“Photographs slice space into place; land is framed as landscape… Photography contributes to characterising sites as particular types of places within the order of things.” (Wells, 2011, p.56)

Landscape is essentially about exploring the relationships between the maker, their subjects and where they are, both geographically and spiritually or psychologically. .. Whether celebrated for its beauty and the bounties it provides or respected for its power and the challenges it presents, the different ways we’ve presented the landscape – and continue to present it – tell us above all, about the depth, range and contrasting values we place upon it. .. For the vast majority of people working with photography, whether as a tourist or within professional practice, the camera provides an opportunity to record, if not an accurate representation of the scene before them, then an enhanced interpretation of it. This reflects an urge – perhaps even an instinct – to tame the land, and in an abstract sense to take ownership of it. Jesse Alexander 2013 p22.

10 Photographers You Need To Watch If You Love Simple Landscapes

This blog is based on my studies for ‘Landscape’ OCA Photography Course Level 2 by Jesse Alexander 2013. It is part of my thinking through of my approach to landscape and landscape photography:

– how do I  feel about and relate to my environment? how does photographic practice increase my awareness of the world around me? how do or should I react to the technological changes that are taking place in the ways people are affecting the environment? what is ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’? why?

– why photography? what do I want to say? do I want to portray beauty (form, colour, light, wind and being alive)? sublime (the awe of it all, darkness and light?)? in everything (including things destroying the planet?)? do I want to show human interaction with the environment and social documentary/activism? does photographing the world teach me something new through making me slow down and slice up then reconstruct?

– what is the best way to visually communicate my perceptions and feelings? through photography for different purposes: my professional work on development in Africa, Asia and Latin America and also my art practice and interest in post-modern/multicultural approaches to illustration and digital processes. How do I communicate emotions, feelings and messages in a 2D frame?

– what are the best ways of showing my work (when it is good enough) to change what I want to change? photographs in an exhibition? photobooks? web galleries? other?

1: Beauty and the Sublime

2: Landscape as a Journey

3: Landscape as Political Text

4: Landscape and identities

5: Resolution: Kyrgyzstan

 Transitions: Bench  forthcoming

Other Links

This landscape photography blog complements:

• Zemni Images : http://www.zemniimages.com – commercial site for my photography, art and design website. High resolution versions of the images on this blog can be found there as indicated in relevant page links.
• https://zemniimages.info links other blogs for my OCA degree in Visual Communication.

Other OCA Photography student blog links

Using search engines and any other resources, find at least 12 examples of 18 and 19th century landscape paintings. List all of the commonalities. Try to find out why the examples were painted (eg private or public commission.) your research should provide some examples of the visual language and conventions known to the early photographers.

Notes here to be updated from visits to exhibitions at:

VandA: Constable

Tate Britain: Late Turner and Turner galleries

National Gallery : Pedar Balke

National gallery and elsewhere Maggie Hambling

Tate Britain: John Martin

 Corot

http://www.jean-baptiste-camille-corot.org  Creative Commons website

Horizon lines, framing devices, division between foreground, middle ground and background planes. Aerial perspective.

Storm at Sea, 1865

Diagonal lines of rain point to solid horizontal horizon.

 

 

 

Souvenir du Pont de Mantes

Framing device and aerial perspective.

 

Constable

http://www.john-constable.org Creative Commons website
Haywain

 

 

 

Hampstead heath with a rainbow

 

 

 

Hampstead Heath

 

 

 

 

• 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

John Martin

Turner

http://www.william-turner.org creative commons website

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.

The Fighting ‘Téméraire’ tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, National Gallery

 

 

 

Snow Storm, Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps 1812, Tate Gallery

Snow Storm- Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth c. 1842

Caspar David Friedrich

http://www.caspardavidfriedrich.org  creative commons website

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.

The Wanderer above the Mists 1817-18

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.

Trees 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’.

Monet

from Tate.org search

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

from http://www.tate.org.uk/search/Whistler 

mists, high horizons. Strong horizontals and verticals.

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights 1872

Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge c.1872-5

Then try to find examples of landscape photographs from any era that conform to these conventions.

See analysis in posts on:

Exercise 1.2 Photography in the museum or in the gallery

This image has horizon on top thirds line with leading line of rocks from, between and to vertical thirds lines. The original image though breaks with conventions on aerial perspective in that the rocks in that although there is a progression in sharpness from fore to middle to background, the equal haze of water and sky add the feeling of mystery. In a painting probably there would have been an attempt to use various devices to de-emphasise the sharpness on the rock at the front to more effectively lead the eye into the picture to the triangular rock at the middleground and back again. In the photograph this is achieved to some extent by the changes in tonal contrast from relatively equal tones between the foreground rock and sea to the sharper contrast between the dark triangular rock and the sea. Then back to the sharp dark/white contrast lines on the foreground rock.

See posts on:

Peter Henry Emerson

Fay Godwin (reading still to be written up )

Justyn Partyka

Most landscape photographs on sites like Flickr, photographs submitted to landscape photography magazines and camera club competitions also conform to:

– conventions of rule of thirds (reflected in grids in Lightroom and Photoshop),

– contrast between fore/middle/background to include near and far objects

– use of leading lines/implied lines to link the elements.

They also generally:

– blur motion on water through slow shutter speed

– increase tonal contrast in cloud and sky areas, and often enhance colours

– have a deep depth of field through small apertures – both these done through using a tripod.

– simplify the image, cloning or removing distractions in digital processing.

Deborah Bright’s essay ‘Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men’ was written in 1985.

Arguments:

Landscape (from lakes Tahoe to Wobegon) is conceived by the middle classes in America as evoking the universal constancy of geological and mythic America beyond politics and ideology, appealing to ‘timeless values’.

But: every representation of landscape is also a record of human values and actions imposed on the land over time. Even formal and personal choices reflect collective interests and influences – philosophical, political, economic.

In late 19C US, after the ‘Indian problem’ had been brutally solved, a Cult of Wild Nature flourished. Tourism to national parks exploded. Supported by cowboy films from Hollywood.

But landscape photographers represented are mostly male.

John Pfahl Power Places – beautiful pictures of nuclear power plants but there are no statements to anchor his photographs. Expensive for gallery.

Contrast with Lisa Lewenz Three Mile Island Calendar uses photographs from nearby inhabitant’s windows. Published cheaply for mass distribution. Much more human and political.

 

Landscape images are the last preserve of a nation’s myths about nature, civilisation and beauty. It is no accident that the genre’s resurgence in both popular and high art is taking place during the Reagan Revolution when multinational corporations have been given virtually free rein over the economic and physical environment. Photographs of the strong graphic lines of a blast furnace or pithead tell us nothing about the massive exporting of industries to impoverished labor markets overseas and the devastated communities left behind…Landscape imagery has almost always been used to argue for the timeless virtues of a nature that transcends history – which is to say, collective social action…

But landscapes needn’t serve such meagre ends. If we are to redeem landscape photography from such a narrow, self-reflexive project, why not use it to question the assumptions about nature and culture it has traditionally served? Landscape is not the ideologically neutral subject many imagine it to be. Rather, it is an historical artifact that can be viewed as a record of the material facts of our social reality and what we have chosen to make of them.

Part 1 ‘Beauty and the Sublime’ explores some of the traditional concepts within landscape art, in particular the concepts of beauty and the sublime and some of its technical concerns.

Concepts of beauty

“Beauty and art were once thought of as belonging together, with beauty as among art’s principle aims and art as beauty’s highest calling” Beech 2009 p12 “Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life mat be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning” Adams 1996 p25 “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” Edmund Burke 1757.

 

Landscape perspectives: pictorialism to modernism

1.1: Preconceptions about landscape 1.2 Photography in the museum or in the gallery? 1.3 Establishing conventions: Landscape Photography and Landscape Art 1.4 What is a photographer?

The beautiful and the sublime

 1.6 The contemporary abyss

The Zone System

1.8 The Zone System in Practice

Landscape and the City

Assignment 1: Beauty and the Sublime

  1.5 and 1.7: Preparing Assignment 6: Transitions TASK Write a short reflective account of your own views on the picturesque (around 300 words). Consider how the concept of the picturesque has influenced your own ideas about landscape art, and in particular your ideas about what constitutes an effective or successful landscape photograph. NOTE: Link no longer available for the picturesque and romanticism in painting: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/r/romanticism-romance-sublime-picturesque/) I have attended many art classes and read many books and magazine articles books on art and photography composition and techniques, many of which together with topics like Golden Mean/Rule of Thirds and theories of balance and harmony, promote ‘correctly’ picturesque principles like those of Gilpin:

• The texture should be “rough”, “intricate”, “varied”, or “broken”, without obvious straight lines (though against this, leading lines can exaggerate perspective and make it more dramatic).
• The composition should work as a unified whole, incorporating several elements: a dark “foreground” with a “front screen” or “side screens”, a brighter middle “distance”, and at least one further, less distinctly depicted, “distance”. (often together with a path or entry point conveniently disappearing at rule of thirds)
• A ruined abbey or castle would add “consequence” (or nowadays some flaking stone or wood can also give idea of impermanence)
• A low viewpoint, which tended to emphasise the “sublime”, was always preferable to a prospect from on high. (but depends how high – very high looking down steep is also good.)

So I am very sure that these principles have become more or less intuitive in the way I often initially frame landscape pictures. I also often evaluate pictures against these principles if I think things look uninteresting or flat. However in general I find ‘picturesque’ images rather boring and carefully composed images that just follow these conventions rather cliche. There are very interesting debates in design theory on how far and in what ways some of these principles are ‘hard-wired’ and how our brains interprete images eg we see tonal structure before colour, automatically try to group elements in an images and (I for one) see faces everywhere. And how far these things (eg reading single-point perspective and how we see and experience perspective) are culturally learned. Personally from an aesthetic point of view I am more interested now in images that subvert the ‘natural’ way I see things and point to something new. I do not however think my reaction to conventionally ‘picturesque’ landscape images is due simply to the aesthetic per se  but rather the underlying concept of ‘picturesque’ in terms of making life and nature tame and ‘pretty’ rather than facing its contradictions, exhilarations and pains. Tourists seeking to idealise and sanitise their ‘safe’ experiences wither in the images they themselves produce, or those they purchase. I would much rather see and experience real sunsets, views from the top of ridges and crags and the wind in my face than see these in photographs. In photographs I am looking much more for the thoughts of the photographer on the meaning of their images – including Fay Godwin’s call for much more attention to complexities of power and conflicts of interest between different users of the countryside and also urban natural environments. I have a long way to go though before my own images are able to go beyond the conventional.  

This review revisits the questions I had about landscape and landscape photography at the beginning of this course (See front page).

How do I  feel about and relate to my environment?

• how does photographic practice increase my awareness of the world around me?
• how do or should I react to the technological changes that are taking place in the ways people are affecting the environment?
• what is ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’? why?

Photography, and also art and illustration, have become part of my way of seeing the world and exploring different meanings and responses to the world around me. Developing my skills and exploring different approaches in photographing journeys greatly increases my ability to record and remember what I see of countries I visit for my work, as an archive then to work with later either as photographs or as art (See Assignment 4 ‘A New Safari’ and Assignment 5 Perspectives on Kyrgyzstan). The Transitions project also made me look much in a much more focused way at my local environment to observe human interactions with the environment, what traces left behind can indicate about what actually happened – and sometimes the ‘beauty’ of human objects like plastic beer can carriers and ‘wild things’ left behind (See Assignment 6: BENCH). My feelings about landscape itself remain conflicted (see ‘A Subjective Voice’). I still need quiet places for reflection and enjoy conventional ‘stunning beauty’ of sunsets, reflections on water and plays of light. I think maybe human beings still need to think there is some untamed ‘wilderness’ – even if it is quite tame and I don’t want to feel scared of strangers I meet in isolated places much less marauding lions and elephants in Africa at night. But I have become interested in, rather than just avoiding, the traces of human impact and activity, and ways in which people can enjoy and shape natural environments without destroying them. Why photography? what do I want to say?

• Do I want to portray beauty (form, colour, light, wind and being alive)? sublime (the awe of it all, darkness and light?)? in everything (including things destroying the planet?)?
• Do I want to show human interaction with the environment and social documentary/activism?
• Does photographing the world teach me something new through making me slow down and slice up then reconstruct?

The course helped me to clarify and extend what I am trying to do with landscape photography, and photography in general. I have been particularly interested in the work of Fay Godwin, the New Topographics, Justyn Partyka as well as course author Jesse Alexander (though not everything that interested me is on his website eg work on the sublime) as well as photographers I had studied in courses on documentary. I am also interested in the work on light in monochrome by Japanese photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto. My photography now integrates landscape and documentary – whereas before in my work I had tended to separate the two – scenery on journeys and documentary when I arrive – I now look  much more closely at natural landscapes to identify and appreciate how people have shaped and interacted with it. What is the best way to visually communicate my perceptions and feelings?

• through my professional work on development in Africa, Asia and Latin America
• my art practice and interest in post-modern/multicultural approaches to illustration and digital processes.
• how do I communicate emotions, feelings and messages in a 2D frame?

I have learned more about the possibilities and limitations of digital processing in Lightroom, Photoshop and Nik FX to make use of images shot in less than perfect conditions – what details need to be recorded in pixels when I take them, and what can be adjusted later in software. At the same time I need to continue to work on my technical skills, and experiment with different cameras to produce more unusual images of light on the landscape. I also need more practice to capture the often fleeting and intriguing images flying past me on journeys. There is also a lot more I could do with sights from the air – interpreting the meaning of different field patterns and marks on the landscape.

What are the best ways of showing my work (when it is good enough) to change what I want to change? 

• photographs in an exhibition?
• photobooks?
• web galleries?
• other?

I started to develop my skills in:

• designing photobooks (Assignments 5 Perspectives on Kyrgyzstan and Assignment 6 Transitions) and have self-published drafts of a number of books on Blurb to look at formats, layout and paper types. This has been in parallel to my OCA degree course on Book Design. But I need to go much deeper into Photobook design using InDesign and other specialist and commercial publishers to get the best from my images.
• on-line web galleries (http://www.zemniimages.com) through SmugMug. The galleries on this site still need a lot of work – separating best portfolio images from archives. Although there is potentially more of a market for some some of my more obscure albeit less technically proficient archive images from work because of their rarity, than most of my best portfolio images that are in competition with professional photographers. Ideally obviously I would combine the two.

Further ideas for medium term development

I see two main directions I can now focus on (in addition to continuing to use images as the basis for art and illustration):

• photobooks
• website for download of individual images and showcase selected images as tasters for the photobooks. Here I have to decide whether and how to combine any professional photography with work photography for clients and/or my art/design/illustration work.

Landscape documentary photobooks ideas I intend to revise the current photobooks I have drafted on Kyrgyzstan, Cote d’Ivoire and also look at some of my other travel collections as photobooks. I have images from Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Indonesia with work in Philippines in the autumn. Looking much more at different approaches for different readership (NGO, tourist etc) in terms of layout, use of text etc. I also have material that will be further developed from my Transitions work – specifically a series on two bridges: The Railway Bridge as the area is developed with a new station and cycle path across the current bridge. And the A14 Road Bridge with echoes of Donovan Wylie’s Northern Ireland work. Some images for Bridge 2: one direction for future development – probably in Black and White. I have hundreds more that I need to work through when time and RSI permit through. I experimented a lot with light and possible monochrome interpretations but have not yet uploaded for viewing.