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
Landscape photography and printmaking draws on a long tradition of landscape art that can inform different styles and approaches for my own work. I want to work more on the underlying theory of landscape composition and bridging elements, perspective etc. Abstraction. To make my landscape photography and printmaking more conscious of the influences on my work and thereby able to subvert and question to create something new.
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction of landscapes, natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects.
The word “landscape” entered the modern English language as landskip (variously spelt), an anglicization of the Dutch landschap, around the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art, with its first use as a word for a painting in 1598. Within a few decades it was used to describe vistas in poetry, and eventually as a term for real views. However the cognate term landscaef or landskipe for a cleared patch of land had existed in Old English, though it is not recorded from Middle English. Landscape views in art may be entirely imaginary, or copied from reality with varying degrees of accuracy. If the primary purpose of a picture is to depict an actual, specific place, especially including buildings prominently, it is called a topographical view. Such views, extremely common as prints in the West, are often seen as inferior to fine art landscapes, although the distinction is not always meaningful; similar prejudices existed in Chinese art, where literati painting usually depicted imaginary views, while professional court artists painted real views, often including palaces and cities.
The earliest forms of human art depict little that could really be called landscape, although ground-lines and sometimes indications of mountains, trees or other natural features are included. The earliest “pure landscapes” with no human figures are frescos from Minoan Greece of around 1500 BCE. Hunting scenes, especially those set in the enclosed vista of the reed beds of the Nile Delta from Ancient Egypt, can give a strong sense of place, but the emphasis is on individual plant forms and human and animal figures rather than the overall landscape setting.
The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present form its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism.
Chinese and Japanese traditions
!!Possibly I will do a separate post on this as Japanese ink landscapes and monochrome styles have been important influences on my Black and White photography and printmaking.
Zhan Ziqian, Strolling About in Spring, a very early Chinese landscape, c. 600. Landscape as a subject in itself
In East Asia famous practitioners of imaginary landscapes were highly respected, including several Emperors of both China and Japan. They were often also poets whose lines and images illustrated each other.
The Chinese ink painting tradition of shan shui (“mountain-water”), or “pure” landscape, in which the only sign of human life is usually a sage, or a glimpse of his hut, uses sophisticated landscape backgrounds to figure subjects, and landscape art of this period retains a classic and much-imitated status within the Chinese tradition. As in Roman traditions these typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, backed with a range of spectacular mountains. Sometimes they showed only a distant view, sometimes waterfalls, mist or dead ground bridged the gap between a foreground scene with figures and the distant panoramic vista.
Western tradition
It seems from literary evidence that some rough system of perspective, or scaling for distance was first been developed in Ancient Greece in the Hellenistic period, although no large-scale examples survive. Roman landscapes from the 1st century BCE onwards, especially frescos of landscapes decorating rooms, have been preserved at archaeological sites of Pompeii, Herculaneum and elsewhere, and mosaics. These typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, generally backed with a range of spectacular mountains, often including sea, lakes or rivers to bridge the gap between a foreground scene with figures and a distant panoramic vista.
History painting came to require an extensive landscape background where appropriate and for several centuries landscapes were regularly promoted to the status of history painting by the addition of small figures to make a narrative scene, typically religious or mythological. In Kenneth Clark’s analysis, underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches:
the acceptance of descriptive symbols
curiosity about the facts of nature
creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature
belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved.
In early Western medieval art interest in landscape disappears almost entirely, kept alive only in copies of Late Antique works such as the Utrecht Psalter; the last reworking of this source, in an early Gothic version, reduces the previously extensive landscapes to a few trees filling gaps in the composition, with no sense of overall space.A revival in interest in nature initially mainly manifested itself in depictions of small gardens such as the Hortus Conclusus or those in millefleur tapestries. The frescos of figures at work or play in front of a background of dense trees in the Palace of the Popes, Avignon are probably a unique survival of what was a common subject.Several frescos of gardens have survived from Roman houses like the Villa of Livia.
During the 14th century Giotto di Bondone and his followers began to acknowledge nature in their work, increasingly introducing elements of the landscape as the background setting for the action of the figures in their paintings. Early in the 15th century, landscape painting was established as a genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often expressed in a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert. Luxury illuminated manuscripts were very important in the early development of landscape, especially series of the Labours of the Months such as those in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which conventionally showed small genre figures in increasingly large landscape settings. A particular advance is shown in the less well-knownTurin-Milan Hours, now largely destroyed by fire, whose developments were reflected in Early Netherlandish painting for the rest of the century. The artist known as “Hand G”, probably one of the Van Eyck brothers, was especially successful in reproducing effects of light and in a natural-seeming progression from the foreground to the distant view.This was something other artists were to find difficult for a century or more, often solving the problem by showing a landscape background from over the top of a parapet or window-sill, as if from a considerable height.
Italian Renaissance
Landscape backgrounds for various types of painting became increasingly prominent and skilful during the century. The period around the end of the 15th century saw pure landscape drawings and watercolours from Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Fra Bartolomeo and others, but pure landscape subjects in painting and printmaking, still small, were first produced by Albrecht Altdorfer and others of the German Danube School in the early 16th century.
Landscapes were idealized, mostly reflecting a pastoral ideal drawn from classical poetry which was first fully expressed by Giorgione and the young Titian, and remained associated above all with hilly wooded Italian landscape, which was depicted by artists from Northern Europe who had never visited Italy, just as plain-dwelling literati in China and Japan painted vertiginous mountains. Though often young artists were encouraged to visit Italy to experience Italian light, many Northern European artists could make their living selling Italianate landscapes without ever bothering to make the trip. Indeed, certain styles were so popular that they became formulas that could be copied again and again. Salvator Rosa gave picturesque excitement to his landscapes by showing wilder Southern Italian country, often populated by banditi.
Dutch Landscape
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565: Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors
Joachim Patinir in the Netherlands developed the “world landscape” a style of panoramic landscape with small figures and using a high aerial viewpoint, that remained influential for a century, being used and perfected by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The Italian development of a thorough system of graphical perspective was now known all over Europe, which allowed large and complex views to be painted very effectively.
The publication in Antwerp in 1559 and 1561 of two series of a total of 48 prints (the Small Landscapes) after drawings by an anonymous artist referred to as the Master of the Small Landscapes signalled a shift away from the imaginary, distant landscapes with religious content of the world landscape towards close-up renderings at eye-level of identifiable country estates and villages populated with figures engaged in daily activities. By abandoning the panoramic viewpoint of the world landscape and focusing on the humble, rural and even topographical, the Small Landscapes set the stage for Netherlandish landscape painting in the 17th century. After the publication of the Small Landscapes, landscape artists in the Low Countries either continued with the world landscape or followed the new mode presented by the Small Landscapes.
Rembrandt, The Three Trees, 1643, etching
Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw the dramatic growth of landscape painting, in which many artists specialized, and the development of extremely subtle realist techniques for depicting light and weather. There are different styles and periods, and sub-genres of marine and animal painting, as well as a distinct style of Italianate landscape. Most Dutch landscapes were relatively small, but landscapes in Flemish Baroque painting, still usually peopled, were often very large, above all in the series of works that Peter Paul Rubens painted for his own houses. Landscape prints were also popular, with those of Rembrandt and the experimental works of Hercules Seghers usually considered the finest.
The Dutch tended to make smaller paintings for smaller houses. Some Dutch landscape specialties named in period inventories include the Batalje, or battle-scene; theManeschijntje, or moonlight scene; the Bosjes, or woodland scene; the Boederijtje, or farm scene,and the Dorpje or village scene.Though not named at the time as a specific genre, the popularity of Roman ruins inspired many Dutch landscape painters of the period to paint the ruins of their own region, such as monasteries and churches ruined after the Beeldenstorm.The popularity of landscapes in the Netherlands was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious painting in a Calvinist society, and the decline of religious painting in the 18th and 19th centuries all over Europe combined with Romanticism to give landscapes a much greater and more prestigious place in 19th-century art than they had assumed before.
Claude Lorrain, Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682. The landscape as history painting.
Compositional formulae using elements like the repoussoir were evolved which remain influential in modern photography and painting, notably by Poussin and Claude Lorrain, both French artists living in 17th century Rome and painting largely classical subject-matter, or Biblical scenes set in the same landscapes.
French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830sJean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other painters in the Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that would become the most influential in Europe for a century, with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for the first time making landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting.
English landscape: 19th Century
In England, landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits, typically suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner, though mostly painted in London by an artist who had never visited his sitter’s rolling acres; the English tradition was founded by Anthony van Dyck and other mostly Flemish artists working in England. In the 18th century,watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality, with both a buoyant market for professional works, and a large number of amateur painters, many following the popular systems found in the books of Alexander Cozens and others. By the beginning of the 19th century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscapists, showing the wide range of Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer. However all these had difficulty establishing themselves in the contemporary art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits.
The 18th century saw the rise of the topographical print, often intended to be framed and hung on a wall. These depicted more or less accurately a real view in a way that landscape painting rarely did. Initially these were mostly centred on a building, but over the course of the century, with the growth of the Romantic movement pure landscapes became more common. Landscapes in watercolour became a distinct specialism, above all in England.
Constable:
frequent use of the Golden ratio to position horizons at one or two thirds levels in paintings
uses a lanes, roads and other devices to lead the eye into the picture
interest in plays of light and naturalistic colour
linear as well as aerial perspective
use of triangles and implied triangles on foreground objects like carts, boats etc.
later starts to experiment with dynamic and impasto brushstrokes, as precursor to Impressionists
Turner tends to have his horizons lower, or non-existent. And makes lots of use of dramatic swirls for storms, and brilliant sunsets. But still positions vertical elements and objects around the thirds line.
Romantic movement
The Romantic movement intensified the existing interest in landscape art, and remote and wild landscapes, which had been one recurring element in earlier landscape art, now became more prominent. Caspar David Friedrich had a distinctive style, influenced by his Danish training, where a distinct national style, drawing on the Dutch 17th-century example, had developed. To this he added a quasi-mystical Romanticism.
TheTrees in the Moonlight Use of diagonals and muted colours.
Two Men by the Sea at Moonrise Use of strong horizontals with central horizon line. Silhouettes against an oval pool of light. ‘High Dynamic Range’.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog/Mists, 1818. A classic image of German Romanticism. Strong contrast in colours and between foreground and background with dramatic silhouette. Quasi symmetrical balance between right and left side of the image. Diagonals leading to the centre figure.
TASK: Read Simon Morley ‘Staring into the Contemporary Abyss’. Choose any body of work you feel explores the sublime. It may be a photographic project, a work of literature, cinema, or any other medium. Write at least 300 words describing how you believe the work you have selected relates to the sublime. Use Morley’s text to support your argument.
Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto focuses in much of his work explicitly or implicitly on the transience of life, the conflict between life and death and the known and unknown. He questions our attitudes to death in ‘Chamber of Horrors’ using photos of (now removed) waxworks of torture and execution from Madame Tussaud’s. His images of an ancient ‘installation’ of hundreds of Bodhisattvas in a Kyoto temple mirrors interestingly Gursky’s images of North Korean armies – are they also all the same? or individual souls?
Works like ‘Seascapes’ and ‘Revolution’ give a sense of void – of being on a borderline or edge where we can no longer codify experience – as a fundamental prerequisite for a deeper sense of reality, serving to mediate between being and nothingness, and communicating through a condition of absence a heightened awareness of the self. He is particularly interested in boundaries between science and religion ‘In all this, I somehow feel we are nearing an era when religion and art will once again cast doubts upon science, or else an era when things better seen through to a scientific conclusion will bow to religious judgement.’ ‘There remains… a great divide between comprehending (i.e.explaining) the world and being able to explain what we ourselves are. And even then, what we can explain of the world is far less than what we cannot ― though people tend be more attracted by the unexplained.’
Other works like ‘architecture’ use photography as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. He pushes his old large-format camera’s focal length out to twice-infinity―with no stops on the bellows rail, the view through the lens was an utter blur. This gives a very eerie effect, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process.
In Joe – a photograph of an outdoor sculpture, he looks at relationships between 2 and 3 dimensions, effects of light on memory. The sculpture has to be experienced by walking around and through it… Joe is different according to the time of the day, the season, and the viewer’s position. Using a photographic technique involving areas of extremely soft light and blurred darkness, he sculpts views that seem like aspects of visual memory.
Other works like Lightning Fields observe the effects of scientific processes like electrical discharges on photographic dry plates. He describes these as a desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes. But the effects are extremely beautiful – art produced by science.
Simon Morley main points
Romantic artists: irrational and frightening
Abstract expressionists: Barnett Newman ( ‘The Sublime is Now’) and Mark Rothko. an art possessing depth and profundity beyond classical ideas about beauty and aesthetics.
Pop and Conceptual Art and radical philosophers in France trying to understand aspects of human experience that seemed to lie beyond the controlling structures imposed by the status quo, to keep open a pathway leading to some kind of possibility of emancipation.
Morley’s book The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art distinguishes five different ways in which the word is now broadly used:
the unpresentable
transcendence,
terror,
the uncanny and
altered states of consciousness.
There are also two main contexts for such discussions: nature and technology. Linking all these: a desire to define a moment when social and psychological codes and structures no longer bind us, where we reach a sort of borderline at which rational thought comes to an end and we suddenly encounter something wholly and perturbingly other.
At the sublime’s core are experiences of self-transcendence that take us away from the forms of understanding provided by a secular, scientific and rationalist world view. covert or camouflaged devices for talking about the kinds of things that were once addressed by religious discourses and nevertheless seem to remain pertinent within an otherwise religiously sceptical and secularised world.
” a transformative experience understood as occurring within the here and now. What we make of this experience, what value we give it, can take us in two very different directions, however. One re-envisages the self as existing in the light of some unnameable revelation arising in a gap between, on the one hand, a dull and alienating reality, and on the other an unmediated awareness of life. In contrast, there is a far more pessimistic conclusion that can be drawn, one that ends up as a resigned sense of inadequacy, in which we are made aware of our emotional, cognitive, social and political failure when faced with all that so blatantly exceeds us.”
Ultimately, the concept of the sublime must pose more questions than it answers
Anish Kapoor’s huge maroon trumpet Marsyas 2002. made of stretched PVC, managed to convey a more affirmative experience of the sublime – a kind of post-religious state of emotional transcendence in which, exactly because of the lack of ordered structures or codes, we feel a powerful sense of exaltation and release rather than fear. His work also serves to link discussions of the sublime to non- Western concepts. In an interview given several years ago, he declared that through the experience of void that is central to his art he sought to convey ‘a potential space, not a non-space’.
Miroslaw Balka’s dark container How It Is 2009, a huge steel structure with a vast dark chamber. ‘negative sublime’, destabilising and unnerving entering into a structureless and unsettling zone of inky blankness (at least when there are no mobile phone lights being turned on) but simultaneously aware of merely experiencing an artwork in a museum.
Douglas Gordon,site-specific work Pretty much every word written, spoken, heard, overheard from1989…2010. nameless and imageless emotions, Wordsworth’s ‘blank abyss’.
Korean artist Lee Ufan and Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, a sense of void – of being on a borderline or edge where we can no longer codify experience – is considered a fundamental prerequisite for a deeper sense of reality, serving to mediate between being and nothingness, and communicating through a condition of absence a heightened awareness of the self.
James Turrell, who uses light to dematerialise an environment and to propel the spectator into a state of sensory confusion that isn’t so much unsettling as ecstatic. Turrell, who is influenced by Quaker Christianity’s idea of divine light as well as by oriental concepts, declares that his work is involved in the ‘plumbing of visual space through the conscious act of moving, feeling out through the eyes’, and adds that the experience is ‘analogous to a physical journey of self as a flight of the soul through the planes’.
Gerhard Richter paintings looking like blurred photographs ‘ new sense of the sublime as something that gets squeezed out as an intangible and ambiguous supplement in the gap between these two different but related media’. large abstracts ‘seem merely to engage with the sublime in the more traditional and easily consoling sense of something that strives for the exalted effect’.
Luc Tuymans : thwarted transcendence in deliberately drab paintings derived from photographs. Many of Tuymans’s works refer to Nazism, in which sublime effects were exploited in order to inspire a nation to commit barbaric acts. Albert Speer’s Cathedrals of Light, constructed for the Nuremberg rallies, were frightening instances of the sublime in the hands of authoritarian politics
Andreas Gursky. series of large-scale photographs of intricately orchestrated mass public displays of the North Koreans – any discussion of the concept of the sublime should take into account its political implications.
French artist Philippe Parreno and his collaborators, dive into the depths of virtual reality by exploring how contemporary subjectivity is distorted and augmented through plugging into the digital. The artists copyrighted a digital animation character in order to ‘set her free’ to ‘live’ in ways not constrained by the strict regulations imposed by the usual conventions of cyberspace. Perhaps it is indeed to this new world, beyond the limits of the physical body and of time and space, that the sublime experience is now migrating.
‘Landscape for Everyone’, published in John Taylor (1994) A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination.
In this piece Taylor discusses the ways in which symbolism of the ‘timeless’ and ‘infinitely different and varied’ English landscape was used during World War II to encourage patriotic emotion and resistance against German ‘industrialisation gone riot’. In 1940 many restrictions were imposed on movement around the countryside and measures were taken to make the geography ‘illegible’ to any invading force. At the same time “the mythic history of the country ‘unconquered for a thousand years’ was central to patriotic propaganda which imagined England to be magical, and centred on the village, the squire and the sense of a community close to the past and to nature. This variegated but close-knit aspect of the English landscape meant that it would ‘triumph’ even if the enemy invaded. ‘ (p198)
Images of the countryside in books and magazines like ‘Picture Post’ emphasised its wholeness ‘belonging to everyone’, underplaying pre-war class conflicts over rights of access. Pictures of ‘sublime’ mountains now had city children evacuees to emphasise the disruption of ‘nature’. Particular landmarks took on symbolic meaning – people looking up for signs of threat and salvation at the cliffs of Dover.“The cliffs at Dover came to stand for a complete ring of natural bulwarks. Moreover, the white cliffs remained unsullied. The barrier of the cliffs also stood in for a message of farewell and recognition as airmen, and troops later, left them behind and returned to them as a marker of what was to be the absolute and inviolate boundary of the country.”
What really strikes me on re-reading this article after the Brexit campaign, is how these same images of the British countryside are still manipulated as a symbol of independence and freedom. European regulation and migrants coming in and taking over our green and pleasant land. Whereas heartlands of Brexit like East Anglia – which felt like a very hostile place and not at all ‘my country’ (though I am white British and lived here all my life though partly French) would come to a complete standstill without the (very exploited) migrant labour. Big farms (some owned by Arab princes it seems) replacing this Eastern European labour with technology is likely to be far more environmentally disruptive, let alone removal of the many EU environmental protections seen as ‘red tape’.
This is more than a romantic need to hark back to some mythical past in the midst of chaotic change (which has always occurred, starting with prehistoric forest clearances, let alone Viking and medieval carnage, then the Tudor enclosures). A means by which privileged classes in the countryside can protect their interests through creating a common identity of ‘countryfolk’. It also reflects the need of urban populations (including those living in areas of serious deprivation) to think that somewhere else is cleaner and more healthy – lungs somewhere else to make the urban pollution and waste somehow sanitised and acceptable (despite all the scientific evidence that our whole lifestyle needs urgently to change).
TASK:Abandon technique. Pick up a pencil and draw a very rough sketch of a ‘landscape’ picture or brainstorm.
I found this quite difficult because I have been doing landscape drawings and paintings for OCA Fine Art courses (See my Landscape Art and Prints on Zemniimages). These have broadened my own preconceptions of what landscape can be to anything from figurative panoramas, through expressionist close-up to near complete abstraction. Though this diversity is not yet reflected in my photography – one of the reasons I find this course exciting.
what shape is the picture?19C conventions were usually landscape format with broad vistas. But some late 19C landscapes and also earlier drawings were much more focused on particular elements in portrait format eg trees. Japanese and Chinese landscapes were also often vertical. There can also be very long thin panoramas, or tall thin verticals also.
what sort of terrain is depicted? 19C conventions and also Chinese and Japanese landscapes were concerned with mountains, trees, flat fields, sky, water, river. Sometimes cottages, houses, castles.
what is in it? Are there people? 19C conventions and before generally used landscape as a backdrop to religious or historical paintings. ‘Landscape paintings’ in both Western and Asian traditions generally had one or two people or a small group of people dwarfed by the natural elements. Sometimes they are excluded altogether eg Monet’s waterlillies and abstract landscapes like Richter.
how are the subjects arranged? According to rule of thirds composition. Pleasing. But might have high, low or central horizons, and diagonals and triangular relationships or swirling circles.
how might you describe the ‘mood‘ of the picture. Awestruck, calm, Turner’s turbulence. David’s mystique. Whistler’s mistiness. Colour and dramatic distortions in Hockney.
Compares two versions of the same image by Timothy O’Sullivan ‘Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake (Nevada)’
1868 photograph which later became a celebrated example of art photography for its abstract composition, and contrast between mistiness of the water and the detail of the foreground – ‘Twentieth century sensibility welcomes…as a model of the mysterious, silent beauty to which landscape photography had access during the early decades of the century’ ‘the mysterious beauty of the image is in this opulent flattening of its space’.
1875 lithograph published in King Survey Report as a geological study. This increased the detail and thereby removed the mystery.
She argues that different types of image are legitimate for different types of discourse. She examines the transition in painting, and a little later in photography, from early 18C landscape with feelings of depth that had been commissioned particularly to hang in houses of patrons, to flattened perspectives more suitable for displaying on larger exhibition gallery walls. ‘Transformation after 1860 into a flattened and compressed experience of space spreading laterally across the surface’. Voiding of perspective but with sharp value contrasts. Serial landscapes like Monet’s haystacks.
But is an issue if the effects and our appreciation of a work does not relate to the original intention of the artist? eg in the case of O’Sullivan if what we value today are effects caused by the limitations of the photographic process that O’Sullivan would have changed if he could.
Many 19C images were also intended to be viewed through stereoscopes. Shutting out surroundings to focus on the ‘view’ or sequence of ‘views’. Makers of stereo views often structured the image around a vertical marker in the fore-or middle-ground to center the space. Copyright was often with the companies, not with the photographer.
Atget – need to understand the number, sequencing and repetition in relation to the way they were used and cataloguing systems. He himself did not give an artistic evaluation. What does this imply for our evaluation of his photography as art?
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
1. Gather a selection of postcards (6-12) that you’ve either bought yourself or received from other people. If you don’t have any, then try to borrow some from other people,or see what you can find on an internet search. Write a brief evaluation (around 300 words) of the merits of the images you find. Importantly, consider whether, as Fay Godwin remarked, these images bear any relation to your own experience of the places depicted in the postcards.
“I am wary of picturesque pictures. I get satiated with looking at postcards in local newsagents and at the picture books that are on sale, many of which don’t bear any relation to my own experience of the place… The problem for me about these picturesque pictures, which proliferate all over the place, is that they are a very soft warm blanket of sentiment, which covers everybody’s idea about the countryside… It idealises the country in a very unreal way.” (Fay Godwin)
It is now quite some time since I received or sent postcards – most things these days are done by Facebook posts. I looked for postcards in East Anglia seaside towns like Aldeburgh but most were art postcards, no photographs. Even in Cambridge it is difficult to get ‘straight’ postcards. Most are tinted or artist drawings. I feel the traditional postcard is probably going out of fashion with technological change. On the Internet search for ‘postcards’ shows many sites where you can send off your own photos and get them produced as cards – this seems to be the growing trend. The other trend of for vintage postcards and art postcards.
In the end I resorted to a simple search for Google images of some places I am familiar with on the Norfolk and Suffolk coast.
I find these very tame and boring – the place itself is breezy with salt spray in your face, sounds of seagulls that eat your fish and chips chips, a very poignant out-of-season wrapped up feel on its fun fare and Seaworld, crashing waves against the sea defences and amazing light. It is one of the few places on the East Anglia coast that face West where you can see a sunset, and is also a place famous for seeing a sky full of geese flying to roost or migrating. But nothing of this was in the postcards. They mostly just showed:
These images are not really ‘picturesque’ in Gilpin’s sense, more just promotion of seaside holidays. The pictures of castles are generally full frontal, with very little photographic artistry. Maybe imitating snapshots that holiday-makers themselves might take.
Below are a selection of my own mixed ‘picturesque’ and social documentary images taken in early January out of season. I find these out of season images capture more of the spirit of the place – the light and long shadows, the way people enjoy themselves even when it is cold.
Hunstanton, Norfolk
Hunstanton, Norfolk
Hunstanton, Norfolk
Some other out of season images of Snettisham just down the coast. These are not picturesque – many are purposely underexposed – but do echo my memories of the place. This is possibly because of my memories of taking them – the act of taking images alters perception and memory itself.
Aldeburgh in Suffolk
This resort is better portrayed with rather more imagination – maybe because tourists there are rather more upmarket and it is a centre for art shops for the London weekend getaways with money – but still rather tame. Many of the street scenes use a very wide angle lens and leave out the traffic and parked cars – the streets are rarely that quiet.
These cards do capture something of the light, the colour of the Dutch/Norfolk style houses as they look in the sunshine, the dramatic cloud forms (although the blue is too saturated) and the movement in the waves. These are more ‘picturesque’. What they fail to capture is the energy of the place and the people – all the children walking along the top of the sea wall, the different fashions people wear, the scrabble for parking in town (though plenty outside along the shoreline). They also fail to capture the drama of the windy cold days with people still enjoying a bracing walk on the shingle beach. And there is absolutely no social commentary – the parties of the rich with drunken and exclusive guests spilling out onto the streets from their holiday cottages.
Below are some of my own more ‘picturesque images’ – I also have not so far dared to take pictures of drunken aristocracy. These for me capture more of the feel of the place – though many were taken with an old i-Phone and are not completely sharp.
2. Write a brief response (around 200 words) to Graham Clarke’s comments above. Do you think it’s possible not to be a ‘tourist’ or ‘outsider’ as the maker of landscape images?
“…the landscape photograph implies the act of looking as a privileged observer so that, in one sense, the photographer of landscapes is always the tourist, and invariably the outsider. Francis Frith’s images of Egypt, for example, for all their concern with foreign lands, retain the perspective of an Englishman looking out over the land. Above all, landscape photography insists on the land as spectacle and involves an element of pleasure.”
Graham Clark (1997 p73)
In its conventional sense as a noun, the land is inanimate space though it may have life in it – so the photographer is inevitably apart as an observer in the way they are not necessarily with documentary or street photography where the subjects of the photograph may participate in determining the meaning .If one takes ‘landscape’ as a verb and not a noun – an act of slicing parcels of space and thereby giving them some meaning – then also the photographer is always in some sense an observer and hence ‘outside’.
But an observer is not necessarily superficial, privileged, a disinterested tourist or portraying land as spectacle for pleasure. Much depends on the intention of the photographer, their understanding of the complexities of the space they are ‘landscaping’ and the intended audience or market for the images. People may photograph the environment in which they live, or serve as a voice for other people living in the landscape – they are then less of an outsider. Many photographers have also acted as advocates for preservation or restoration of landscapes devastated by commercial or other human exploitation – those images are far from pleasurable. Technically it is possible to select the content and composition, include even parts of the photographer’s body in the image, to increase the feeling of immersion and involvement. If the intended audience or market for the images is looking not for pleasure or commercial attraction, but to be informed of issues in the landscape/landscaping and the forces that shape it then the photographer often does in-depth research akin to documentary to select the images and meanings to communicate.
Initial reactions to ‘Wire’ and ‘Power’ – I found the descriptions evocative and also reminiscent of forbidden forays of my own early teenage life with my best friend or my dog into old bombed sites and semi-urban lanes on the outskirts of Manchester – with their potential threats of meeting with men in wait for teenage girls, gang knife fights between rival football teams and the odd murder.
Many of the descriptions also resonate with areas along my daily walk in Cambridge that I have chosen for ‘Transitions’. And the book is definitely one source of inspiration to which I shall return many times as I progress with that project.
But I agree with Marion Shoard:
This book could perhaps have had more investigative rigour. The edgelands now need something beyond a merely subjective celebration of their identity. Far more than our towns and countryside, they are being subjected to ceaseless change. Wild space is being prettified at the expense of its character and creatures. Industrial ruins are being cleared away.
We could be in the process of losing this landscape just as we are discovering its charms. Should we be trying to conserve it, as we conserve the best of rural environments? Or would any attempt to regulate this space destroy the wildness that makes it special?
It is time for us to consider what relationship we want to see in the long term between our activity in the edgelands, their epic infrastructure, their unique wildlife and industrial archaeology and their peculiar place in our imagination.
Initial reactions to ‘Wire’ and ‘Power’ – I found the descriptions evocative and also reminiscent of forbidden forays of my own early teenage life with my best friend or my dog into old bombed sites and semi-urban lanes on the outskirts of Manchester – with their potential threats of meeting with men in wait for teenage girls, gang knife fights between rival football teams and the odd murder.
Many of the descriptions also resonate with areas along my daily walk in Cambridge that I have chosen for ‘Transitions’. And the book is definitely one source of inspiration to which I shall return many times as I progress with that project.
But I agree with Marion Shoard:
This book could perhaps have had more investigative rigour. The edgelands now need something beyond a merely subjective celebration of their identity. Far more than our towns and countryside, they are being subjected to ceaseless change. Wild space is being prettified at the expense of its character and creatures. Industrial ruins are being cleared away.
We could be in the process of losing this landscape just as we are discovering its charms. Should we be trying to conserve it, as we conserve the best of rural environments? Or would any attempt to regulate this space destroy the wildness that makes it special?
It is time for us to consider what relationship we want to see in the long term between our activity in the edgelands, their epic infrastructure, their unique wildlife and industrial archaeology and their peculiar place in our imagination.
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Photography is not, and cannot be an ‘objective’ art. Although the camera can only capture light bouncing off objects that are in front of the lens, the photographer behind the lens will always be making subjective judgements about:
– what exactly to include in and out of the image and composition
– when to take the image to include what they want in terms of eg action and lighting
– how to take the image eg type of lens, depth of field, shutter speed
Although all the above are affected by technological possibilities and constraints of particular cameras that have changed over time, photographs have always been made in relation to the photographer’s subjective purpose for the image:
– feelings about the object (even if photographing cells under a microscope)
– intended communication of those feelings for a particular audience
– subjective reactions of different audiences to the image
Lee Miller’s photograph is really intriguing – and becomes even more so the more I look and then read how it was made and constructed. I first saw Lee Miller’s work about 20 years ago at an exhibition in Paris.
When I first saw the image in the context of the topic thread here, I assumed that the rectangle was a small looking glass like the ones one often sees in bathrooms in India and Islamic countries. So a blank mirror reflecting nothing back of the photographer as if her mind was clouded, blank and probably depressed. Echoing then the arid stone desert outside. Obviously somewhere like Egypt or North Africa/Arabia but no culture or distinguishing features to be seen. A bleak landscape through a torn curtain seen by a blank mind. Just space.
But when I looked up the discussion about how this particular version of the scene was constructed and why it was selected, I discovered I had misunderstood.
Lee altered the framing of the whole photograph to try to accommodate a rectangular window in a square format camera exposure. The version seen here is taken very much closer to the window than earlier takes to de-emphasise the window, and focus more on the torn curtain.
The ‘mirror’ is not actually a mirror at all, but one of a number of versions of framing that direct the viewer’s eye. In other versions the small black frame was positioned to focus on the escarpment on the left that was positioned so that the top converging lines of the curtain led the eye to the frame. It seems this was because the cabin where she stayed was one used by officials and visitors who might be more interested in the only ‘landscape feature’, rather than the stone desert. Placing the frame so that it frames part of the washed out sky is the ‘Portrait of Space’.
But the viewer can choose where they look in the frame and let their gaze wander through different spaces, including examination of the torn curtain that now provides another frame, rather than a device to direct the eye to the horizon.
So this is an image that is a choice of different windows, but actually revealing very little of what ‘objectively’ exists. The mirror being I think less a reflection of the photographer, than of what the viewer chooses to look at. And how far they choose to see past what the photographer has hidden through the device of the curtain.
My own work
In my own work I range across a whole continuum from windows to mirrors, and the various barriers between. Some of my projects have been research-based more documentary images eg in preparing a Blurb photobook Anywhere Road I consciously question a range of different perspectives and photographic interpretations to become more aware of my subjectivity – and discovered a lot of new things in the process. Others projects are much more obviously my own interpretation of what I see. I have also been very interested in photographic textures eg in wood and stone that suggest fiction narratives but inspired by the particular location.
Through the Window Pane
One project ‘Through the Window Pane’ was shot in Shingle Street on the Suffolk Coast, referencing Alice Through the Looking Glass and clouded mirrors that distort and put things back to front.. I had unfortunately hurt my ankle just a day before the trip, so could not go out. And I was imprisoned watching Liz Truss’ budget and ware in Ukraine on the TV, just looking through the window. So I decided to make the most of it through a photoseries of the changing light, weather and views on my iPhone. This does I think indicate a lot about myself, what I choose to shoot and also select, how I interprete and then also manipulate what I have shot to further communicate my mood and sometimes a message.
Through the Window
Reflecting the Photographer
What is on the ‘window lens’ distorting my view?
Shingle Street October 2022Shingle Street October 2022
