Zemni Images

Photography, moving image, design and illustration of Linda Mayoux

Mapping and Other Technologies

Category: Journeys

  • Mapping and Other Technologies

    A ‘map’ isn’t necessarily something used to navigate through unfamiliar territory; it’s also a visual ordering of features and information…a means of making sense of our physical surroundings in new ways. Alexander 2013 p67

    Liz Nicol the Rubber Band Project (1997)

    Ian Brown’s series Walking the Land (2007)

    Other artists and photographers who layer numerous different photographs include Idris Khan, Jon Spencer and Isidro Ramirez.

    Creative possibilities  have been opened up by digital technologies like:

    •  Google Earth (2005): allows users to make a journey to literally anywhere in the world from the comfort of their computer, scrolling around sites of interest from the vantage point of Google’s satellite images.
    • Google Street View (2007): is limited in terms of its global coverage, but provides a more intimate, street-level view of our landscape.

    ‘Stay-at-home street photographers’ who have used these images – trawling through endless Street View images, framing and selecting these digital views as their own photographs – as a form of ‘appropriation’ art include:

     Project 2.4: Is appropriation appropriate?

  • The Road

    The road has featured prominently in art and literature as a means to get characters from one place to another, and as a stage for narratives to be played out. It has been used as a symbol for:

    • notion of a journey – attaining greater understanding and with a coming of age, as explored in The Road to Perdition (2002) directed by Sam Mendes, for example.
    • symbol of liberation and  means of exploration and adventure, by permitting its users to travel freely from place to place, as in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) or Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969). Endless ‘road movies’ have perpetuated the ideology of America as a unified place of opportunity and escape.
    • unfamiliar –  change of pace (for instance by walking instead of driving) brings out a sense of the unheimliche; something very familiar by one means of transport can feel alien when experienced by another.  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006);  Chris Coekin’s photographic project The Hitcher.
    •  environmental damage and climate change – particularly with cars. Lee Friedlander monograph America by Car (2010)
    • cultural exploration American Photographs (1938) by Walker Evans (1903–75) and Les Américains (1958) by Robert Frank; Paul Graham A1 – The Great North Road ; Chris Coekin’s monograph The Hitcher (2007)

    Rivers have also been used to define routes to structure photographic exploration.

     2.2 Explore a Road

  • Surveys

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

    BRITISH SURVEY MOVEMENT

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

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

    John Thomson (1837-1921)

    Francis Frith (1822-98)

     UNITED STATES

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

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

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

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

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

    2.1 : ‘Territorial Photography’