Zemni Images

Photography, moving image, design and illustration of Linda Mayoux

The Tourist Perspective

Category: Landscape

  • The Tourist Perspective

    Before photography landscapes for mass market were available as etchings. Postcards were invented in the late 19th Century – objectifying places into commodities that could be consumed and collected for a reasonable price. People often collected postcards of places they could never travel to. By the 1870s Americans could buy photographic prints of faraway places in their local shop or mail order (Snyder in Mitchell, 2002 p179 q Alexander 2013 p89). Stereoscopic cards also became available. In order to create the 3D illusion these reinforced traditional views of separation of landscape focal planes into foreground, middle ground and background.

    See posts:

    More recently, with the development of mass tourism since the 1950s, postcards were mass produced as souvenirs of places people visited and to send home ‘Wish You Were Here’. The main emphasis is on enjoyment and selling particular places as destinations that yet more tourists will want to come. They include very cheaply produced and printed cards, sometimes with landscape as the backdrop to humorous pictures of people enjoying – or making fools of – themselves. Some are also ‘boring’ both in subject matter and treatment – and in this way become quite intriguing.

    There are also more expensive quality up-market colour images of sunsets, buildings and landscapes – particularly in more ‘exclusive’ destinations. Some of these follow ‘picturesque’ convention. Others seek to distinguish themselves from other postcards on the rack or nearby shopd by seeking new angles and composition. Some use new ways of digital processing that avoid earlier oversaturation and try to interprete views in a novel way for a more ‘discerning’ customer.

    Increasingly, standard photographic postcards produced by local photographers seem to be giving way to artists’ cards and a trend for self-processing where people produce cards from their own images so they can record their own personal impressions.

     3.2: Postcard views

  • Landscape and the City

    !!To be developed with documentary

    Since the very beginning of photography, the city has provided opportunities for the photographer: landscape and other subject matter.

    Detachment

    Daguerre’s. ‘View boulevard du temple’. First example of photograph of a person. Only rendered because he must have remained relatively still to have his shoes shined.

    Talbot’s views of Paris.

    “The images of Paris remain passive and mute, and establish not so much the tourist eye-view, hungry for sights to record, as one that was looking for things to record… his London images, for example Nelson’s Column (1843), keep the city at a distance and follow the eye in its way within the urban world.”
    (Clarke, 1997, p.77)

    Eugene Atget

    Social documentary

    John Thomson Street Life in London

    Jacob Riis How the other half lives.

    Brassai

    Cities within cities

    A recurring line of investigation is that of the city, not just as one complete interconnecting  unit, but layers of different cities within cities. Sometimes these elements are briefly exposed to one another, but often they are designed to restrain their inhabitants from uncomfortable contact with each other. Eg film In Time.

    Paul Seawright.    Invisible Cities.

     

    1.9: Visual research and analysis – social contrasts

  • Postcard Views

    Task:

    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.

    Hunstanton postcards

    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.

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    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.

    Cyclists walking in front of shop

    Fish and chip shop (very famous this one)

    Street view

    Some of what I consider to be the more interesting cards include:

    a  composite with different shaped and sized images of some of the major landmarks

    set of panoramas of different views from the seafront looking towards the town

    narrow panorama of the seafront houses

    narrow panorama of the tower

     the pier

    distant town view from the far beach.

    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.

     

  • Land Art

    ‘Land art’  is a conceptually-based approach approach to making art that emerged in the 1970s. The nature of earth and land art requires the media of film and photography to document outcomes and incorporates aspects of performance art and sculpture.

    Land Art: The focus is not on describing the place itself, but representing the artist’s experience of visiting or travelling to or through it.

    • Hamish Fulton
    • Richard Long
    • Christo wrapping’ works
    • Jeanne-Claude wrapping’ works

    Earth art: involves direct intervention with, and often use of, the raw materials of a landscape (e.g. rocks, plants, mud), and is generally made or presented in situ. In Malcolm Andrews’ words:

    “The work of the Earth Artists cannot easily be identified with this or that particular object which the hands of the artist have made, but more with the relationship between that object (sometimes a mere rearrangement of on-site stones, for instance, or a line drawn on the desert floor) and the otherwise untouched site. The ‘landscape art’ in this case is that relationship.” (Andrews, 1999, p. 204 q Alexander 2013 p71)

    Robert Smithson (1938–73), celebrated for his Spiral Jetty (1970) which is almost 0.5km in length and extends into the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

    In relation to photography this raises the possibilities of manipulating the scene – going beyond simply tidying up strands of grass or intruding branches to constructing images to photograph – along the lines of Mohammad Barouissa’s constructed scenarios of conflict based on research and then staged. One could envisage something similar for eg environmental issues, or simply aesthetic effect.

    A further element used by some land artists, and also painters like Kurt Jackson, are words added to images – might be handwritten or typed in an appropriate font and overlaid in Photoshop. Or simply titling and putting alongside the image as a meta-narrative. This could complement or give ironic contrast to the image.

    Project 2.5: Text in art

  • 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