As I stood admiring just before sunrise, the reed-tops bending under their beautiful crystal heads, rooks came flying from a wood near by, and a vast flock of peewits darkened the sky. As the yellow sun arose in frosty splendour mists began to rise on the river, and there followed a brief spell of magic beauty ere the thickening mists began to bury everything as they blew in fitful gusts from the river. in On English Lagoons (1893)
Do not put off doing a coveted picture until another year, for next year the scene will look very different. You will never be able twice to get exactly the same thing. 1889
Blackshore, River Blythe, Suffolkfrom Emerson’s illustrated book ‘Pictures of East Anglian Life’, 1888
“At Plough, The End of the Furrow”, from Emerson’s photographic album ‘Pictures From Life in Field And Fen,’, 1887
Confessions from Emerson’s book ‘Pictures From Life in Field And Fen’, 1887
Peter Henry Emerson (13 May 1856 – 12 May 1936) was a British writer and photographer. Emerson was intelligent, well-educated and wealthy with a facility for clearly articulating his many strongly held opinions. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural settings and for his disputes with the photographic establishment about the purpose and meaning of photography.
Life
Emerson was born on La Palma Estate, a sugar plantation near Encrucijada, Cuba[1] belonging to his American father, Henry Ezekiel Emerson and British mother, Jane, née Harris Billing. He was a distant relative of Samuel Morseand Ralph Waldo Emerson. He spent his early years in Cuba on his father’s estate.
During the American Civil War he spent some time at Wilmington, Delaware, but moved to England in 1869, after the death of his father.
He was schooled at Cranleigh School where he was a noted scholar and athlete. He subsequently attended King’s College London, before switching to Clare College, Cambridge in 1879 where he earned his medical degree in 1885.
In 1881 he married Miss Edith Amy Ainsworth and wrote his first book while on his honeymoon.The couple eventually had five children.
He bought his first camera in 1881 or 1882 to be used as a tool on bird-watching trips with his friend, the ornithologist A. T. Evans. In 1885 he was involved in the formation of the Camera Club of London, and the following year he was elected to the Council of the Photographic Society and abandoned his career as a surgeon to become a photographer and writer. As well as his particular attraction to nature he was also interested in billiards, rowing and meteorology.
After the publication of Marsh Leaves in 1895, generally considered to be his best work, Emerson published no further photographs, though he continued writing and publishing books, both works of fiction and on such varied subjects as genealogy and billiards. In 1924, he started writing a history of artistic photography and completed the manuscript just before his death in Falmouth, Cornwall on 12 May 1936.
In 1979 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.
Photography as art
Emerson’s passionate belief was that photography was an art and not a mechanical reproduction. In 1889 he published a controversial and influential book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, in which he explained his philosophy of art and straightforward photography. The book was described by one writer as “the bombshell dropped at the tea party” because of the case it made that truthful and realistic photographs would replace contrived photography. This was a direct attack on the popular tradition of combining many photographs to produce one image that had been pioneered by O. G. Reijlander and Henry Peach Robinson in the 1850s. Emerson denounced this technique as false and claimed that photography should be seen as a genre of its own, not one that seeks to imitate other art forms. All Emerson’s own pictures were taken in a single shot and without retouching, which was another form of manipulation that he strongly disagreed with, calling it “the process by which a good, bad, or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting”.
Emerson also believed that the photograph should be a true representation of that which the eye saw. He vehemently pursued this argument about the nature of seeing and its representation in photography, to the discomfort of the photographic establishment.
Initially influenced by naturalistic French painting, he argued for similarly “naturalistic” photography and took photographs in sharp focus to record country life as clearly as possible. His first album of photographs, published in 1886, was entitled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, and it consisted of 40 platinum prints that were informed by these ideas. See You Tube video of the photos
Before long, however, he became dissatisfied with rendering everything in sharp focus, considering that the undiscriminating emphasis it gave to all objects was unlike the way the human eye saw the world. He then experimented with soft focus. Following contemporary optical theories, he producedphotographs with one area of sharp focus while the remainder was unsharp. But he was unhappy with the results that this gave too, experiencing difficulty with accurately recreating the depth and atmosphere which he saw as necessary to capture nature with precision.
Despite his misgivings, he took many photographs of landscapes and rural life in the East Anglian fenlands and published seven further books of his photography through the next ten years. In the last two of these volumes, On English Lagoons(1893) and Marsh Leaves (1895), Emerson printed the photographs himself using photogravure, after having bad experiences with commercial printers.
His main photography books are:
Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886) You Tube video of the photos
Pictures from Life in Field and Fen (1887) Google Images
In the end Emerson found that his defence of photography as art failed, and he had to allow that photography was probably a form of mechanical reproduction. The pictures the Robinson school produced may have been “mechanical”, but Emerson’s may still be considered artistic, since they were not faithful reproductions of a scene but rather having depth as a result of his one-plane-sharp theory. When he lost the argument over the artistic nature of photography, Emerson did not publicise his photographic work but still continued to take photographs.
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:
Wander the path of a winding river and it will take you deeply into the experience of landscape. Through the summer days I walked the footpaths, fields, meadows and farm tracks of this bucolic river valley. The Stour Valley remains a timeless landscape that continues to be rooted to its past. In places it has remained relatively unchanged for centuries by escaping the impact of industrial agriculture. Of course, this is “Constable Country:” the heart of English landscape art. People come to this part of East Anglia to literally step into the scenes of Constable’s paintings, but I set out to find my own way of seeing the Stour Valley. I discovered it can be a place of wonderful afternoon light and this inspired the photographs I made. These photographs largely reject the celebrated grand vistas of the Stour Valley and instead offer an alternative way of looking at this landscape. They bring attention to the particular, the peculiar, and the poetic – highlighting the hidden places and scenes that are so often overlooked. But as I worked, the spirit of Constable was always there, lingering behind me in the fields.
[These photographs were made during the summer months of 2012-2013.]
“When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods….”
(Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking,’ 1862)
Some Country continues my commitment to photographing rural East Anglia. Following the decade long work photographing the agrarian farmers of the region (Field Work), this new ongoing series explores the contemporary rural agricultural landscape of Norfolk and Suffolk. Moving beyond the farmer’s connection to the landscape, Some Country is reveals my own connection to rural East Anglia and includes photographs from the same fields and farm tracks that I explored during childhood. Once again, these photographs show my fascination with how man shapes the landscape, but they are also photographs about memory, personal experience, and how a prolonged connection to the landscape around us, makes us and shapes us.
As I have wandered the East Anglian landscape making the photographs for Some Country occasionally I have encountered trees that are so particular in their diginity and presence in the landscape that they suggest something beyond the country and become themselves the subject of a photograph.
One of England’s most rural and agricultural regions, East Anglia is a place with a long history of people working the land. Here the Romans grew their wheat and barley, and a culture of family owned agrarian farms developed and flourished, continuing an agricultural tradition with a lineage extending back to the region’s peasant farmers of the early Middle Ages. But during the last 50 years things have changed. Most of the small farms are now gone.
These photographs are from the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. They tell the story of those that remain – the stoical small-time farmers who continue to work the fields because it is all they know. They are the forgotten people of the flatlands, whose identity is intimately shaped by the landscape that surrounds them. Theirs is a way of life that is deeply rooted in the past. Traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon. How best to plough, sow, hoe, and harvest a field to reap the best from it. The detailed histories and biographies of the local landscape. Farmers who have come and gone, from what direction the fox will come to steal a chicken, and who planted a particular oak tree and when. The old ways continue to work, so there is no need to change.
For ten years Justin Partyka has been photographing throughout the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, exploring a world of rabbit catchers, reed cutters, and the region’s small-scale agrarian farmers. He calls them “the forgotten people of the flatlands,” who have an intimate relationship with the landscape that surrounds them. It is a way of life that is deeply rooted to the past and its traditional methods and knowledge. These photographs tell the story of these farmers and the fields they work, and clearly illustrate Partyka’s dedicated immersion into their world. His painterly use of colour and the unique qualities of the East Anglian light beautifully captures this timeless way of rural life.
Field Work: Photographs from East Anglia is published in a limited edition of 100 signed and numbered books. Each book comes with a specially embossed slipcase and a 10 x 12
Black fen they call it round here. Black — for the peaty soil; black — for the mood of the area, for its history and for its future.
— Mary Chamberlain, Fenwomen, 1975
Black Fen is an ongoing series of photographs exploring the mysterious flatlands of the Fens. To drive across this landscape feels like crossing a great sea. The road undulates from the ever-shifting land, tossing the car like a small boat. Occasionally an unpaved drove branches off providing access to a house, farm buildings or fields deep in the middle of the fen. The presence of water is constant. A complex network of dykes and drains criss-crosses the fields, the murky waters rising and falling as the fenland locks and pumping stations work to prevent the water from taking back the land. All around is an abundance of crops which fight for space with an encroaching wildness of weeds and bushes that grow thick and fast out of the fertile earth. Once a place of swamps and marshes, this landscape exists because of the pioneering work of Cornelius Vermuyden and his fellow Dutch engineers, who in 1626 began draining the fens with the support of King Charles I. Today covering an area of almost 1,500 square miles in Eastern England, the Fens are one of the world’s largest areas of reclaimed land.
Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain is a classic work of oral history. It was the first book by the feminist publisher Virago Press in 1975. Fenwomen is a unique documentary of women’s lives in the village of Isleham in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It tells the story of “women as labourers and labourers’ wives, whose daily toil for the survival of themselves and their families had never been acknowledged, much less lauded.”
This new edition of the book by Full Circle Editions features 23 new photographs by Justin Partyka specially commissioned for this publication. Taken in and around Isleham during 2010, these photographs present a portrait of the village over thirty years since the oral history was originally collected. Much has changed in the village, but as these photographs reveal, Isleham’s strong sense of place is still intimately shaped by the mysterious flat fenlands that surround it.
Covering an area of 251, 700 square miles, the province of Saskatchewan is almost three times the size of Great Britain, yet it has a population of only 1, 010, 146. For such a big place, the rest of the world seems to know very little about Saskatchewan, if anything at all. Even in Canada, the majority of Canadians asked about Saskatchewan have never been there and have no desire to go. Those that have driven through the province say that, “there is nothing there, just endless wheat fields.”
Saskatchewan is the place you pass through to get somewhere else. But hidden amongst the wheat fields is a rich and diverse, deeply traditional prairie culture. It is an eclectic mix of Hutterite colonies, Indian reservations, stock car racing, and cowboys; towns and cities which rise out of the landscape with their seductive names like Moose Jaw, Big Beaver, and Buffalo Gap, along with the main industry of grain farming.
In 2005 Saskatchewan celebrated its centennial year. But as the pioneering spirit of the province’s founders is remembered, rural life is experiencing a major decline. The many abandoned farms which scar the landscape are a testimony to this. Although Saskatchewan is still predominately agricultural, today seventy percent of the population live in towns and cities. Many years of poor grain prices, along with the dominance of corporate agribusiness are destroying the cultural landscape of the province, where 20,000 small farms have closed since 1986 alone. As DeNeen Brown highlights in a story in the Washington Post (Oct 25, 2003): ‘Towns throughout Canada’s prairies are dying slow deaths. All along the highways of Saskatchewan abandoned buildings lean against the prairie wind, which blows through the cracked windows of houses deserted by the families who traded them for a few thousand dollars or for the cars they drove away.’
However, the people that remain and call Saskatchewan home express a deep passion for and understanding of prairie life: an acceptance of the endless space and the loneliness it brings, but also the importance of community in a world of rural isolation. And underlying it all is a deep sense of place–an intimate relationship with the inescapable open landscape which surrounds everything and everyone.
[This project has developed into a collaboration with the Saskatchewan writer Ken Mitchell, taking the form of an image and word performance and a future book. In 2015 – 2016 Justin will be returning to Saskatchewan to make new photographs.]
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
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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.
The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced documentary photography that
was far removed from the frontier of photojournalism. During a working life that lasted from
1890 to 1927, Atget produced 10,000 images of Paris, working with a large format 24x18cm
wooden camera and making and coating his own large glass plate negatives. Atget cared deeply
about the small traders, street musicians, actors, artists, ribbon sellers, etc., who were being
squeezed out of their livings by modernisation. He also cared for the architecture of the republic,
much of which was crumbling and in a state of squalor, just waiting to be demolished. Atget
was motivated more by the need to re-create, preserve and document the old city’s existence
than by a desire to create imagery for sale.
It’s not difficult to imagine these
works as paintings. (Compare Atget’s
Bitumiers with Gustave Caillebotte’s The
Floor Scrapers, for example.) You’ll find
more Atget images in the Bridgeman
Art Library. Follow the link on the OCA
student website. Some of Atget’s work
showed surrealist elements. Look at his
famous ‘corset shop’ photograph, for
example.
Project Photography as art
Water Lilies Eugène Atget. Not Paris this time, but recognisably
in a fine art tradition i.e. Monet.
Bitumiers
One of the most striking campaigns in relation to the developing mythology of the British rural landscape was a series of posters painted during 1942 by Frank Newbould (1887–1951).The resemblance between Newbould’s posters and travel advertising of the time is also worth noting. Substituting strap lines encouraging would be holidaymakers to explore their country with a command to defend it was a novel strategy.
Marcus Bleasdale (born 1968) is a photojournalist, born in the UK to an Irish family. He spent over eight years covering the brutal conflict within the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and has worked in many other places. Much of his work is linked to fundraising for aid and human rights agencies and there is often a link to ways t donate. His videos are extremely powerful and also discuss what people can do to change the situations the are seeing.
His images are in both black and white and colour and he also does video. They get their power because he is well informed about what he is shooting and knows why he wants hat shot and also has access to people and situations most outsiders would not. But he also has an extraordinary sense of composition and tone. Some of his images at composited (no examples available for download) but I generally find these less powerful.
Mathew B. Brady (ca. 1822 – January 15, 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and his documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism.
Brady was born in Warren County, New York, the youngest of three children of Irish immigrant parents. At age 16 he moved to Saratoga, New York, where he met famed portrait painter William Page. Brady became Page’s student. In 1839 the two traveled to Albany, New York, and then to New York City, where Brady continued to study painting with Page, and also with Page’s former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse had met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France in 1839, and returned to the US to enthusiastically push the new daguerrotype invention of capturing images. He soon became the center of the New York artistic colony who wished to study photography. He opened a studio and offered classes; Brady was one of the first students.
In 1844 Brady opened his own photography studio in New York, and by 1845 he began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans. He opened a studio in Washington, D.C. in 1849.
Brady’s early images were daguerreotypes, and he won many awards for his work; in the 1850s ambrotype photography became popular, which gave way to the albumen print, a paper photograph produced from large glass negatives most commonly used in the American Civil War photography. In 1850 Brady produced The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portrait collection of prominent contemporary figures. The album, which featured noteworthy images including the elderly Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, was not financially rewarding but invited increased attention to Brady’s work and artistry. In 1854, Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri popularized the carte de visite and these small pictures (the size of a visiting card) rapidly became a popular novelty as thousands of these images were created and sold in the United States and Europe.
In 1856 Brady created the first modern advertisement when he placed an ad in the New York Herald paper offering to produce “photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes.” His ads were the first whose typeface and fonts were distinct from the text of the publication and from that of other advertisements.
Civil War documentation
He was head of a team of photographers who documented
the American Civil War. Brady and his team recorded the cruelty and futility of war through photography of the dead.
At first, the effect of the Civil War on Brady’s business was a brisk increase in sales of cartes de visite to transient soldiers. However, he was soon taken with the idea of documenting the war itself. He first applied for permission to travel to the battle sites to an old friend, General Winfield Scott, and eventually he made his application to President Lincoln himself. Lincoln granted permission in 1861 with the proviso that Brady finance the project himself. His efforts to document the American Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio right onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the obvious dangers, financial risk, and discouragement of his friends, Brady is later quoted as saying “I had to go. A spirit in my feet said ‘Go,’ and I went.” His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he got so close to the action that he barely avoided capture.
He employed Alexander Gardner, James Gardner, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, William Pywell, George N. Barnard, Thomas C. Roche, and seventeen other men, each of whom was given a traveling darkroom, to go out and photograph scenes from the Civil War. Brady generally stayed in Washington, D.C., organizing his assistants and rarely visited battlefields personally. This may have been due, at least in part, to the fact that Brady’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate in the 1850s.
In October 1862 Brady opened an exhibition of photographs from the Battle of Antietam in his New York gallery titled “The Dead of Antietam.” Many images in this presentation were graphic photographs of corpses, a presentation new to America. This was the first time that many Americans saw the realities of war in photographs as distinct from previous “artists’ impressions”.
Mathew Brady, through his many paid assistants, took thousands of photos of American Civil War scenes. Much of the popular understanding of the Civil War comes from these photos. There are thousands of photos in the National Archives taken by Brady and his associates, Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, and Timothy O’Sullivan. The photographs include Lincoln, Grant, and common soldiers in camps and battlefields. The images provide a pictorial cross reference of American Civil War history. Brady was not able to photograph actual battle scenes as the photographic equipment in those days was still in the infancy of its development and required that a subject be still in order for a clear photo to be produced.Like Fenton, Brady and his colleagues moved people and objects
to create a more graphic or telling image.
Following the conflict a war-weary public lost interest in seeing photos of the war, and Brady’s popularity and practice declined drastically.
During the war, Brady spent over $100,000 to create over 10,000 plates. He expected the U.S. government to buy the photographs when the war ended, but when the government refused to do so he was forced to sell his New York City studio and go into bankruptcy. Congress granted Brady $25,000 in 1875, but he remained deeply in debt. Depressed by his financial situation, loss of eyesight and devastated by the death of his wife in 1887, he became very lonely. He died penniless in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on January 15, 1896, from complications following a streetcar accident.
Brady can be considered a pioneer in the orchestration of a “corporate credit line.” In this practice, every image produced in his gallery was labeled “Photo by Brady;” however, Brady dealt directly with only the most distinguished subjects and most portrait sessions were carried out by others.
