed by increasing interest in ‘dark tourism’

    Urbex

  • ‘Late’ photography’

    In his 2003 essay, David Campany comments that:
    “One might easily surmise that photography has of late inherited a major role as undertaker, summariser or accountant. It turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened totting up the effects of the world’s activity.” (‘Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problem of “Late Photography”’ (in Campany (ed.), 2007)

    This ‘aftermath’ approach dates back to the war photographers of the American Civil War and the Crimean War (1853–56), because of technological limitations of the time. Because of the large plate cameras and slow emulsions, it was not possible to photograph actual combat. Their images focused instead on portraits of soldiers, camp scenes and the aftermath of battles and skirmishes. Their images could not yet be reproduced en masse in the illustrated press, but some of these photographs were used as the basis for woodcut engravings for publications such as The Illustrated London News and Harper’s Weekly.

    Although technology today makes it possible – though still difficult –  to capture the heat of war and atrocities, this is not necessarily the most effective way of portraying the horrors of violence.

    Examples of photographers using the ‘late’ approach in contemporary landscape include:

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

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

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

    3.3: ‘Late Photography’

    —–

    TASK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    John Botte’s photos of Ground Zero

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

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

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

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

     
    ————————————-

    !!To be updated from Landscape Photography

    In his 2003 essay, David Campany comments that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Territorial Photography

    Read Snyder’s essay ‘Territorial Photography’ from W.J.T Mitchell ed 2002 Landscape and Power. Summarise Snyder’s key points.

    Snyder’s argument:

    In the 1830s and 1840s photography was dominated by wealthy upper class photographers trained within a fine art tradition. Their work was personal and intended for a small audience as there were no means for mass production. It aimed to express the photographer’s feelings towards the landscape depicted.

    But from the mid to late 1850s a growing middle class clientele created a large and definable market for landscape photographs. This coincided with/was a motor for development of mass production techniques. As the costs of photography reduced, the photographers themselves increasingly came from the middle classes. Prints were increasingly sold by print houses near to sites of tourist interest, and other commercial outlets.

    This led to a change in the understanding and techniques of photography itself. Middle class clients were interested in technological progress and wanted photographs that looked machine made with high degree of detail. Tendency towards glossy sepia. Photographs are seen to be disinterested reports.

    Issue: ‘how to make a picture that was resolutely photographic yet, at the same time, beautiful or stunning …but that nevertheless could be convincingly experienced as aconventional, a product of scientific laws and photographic craft.’ 

    Carleton Watkins      Google Images

    ‘entrepreneur whose job was to record pre-existing scenes in a thoroughly disinterested manner’

    Watkins seeks to harmonise landscape with industrial progress – grand, sublime and quiet – a West American Eden. He produced large 20″ x 24″ negatives of very detailed views of Yosemite Park, Pacific Coast and sparsely settled areas of Utah and Nevada. The images of Yosemite emphasise accessibility and grandeur. Those of the Pacific coast depict it as unspoiled and unspoilable. There is no questioning  of whose land it was, or what happened to the earlier native American settlers on the land.

    William Henry Jackson  Google images

    also picturesque-sublime. Reconfirm beliefs about America landscape as a ‘scene of potential habitations, acculturation and exploitation’.

    Timothy O-Sullivan                               Google images

    O’Sullivan was not subject to commercial pressures.  His pictures were antipicturesque showing the West as ‘a boundless place of isolation, of contrasts of blinding light and deep, impenetrable shadows’ – a ‘bleak, inhospitable land, god-foresaken, anaesthetising landscape’.  Despite their detail, his images are not primarily scientific and ‘objective’, but often carefully constructed eg recording his own foot prints and carefully selecting particular elements of a view. Figures are present but have no clear role. He was rejected in his time till rediscovered by Ansel Adams in 1939.

    Next, find and evaluate two photographs by any of the photographers Snyder mentions, but not specific examples that he addresses in the essay. Your evaluation (up to 250 words for each) should reflect some of the points that Snyder makes, as well as any other references. (Both the images below are under Creative Commons license)

    Watkins Evaluation of Cathedral Rocks

    This image makes the tock fill the frame, placing it on the centre line and looking upwards. The light is soft and inviting to a gentle mysterious mistiness at the summit. Shadow lines are also soft – rather like an ancient bone that adds the mystery of weathered age. The trees are quite large and invite the viewer to look up – as if inviting to climb. The curve of the trees around the bottom of the image suggest possibilities of a hidden way up behind the mountain.

    O’Sullivan  South Side of Inscription Rock

    File:Timothy O'Sullivan, South side of Inscription Rock, New Mexico, 1873.jpg

    This image of a similar subject is altogether more stark and forbidding. The rock is placed off-centre, showing the flat landscape beyond. The light is harsh with defined shadows to emphasise the sharp razor-like lines in the rock. It is absolutely clear there is no way up. The sky and sepia colour are burning hot – like a scene on the moon. The shrubs and small trees in the foreground are dwarfed – but note the semi-cropped larger tree on the left.

  • Anthony Luvera

    Anthony Luvera is an Australian artist, writer and educator based in London. Anthony Luvera is interested in exploring some of the problems of documentary photography and photographic representations of social issues. Since 2001 he has worked on a series of long-term photographic projects with people who have experienced homelessness living in London. Through these projects, and the social relationships upon which they are based, Luvera explores the tension between authorship (and artistic control), and the ethics involved in making photographs about other people’s lives.

     Residency

    For sample photos see Luvera’s website

    Residency features a series of photographs produced by the artist and individuals experiencing homelessness in Belfast, over a 16month period between 2006 and 2008. The series consists of large-format ‘Assisted Self-Portraits’, landscape images of Belfast and documentation of the working process through photographs and production Polaroids.

    ‘Anthony Luvera updates, remakes and agitates ideas of what is considered to be self portraiture. He shifts the inherent power balances inherit in portrait photography and shows that collaboration can create a much more empathetic approach to the act of photographing people. If that wasn’t enough he has also been able to build an archive of cities though the eyes of people who have difficulty fitting in. This project is a reminder that photography can still hold magical powers that empower and educate when in the right hands.‘

    Residency also features an introductory text by the artist and essays by Anthony Downey and Colin Graham. Anthony Luvera describes his experience of working in Belfast and outlines some of the critical considerations underpinning his practice. Colin Graham reflects on the relationship between identity and attachment to place in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Anthony Downey examines the politics of the project, focusing on questions of ethics and representation.

     Other projects

    His photographic work has been exhibited widely in galleries, public spaces and festivals including the British Museum, London Underground’s Art on the Underground, National Portrait Gallery London, Belfast Exposed Photography, Australian Centre for Photography, Fotofreo and Les Rencontres D’Arles Photographie.

    His writing appears regularly in a wide range of periodicals and peer-reviewed journals including Source, photographies and Hot Shoe International.

    Luvera lectures on under-graduate and post-graduate degree courses in the photography, visual art and social sciences faculties for a number of institutions, including University of the Arts London Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London College of Communication, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, University for the Creative Arts Farnham and University College Falmouth.

    He also facilitates workshops and gives lectures for the public education programmes of the National Portrait Gallery, the Photographers’ Gallery London and various community photography projects across the UK.

  • Jim Goldberg

    Jim Goldberg (born 1953) is an American photographer and writer whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations. Goldberg photographs sub-cultures, creating photo collages, and including text with his photographs, often written by his subjects.Goldberg is part of the social aims movement in photography, using a straightforward, cinéma vérité approach, based on a fundamentally narrative understanding of photography. Goldberg’s empathy and the uniqueness of the subjects emerge in his works, “forming a context within which the viewer may integrate the unthinkable into the concept of self. Thus diffused, this terrifying other is restored as a universal.” (Art Forum, Summer 1987) My only agenda,’ says the photographer Jim Goldberg, ‘is to bring attention to otherwise ignored and shunned lives.’ while picturing the grisly surroundings of the welfare population for his 1970s series Rich and Poor and developed with Raised by Wolves, when he documented teenagers living on the streets in San Francisco and LA. ‘I had a sense that their perceptions were not being observed and considered,’ he says, and so he began asking his subjects to annotate the pictures he took, ensuring his photographs existed as ‘thoughtful encounter, rather than knee-jerk reaction’. Goldberg is best known for his photographic books, multi-media exhibits and video installations, among them: Rich and Poor (1985) The book includes photographs of people in their homes along with handwritten comments by them about their lives. For example, the handwriting under the photograph reproduced on the front cover reads “I keep thinking where we went wrong. We have no one to talk to now, however, I will not allow this loneliness to destroy me,— I STILL HAVE MY DREAMS. I would like an elegant home, a loving husband and the wealth I am used to. Countess Vivianna de Bronville.” Although the book received one mixed review shortly after publication,[3] other reviews were positive, and it was later selected as one of the greatest photobooks of the 20th century. Nursing Home The photographs in a 1988 exhibition of Goldberg’s “The Nursing Home Series” were accompanied by handwritten text by the nursing home residents who were the subjects of the photographs Hospice  Raised by Wolves (1995) See Vimeo A major mixed media exhibition by Goldberg concerning homeless children in California entitled “Raised by Wolves” began traveling in 1995 and was accompanied by a book. Goldberg made reference to other artists and photographers; used photographs, videos, objects, and texts to convey meaning; and “let his viewers feel, in some corner of their psyches, the lure of abject lowliness, the siren call of pain.” Open See (2009).  Open See vimeo Open See, a study of refugee, trafficked and migrant populations fleeing wartorn and economically devastated homelands to forge a new life in Europe. It is a mix of Polaroids and large-format photographs featuring his signature use of handwritten comments, combined with archive snaps and drawings to form a multi-dimensional story. The project began as a Magnum commission for the Athens Olympics in 2004. Greece’s location on the south-eastern tip of Europe makes it one of the busiest transit hubs for illegal migrants, but Goldberg realised he had touched a seam stretching far further than he had imagined. The photographs and scrawled, smudged comments reveal the aspirations and fears of people who might otherwise remain faceless statistics. ‘All I want is a bed to sleep in,’ writes one. ‘I make one dollar a day,’ says another, ‘and I have despair.’ Three years in, he was awarded a grant from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, which enabled him to expand the assignment. Nominated for 2011 Deutsche Börse prize

    Biography

    Goldberg was raised in New Haven, Connecticut in a family of candy sellers. He took an aptitude test in high school that said he should do something in a field where he helped others. He went to college as a Theology major and ended up in photography when a schizophrenic Photo 1 teacher told him he had talent. Goldberg’s work was featured with that of Robert Adams and Joel Sternfeld in a 1984 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Three Americans”; the exhibition was described as “a show of politically charged and socially conscious images.” Goldberg is a Professor of Photography and Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts and has been a full member of the Magnum Photos agency since 2006. He lives and works in San Francisco. His fashion, editorial and advertising work has appeared in numerous publications including W, Details, Flaunt, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rebel, GQ, The New Yorker, and Dazed and Confused. He is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York, the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco, and Magnum Photos. —————————–

    Jim Goldberg (born 1953) is an American photographer and writer whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations. Goldberg photographs sub-cultures, creating photo collages, and including text with his photographs, often written by his subjects.Goldberg is part of the social aims movement in photography, using a straightforward, cinéma vérité approach, based on a fundamentally narrative understanding of photography. Goldberg’s empathy and the uniqueness of the subjects emerge in his works, “forming a context within which the viewer may integrate the unthinkable into the concept of self. Thus diffused, this terrifying other is restored as a universal.” (Art Forum, Summer 1987)

    My only agenda,’ says the photographer Jim Goldberg, ‘is to bring attention to otherwise ignored and shunned lives.’ while picturing the grisly surroundings of the welfare population for his 1970s series Rich and Poor and developed with Raised by Wolves, when he documented teenagers living on the streets in San Francisco and LA. ‘I had a sense that their perceptions were not being observed and considered,’ he says, and so he began asking his subjects to annotate the pictures he took, ensuring his photographs existed as ‘thoughtful encounter, rather than knee-jerk reaction’.

    Goldberg is best known for his photographic books, multi-media exhibits and video installations, among them:

    Rich and Poor (1985) The book includes photographs of people in their homes along with handwritten comments by them about their lives. For example, the handwriting under the photograph reproduced on the front cover reads “I keep thinking where we went wrong. We have no one to talk to now, however, I will not allow this loneliness to destroy me,— I STILL HAVE MY DREAMS. I would like an elegant home, a loving husband and the wealth I am used to. Countess Vivianna de Bronville.” Although the book received one mixed review shortly after publication,[3] other reviews were positive, and it was later selected as one of the greatest photobooks of the 20th century.

    Nursing Home The photographs in a 1988 exhibition of Goldberg’s “The Nursing Home Series” were accompanied by handwritten text by the nursing home residents who were the subjects of the photographs

    Hospice

     Raised by Wolves (1995)

    See Vimeo

    A major mixed media exhibition by Goldberg concerning homeless children in California entitled “Raised by Wolves” began traveling in 1995 and was accompanied by a book. Goldberg made reference to other artists and photographers; used photographs, videos, objects, and texts to convey meaning; and “let his viewers feel, in some corner of their psyches, the lure of abject lowliness, the siren call of pain.”

    Open See (2009).

     Open See vimeo

    Open See, a study of refugee, trafficked and migrant populations fleeing wartorn and economically devastated homelands to forge a new life in Europe. It is a mix of Polaroids and large-format photographs featuring his signature use of handwritten comments, combined with archive snaps and drawings to form a multi-dimensional story.

    The project began as a Magnum commission for the Athens Olympics in 2004. Greece’s location on the south-eastern tip of Europe makes it one of the busiest transit hubs for illegal migrants, but Goldberg realised he had touched a seam stretching far further than he had imagined. The photographs and scrawled, smudged comments reveal the aspirations and fears of people who might otherwise remain faceless statistics. ‘All I want is a bed to sleep in,’ writes one. ‘I make one dollar a day,’ says another, ‘and I have despair.’

    Three years in, he was awarded a grant from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, which enabled him to expand the assignment. Nominated for 2011 Deutsche Börse prize

    Biography

    Goldberg was raised in New Haven, Connecticut in a family of candy sellers. He took an aptitude test in high school that said he should do something in a field where he helped others. He went to college as a Theology major and ended up in photography when a schizophrenic Photo 1 teacher told him he had talent.

    Goldberg’s work was featured with that of Robert Adams and Joel Sternfeld in a 1984 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Three Americans”; the exhibition was described as “a show of politically charged and socially conscious images.”

    Goldberg is a Professor of Photography and Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts and has been a full member of the Magnum Photos agency since 2006. He lives and works in San Francisco. His fashion, editorial and advertising work has appeared in numerous publications including W, Details, Flaunt, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rebel, GQ, The New Yorker, and Dazed and Confused. He is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York, the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco, and Magnum Photos.