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.
The most significant influence on contemporary landscape practice was the exhibition“New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York) in January 1975. The exhibition was intended for a gallery audience and subverted traditional notions of landscape photography in favour of a new kind of sublime: the man-made landscape. In his introduction to the catalogue, Jenkins defined the common denominator of the show as “a problem of style:” “stylistic anonymity”, an alleged absence of style. The exhibition was received negatively at the time, for its bleak celebration of what was considered ordinary and banal.
The exhibition was a reaction to the idealised landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and was influenced by Ed Ruscha who, in the 60s, had made a series of artist’s books with self-explanatory titles such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Walker Evans, who had photographed the vernacular iconography of America in road signs, billboards, motels and shop.
“The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,.” “[…] rigorous purity, deadpan humor and a casual disregard for the importance of the images.” Technically, half the photographers were working with 8″×10″; (20 cm × 25 cm) large format view cameras; those who were not were using either square medium format (Deal, Gohlke), or in the case of Baltz, 35 mm Technical Pan, a slow and high-definition Kodak film that the photographer printed on 8″x10″ paper. Only Baltz and Wessel were using regular 35 mm cameras and film. A notable element of the show was that the artists were, or would be, linked with higher education as students, professors, or both—a change from the preceding generations.The shift from craft or self-teaching to academia had somewhat been started by photographers such as Ansel Adams and Minor White, but the new generation was turning away from the approach of these forebears. This was illustrated by the subject matter that the New Topographics chose as well as their commitment to casting a somewhat ironic or critical eye on what American society had become. They all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach. In most cases, they gradually revealed themselves as coming from rather critical vantage points, especially Robert Adams, Baltz, and Deal.
The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal. …Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.
The prints were in a 20 cm × 25 cm (8″×10″) format except for Joe Deal (32 cm × 32 cm), Gohlke (24 cm × 24 cm – close enough to 8”×10”), and the Bechers with typical European (for the time) 30 cm × 40 cm prints.
However despite their similarities, there were significant differences between the photographers in their reactions to, and portrayal of, the suburban environment and their political conclusions on responses to it.
See Greg Foster-Price and John Rohrbach ‘Re-framing the New Topographics’ 2013 University of Chicago Press
Robert Adams: disappearing wildernesses, pointed his camera at eerily empty streets, pristine trailer parks, rows of standardised tract houses, the steady creep of suburban development in all its regulated uniformity.
Lewis Baltz: stark photographs of the walls of office buildings and warehouses on industrial sites in Orange County.
Nicholas Nixon: innercity development: skyscrapers that dwarfed period buildings, freeways, gridded streets and the palpable unreality of certain American cities in which pedestrians seem like interlopers.
Bernd and Hilla Becher: stark images of Pennsylvania salt mines and giant coal breakers were as coolly architectural as their images of German cooling towers and industrial plants. The suggestion was that there was something determinedly European about this new American gaze.
Ecological citizenship and automobility
The works in different ways question our responsibility in relation to the natural environment. Taken at a time of rapid environmental change, commercialisation and often homogenised destruction of the natural wilderness romanticised by Ansel Adams, they aim to promote a sense of responsibility for what Robert Adams calls the ‘half wilderness’.
There is a general concern with the homogenisation and also isolation of much of modern construction and urban sprawl. Roads that cut of and surround dwellings that can only be accessed by cars.
They differ in their approaches to technological advances like the reliance on the motor car. For Shore and Schott however there is more of a celebration of the accessibility and democratisation of life. Shore in particular celebrates the colour and vibrancy of cities and parking lots.
‘Shore’s images may be seen as ignoring environmental degradation…Yet his photographs encourage a sense of wonder and appreciation, even in the most familiar, most mundane spaces’.
There is thus a core message of the exhibition as a whole: we need to notice and appreciate what is around us in the ‘semi-wilderness’ and make sure we preserve and protect what is valuable in it. In terms of human colour and nature. Not relegate ‘conservation’ to an ever-shrinking small protected area of idealised wilderness. It is all important.
Legacy
The exhibition was recreated in various locations: in 1981, six years after its original presentation, it was shown in reduced form at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK, under the auspices of Paul Graham and Jem Southam. A large scale presentation of the exhibition was organized in 2009 at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. “New Topographics” began an international tour in 2009, with stagings at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2011 the exhibition was on view at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and later at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in Spain.
Baltz, Gohlke, and Shore were later commissioned by the French government for the Mission de la DATAR.
The exhibition was very influential in the subsequent developments in both US and European landscape photography, including the work of Andreas Gursky, Paul Graham, Candida Höfe and Donovan Wylie. See the following interviews with LA photographers discussing how they have been influenced by the photographers at the exhibition:
———————————————– “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York) in January 1975. In his introduction to the catalogue, Jenkins defined the common denominator of the show as “a problem of style:” “stylistic anonymity”, an alleged absence of style.
The exhibition was a reaction to the idealised landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and was influenced by Ed Ruscha who, in the 60s, had made a series of artist’s books with self-explanatory titles such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Walker Evans, who had photographed the vernacular iconography of America in road signs, billboards, motels and shop.
“The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,.” “[…] rigorous purity, deadpan humor and a casual disregard for the importance of the images.” Technically, half the photographers were working with 8″×10″; (20 cm × 25 cm) large format view cameras; those who were not were using either square medium format (Deal, Gohlke), or in the case of Baltz, 35 mm Technical Pan, a slow and high-definition Kodak film that the photographer printed on 8″x10″ paper. Only Baltz and Wessel were using regular 35 mm cameras and film. A notable element of the show was that the artists were, or would be, linked with higher education as students, professors, or both—a change from the preceding generations.The shift from craft or self-teaching to academia had somewhat been started by photographers such as Ansel Adams and Minor White, but the new generation was turning away from the approach of these forebears. This was illustrated by the subject matter that the New Topographics chose as well as their commitment to casting a somewhat ironic or critical eye on what American society had become. They all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach. In most cases, they gradually revealed themselves as coming from rather critical vantage points, especially Robert Adams, Baltz, and Deal.
The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal. …Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.
The prints were in a 20 cm × 25 cm (8″×10″) format except for Joe Deal (32 cm × 32 cm), Gohlke (24 cm × 24 cm – close enough to 8”×10”), and the Bechers with typical European (for the time) 30 cm × 40 cm prints.
However despite their similarities, there were significant differences between the photographers in their reactions to, and portrayal of, the suburban environment and their political conclusions on responses to it.
See Greg Foster-Price and John Rohrbach ‘Re-framing the New Topographics’ 2013 University of Chicago Press
Robert Adams: disappearing wildernesses, pointed his camera at eerily empty streets, pristine trailer parks, rows of standardised tract houses, the steady creep of suburban development in all its regulated uniformity.
Lewis Baltz: stark photographs of the walls of office buildings and warehouses on industrial sites in Orange County.
Nicholas Nixon: innercity development: skyscrapers that dwarfed period buildings, freeways, gridded streets and the palpable unreality of certain American cities in which pedestrians seem like interlopers.
Bernd and Hilla Becher: stark images of Pennsylvania salt mines and giant coal breakers were as coolly architectural as their images of German cooling towers and industrial plants. The suggestion was that there was something determinedly European about this new American gaze.
Ecological citizenship and automobility
The works in different ways question our responsibility in relation to the natural environment. Taken at a time of rapid environmental change, commercialisation and often homogenised destruction of the natural wilderness romanticised by Ansel Adams, they aim to promote a sense of responsibility for what Robert Adams calls the ‘half wilderness’.
There is a general concern with the homogenisation and also isolation of much of modern construction and urban sprawl. Roads that cut of and surround dwellings that can only be accessed by cars.
They differ in their approaches to technological advances like the reliance on the motor car. For Shore and Schott however there is more of a celebration of the accessibility and democratisation of life. Shore in particular celebrates the colour and vibrancy of cities and parking lots.
‘Shore’s images may be seen as ignoring environmental degradation…Yet his photographs encourage a sense of wonder and appreciation, even in the most familiar, most mundane spaces’.
There is thus a core message of the exhibition as a whole: we need to notice and appreciate what is around us in the ‘semi-wilderness’ and make sure we preserve and protect what is valuable in it. In terms of human colour and nature. Not relegate ‘conservation’ to an ever-shrinking small protected area of idealised wilderness. It is all important.
Legacy
The exhibition was recreated in various locations: in 1981, six years after its original presentation, it was shown in reduced form at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK, under the auspices of Paul Graham and Jem Southam. A large scale presentation of the exhibition was organized in 2009 at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. “New Topographics” began an international tour in 2009, with stagings at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2011 the exhibition was on view at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and later at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in Spain.
Baltz, Gohlke, and Shore were later commissioned by the French government for the Mission de la DATAR.
The exhibition was very influential in the subsequent developments in both US and European landscape photography, including the work of Andreas Gursky, Paul Graham, Candida Höfe and Donovan Wylie. See the following interviews with LA photographers discussing how they have been influenced by the photographers at the exhibition:
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
Form and Pressure:
Analyses alternative formal structures. In particular images based on one-point perspective, with the vanishing point in the centre of the image. When 3-dimensional space is collapsed into a flat picture, objects in the foreground are now seen, on the surface of the photograph, in a new and precise relationship to the objects in the background.juggling ever increasing visual complexity.
But at the same time, I recognized that I was imposing an order on the scene in front of me. Photographers have to impose order, bringstructure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar – it is inconceivable. This order is the product of a series of decisions: where to position the camera, exactly where to place the frame, and when to release the shutter. These decisions simultaneously define the content and determine the structure.As I approached the intersection for a second time, I asked myself if I could organize the information I wanted to include without relying on a overriding structural principle, the way I did the day before. I asked myself if I could structure the picture in a way that communicated my experience standing there, taking in the scene in front of me. Sometimes I have the sense that form contains an almost philosophical communication – that as form becomes more invisible, transparent, it begins to express an artist’s understanding of the structure of experience.
From Galilee to the Negev
Biography
Wikipedia
Stephen Shore was interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a photographic darkroom kit at age six from a forward-thinking uncle. He began to use a 35 mm camera three years later and made his first color photographs. At ten he received a copy of Walker Evans’s book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. His career began at fourteen, when he presented his photographs to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Recognizing Shore’s talent, Steichen bought three. At seventeen, Shore met Andy Warhol and began to frequent Warhol’s studio, the Factory, photographing Warhol and the creative people that surrounded him. In 1971, at the age of 24, Shore became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Shore then embarked on a series of cross-country trips, making “on the road” photographs of American and Canadian landscapes. In 1972, he made the journey from Manhattan to Amarillo, Texas, that provoked his interest in color photography. Viewing the streets and towns he passed through, he conceived the idea to photograph them in color, first using 35 mm hand-held camera and then a 4×5″ view camera before finally settling on the 8×10 format. In 1974 a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) endowment funded further work, followed in 1975 by a Guggenheim grant and in 1976 a color show at MoMA, NY. His 1982 book, Uncommon Places, was a bible for the new color photographersbecause, alongside William Eggleston, his work proved that a color photograph, like a painting or even a black and white photograph, could be considered a work of art
—————————————–
About the MOMA exhibition ‘How to See’. A retrospective looking at different ways in which Shore’s photography reflects different conscious ways of seeing.
In some photographs he wanted to show what the experience of seeing looks like, taking ‘screenshots’ of his field of vision, seeing things the way he sees them – subject in the centre, converging verticals etc. Other photographs are creating a view for the viewer to explore, portraying how we see our environment when consciousness is heightened . These are have high structural density as an examination of interrelationships between the different elements .
In some of his landscapes he also reproduces the way the eye sees – the way it seems like the eye changes focal distance on a 2D landscape surface is an illusion produced by different sharpness through the image.
Review of iBooks produced as print on demand. He did a book a day of what everyday life was like on days when significant events were being reported in the news.
Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.
Robert Adams is a photographer who has documented the extent and the limits of our damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures, both reasons to despair and to hope.
“The goal,” he has said, “is to face facts but to find a basis for hope. To try for alchemy.”
His work, especially from the 1960s through the 1970s, focuses on the suburban sprawl and the environmental degradation in Colorado, reflecting the broader changes taking place across the American West. Adams’ photographs are not just images but narratives of the time, capturing the transformation of natural landscapes into urban and suburban developments. They serve as a record of the sacrifice of natural beauty for consumer culture’s demands, characterized by housing developments and shopping malls (Sandeen, E., 2009).
looking beyond the mere physicality of landscapes to understand their deeper significance and the stories they tell.
Rather than offering escape, Adams inspires new ways of seeing by asking viewers to acknowledge and care for the world in all its imperfection.
Ansel Adams’ photographs celebrate the untouched beauty of American wilderness. Robert Adams’ work, in contrast, shows the impacts of development and urbanization. including human-altered landscapes as subjects worthy of artistic consideration. This contrast underscores a broader debate in environmental photography about the role of the artist in documenting nature and human impacts on it.
Reflecting on the duality of beauty and desolation found in the landscapes he photographs, Adams has pointed out the complexity of finding aesthetic value in places marked by environmental degradation. His work is a testament to the persistent beauty of the natural world, even in the face of human interference, and serves as a reminder of what is at stake (Sandeen, E., 2009).
Miguel Guitart Vilches, for example, discusses Adams’ deliberate choice to document the transformation of Colorado’s landscape by human activity, rather than its untouched beauty. This decision highlights Adams’ intent to reveal the ordered chaos created by human intervention and to explore the potential connections between the original landscape and its altered state (Vilches, M. G., 2013).
‘More people currently know the appearance of Yosemite Valley and the Grand Canyon from looking at photographic books than from looking at the places themselves; conservation publishing has defined for most of us the outstanding features of the wilderness aesthetic. Unfortunately…the same spectacular pictures have also been widely accepted as a definition of nature, and the implication has been circulated that what is wild is not natural.’
‘Attention only to perfection…invites…for urban viewers – which means most of us – a crippling disgust; our world is in most places far from clean…This leaves photography with a new but not less important job: to reconcile us to half wilderness’
Dunaway p22
Robert Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937, and moved to Colorado as a teenager, in each place enjoying the out-of-doors, often in company with his father. At age twenty-five, as a college English teacher with summers off, he learned photography, choosing as his first subjects early prairie churches and early Hispanic art, subjects of unalloyed beauty. After spending time in Scandinavia with his Swedish wife, Kerstin, however, he realized that there were complexities in the American geography that merited exploration.
Beauty in Photography
Robert Adams’s Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981) presents a series of essays that articulate Adams’s philosophy on photography, aesthetics, and the value of beauty in art.
conviction that beauty remains an essential, though often overlooked, criterion for evaluating photographs and their significance both as art and as a reflection of the world.
the pursuit of beauty in photography is not merely about capturing pleasant or traditionally attractive subjects. Instead, he suggests that beauty encompasses a sense of rightness or harmony in the relationship between the subject, the photographer, and the viewer.
the photographer’s role is one of reverence and humility before the world, rather than domination over it.
art does not need to be revolutionary or overtly political to be meaningful. Instead, he advocates for a view of art that embraces subtlety and the contemplation of the ordinary.
photography should be deeply attentive to the world as it is, finding beauty and significance in everyday scenes and landscapes.
an appreciation of beauty does not ignore the world’s suffering but rather affirms the value of life in the face of it.
“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are”
Adams, 1981
“To be an artist is not to be a member of a secret society; it is not to be endowed with a capacity for high moral outrage; it is to see what is there” .
Adams, 1981
“No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film”
Adams, 1981
In summary, Beauty in Photography articulates a philosophy of photography that centers on the pursuit of beauty as an expression of harmony, respect, and attentiveness to the world. Adams argues that beauty is essential for both the survival and enrichment of the human spirit, urging photographers to approach their work with humility and openness to the profundity of ordinary life. Through his essays, Adams defends traditional values in photography, not as a retreat into the past, but as a timeless and deeply humanistic approach to art and life.
ADAMS, Robert. 2023 re-issue. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture.
Sandeen, E. (2009). Robert Adams and Colorado’s Cultural Landscapes: Picturing Tradition and Development in the New West. Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 16, 116-97. Link to paper
Sandeen, E. (2009). Robert Adams and the ‘Persistent Beauty’ of Colorado Landscapes. History of Photography, 33, 55-70. Link to paper
Vilches, M. G. (2013). Reshaping Robert Adams’ Landscape. Zarch: Journal of interdisciplinary studies in architecture and urbanism. Link to paper
Mirakhor, L. (2014). Resisting the Temptation to Give Up: James Baldwin, Robert Adams, and the Disavowal of the American Way of Life. African American Review, 46, 653-670. Link to paper
Adams has also written a number of critical essays on the art of photography, including Beauty in Photography, Why People Photograph and most recently, Along Some Rivers.
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
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
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
Long, in particular, has sought to distance his practice from the epic scale of works by Smithson and Michael Heizer. Long branded these kinds of works negatively as ‘capitalist art’, because of the way they absorbed the land and because of the financial resources necessary for their production (Andrews, 1999, p. 215).
Long espoused a less interventionist approach to making land art, as well as simpler, less obtrusive sculptures that have a minimal impact upon the landscape. In addition to the sculptures they produced and documented with photography, Fulton and Long have focused on the meditative process of walking, and conceive of the act of walking as an art form in itself. The outcomes of this activity may be a combination of photographs and notes of objects and events observed, and perhaps also a sculptural aspect using materials from the walk. River Avon Mud Circle (2011) is one such example of this approach.
A talk by Clarrie Wallis, curator of Richard Long’s show Heaven and Earth, Tate Britain 2009:
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/richard-long-curators-talk
Sean O’Hagan’s preview of Heaven and Earth:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/may/10/art-richard-long
No Man’s Land (2011) by Mishka Henner is one body of work that has faced particularly hostile criticism. In his series of Street View images, Henner has singled out prostitutes soliciting clients along the sides of roads on the outskirts of cities in Italy and Spain, which Google’s cameras have happened to pick up. The work also exists as a video, which animates the action of a driver appearing to ‘hone in’ and turn their head towards the women as he drives past them. Although Henner reconstructs a view from within the driving seat and passes this experience on to the viewer, he was not the actual driver. Those who interpret Henner’s images as exploitative and
voyeuristic overlook the point that through this work he draws to our attention the relentless, indiscriminate and inescapable eye of the Street View camera, and the power that is wielded by Google. The title of the work refers to the irony that, despite these women’s apparent wish to attract men, there are no men to be found within Henner’s views. But there is surely also a reference to ideas about territory and ownership, which is perhaps infringed upon by the Street View camera.
In this collection of 10 images, Brown digitally layered a large number of sets of photographs, each set made on different walks. The resulting images resemble abstract impressionist paintings and provide a peculiar overview of the journey and the terrain Brown travelled through. The final images rendered by the layering technique are limited in terms of their actual pictorial detail, yet manage to convey a sense of the particular topography of each landscape.This process is akin to a method of mapping the particular route Brown walked.
An interesting aspect of Walking the Land is that some of Brown’s walks were made a considerable time ago, before he had access to a film scanner and Photoshop.
In the Rubber Band Project (1997), Liz Nicol collaborated with her young son to make a body of work around the streets close to their home. Nicol’s son noticed and started collecting the rubber bands discarded by postmen on their deliveries. The pair began to set aside the bands collected on each day of the school run over a period of a year. Nicol then recorded the bands using the cyanotype process. This is one of the earliest and simplest photographic printing techniques and is particularly associated with the botanical contact prints of Anna Atkins (1799–1871). [Atkins’s prints were compiled in Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843), considered to be the first book to be illustrated with photographs.] As Nicol describes:“The ‘cyanotypes’, are like architectural drawings and blank blue monitor screens. They are part of a map. The prints are a tracing not just literallyof the rubber band, but an imprint of an event, like islands in the sea…The cyanotypes… are a tracing of the rubber bands that we found and a mapping of the walk.”
See a video of Nicol demonstrating the cyanotype process:
http://www.liznicol.co.uk/More-Cyanotypes
