Author Archives: johnmartyn

22 03 28 Reflection on the Work and Methodology of Jem Southam

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Jem Southam is Emeritus Professor of Photography at the University of Plymouth. He is best known for a number of series of colour landscape photographs, mainly based on the South West of England, which began in the 1970s and which he continues to build on to the present day. These have been collected so far into a number of separate books notably:   The Red River (1989), Landscape Stories (2005), Rockfalls and Ponds (2011) and The River Winter (2012).

Southam’s work is characterised by a patient and measured observation of the same location often over a many months or years. Using a large format 10×8 plate camera and colour negative film, he is known to take considerable time in considering each image before finally committing the scene to camera. He describes this process as image “making” rather than image “capturing” which is a term he dislikes. In a text written to accompany the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition “Jem Southam: Path to a Picture” in 2006, its noted that he:

“…observes the balance between nature and man’s intervention and traces the cycles of decay and renewal. His work combines topographical observation with other references: personal, cultural, political, scientific, literary and psycological.1”

In an interview with Andrew Nadolski from 1st March 2013 entitled “Stories from the Land”, Southam describes his passion for photography and the concepts and processes that define his work2. As part of this interview, he explains how the concept behind the book “The River – Winter” came about.  It followed a chance encounter with a teacher who was exploring a child’s awareness and development of concepts in general, and in this case a river in particular. From this encounter, Southam initially posed the question “what is a river”, and from this came his own concept for the project which would be to try and define what a river is by the act of photographing one.

But in addition to this, he goes on to describe how he still felt that “the pictures would not be informed by the generations living those long dark winters and as a result I think it would miss something, so my pictures come from my personal background and my own life’s living, and I believe I believe I make better work that way”3.

I particularly admire this very personal investment in the concept and process, which seems to me is fundamental to producing the best work.

Jem Southam: River Exe at Bickleigh, 29 December 2010 from the book ‘The River – Winter’

In a youtube video of a lecture given by Southam in February 2020, (Rockfalls, Ponds and Rivers or “a clamour of voices”) he elaborates on this very personal approach and explain how he is passionate about and fascinated by the photographic process itself: “I like just going out, with a little box, and sticking it somewhere in the world, and just seeing what happens. That’s what I love doing”4.

In his seminal work, The Red River, he follows the path of a Cornish river from its source in the moors above Cambourne to where it reaches the sea at Gwithian in St Ives Bay. Across 50 photographs taken over a 5 year period in the 1980s, he tracks its path, creating both a topographical history of the route of the river and a cultural history of the land it passes through. Overlaid on to this is also an allegorical journey that incorporates the “potency of mythic narratives”5, such as the creation myth, dark forests, arcadia and flood myths. All of this ties back to a theme which he says runs through all of his work and is the subtitle to the lecture – that of the “clamour of voices”6. This is the idea that as we grow up and engage with the world, we are bombarded by information from hundreds of sources – books, magazines, stories – this accumulated knowledge stays in our minds and as we dwell on it from time to time, it provides a creative force for our work.

What comes across from all of the work by Jem Southam is a profound humanism and a deep desire to translate the love of the landscape and its cultural history into an accessible and enduring photographic record. This dedication is exemplified by the longevity of projects and the repeated return to the same places to see how they have evolved and continue to evolve as they interact with the presence of humans. The series The Pond at Upton Pyne (from Rockfalls and Ponds published in 2013) is a typical example of this. Southam originally found the pond by chance as he was driving through the village near Exeter. But he returned to the site many times over a 5 year period between 1996 and 2001 as it was slowly transformed by one local in particular and then by another.

Jem Southam – Upton Pyne (2001) – https://www.josephbellows.com/exhibitions/jem-southam

In an interview Martin Parr [no date acknowledged for the interview]7, Southam describes how he always wanted to be a “colour landscape photographer” and it is true that all his published work is in colour, apart from an early series of photographs of the docks at Bristol in the late 1970s. This is interesting given the propensity of most photographers at the time to have been working in black and white. Southam was at the forefront of the development of colour landscape photography working in with his large format colour negatives and developing and printing all his own work.

I am still at a stage of working in both colour and black and white depending on the circumstances and the subject but I am fascinated how Southam has seen no need to go back to black and white photography. I also admire the way in which the whole photographic process is slowed down by Southam (he typically took no more than 50 images in a year) so that he can really focus on the composition and intent of each photograph – that seems to me to be an important skill for me to develop, particularly in a digital age where images can be produced ad nauseum without attention to detail, if the process is not carefully controlled.

References

  1. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/l/landscape-photography-jem-southam/
  2. https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2013/03/jem-southam-interview/
  3. Ibid.
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv9vezFysul
  5. Ibid.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Youtube video: Sofa Sessions: Martin Parr Foundation – Jem Southam

22 02 28 Jane Olin and JMW Turner

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Jane Olin – In the Company of Trees

Jane Olin is an American photographer who recently opened an exhibition at NUMU, the New Museum Los Gatos in California running from January to June 2022. The exhibition is entitled “In the Company of Trees” and forms part of a longer running photograph series called Intimate Conversation. Olin is an largely analogue photographer and “dedicated darkroom printer” who “has developed her own distinctive style that marries the natural world with the presence of the artist through intuition and chance”1. Olin’s work is indeed exquisite, recognisable as woodland and trees but with a mystical, other worldly overlay that gives a very distinctive and ethereal quality to her work.

Jane Olin – Intimate Conversation 8, Walk in the Woods

Olin’s photography background is interesting. Working as a photographer in California she initially learned the skills of “straight” photography techniques and the f64 group through students and assistants of Adam Anselm and Edward Weston. But using a pinhole or Holga camera, she has gone on to stretch the limits of darkroom developing (playing with focus, exposure and different chemicals) to create her own unique style of image. She describes herself as “an adventurer who likes to experiment ..…pushing the boundaries of what is possible with both camera and darkroom techniques”2.

At the same time, she grew up surrounded by forests and remains captivated by them, and it is therefore no wonder that much of her photographic work concerns trees and woodland:-

“…trees are revealed to create interdependent relationships through underground fungal networks, exchanging nutrients and chemical information in support of their seedling offspring and other neighboring trees. Working from this perspective, I strive to make images that invite deeper speculation into the nature of trees and that emphasize their individuality, complexity, and imposing presence. The world as we know it would not exist without them, and I want to convey this kinship in my work”3.

I share this passion for trees but it is interesting to see how the very personal nature of her experience fuels her empathy with trees and drives her photographic practice. She describes how “present moment awareness” is embedded in her photographic process, and that her choice of subject “originates in internal questioning, personal experience, and often relies heavily on intuition”4. I have never heard this level of personal feeling be so embedded in the essence of the photographer’s practice – a remarkable driving force and inspiration.

One other quote I think sums up this level of commitment and all-encompassing artistry.

“My photographs always begin with a question or some curiosity that arises within me. In more than twenty-five years, I have rarely photographed the external world for its own sake, but for the ways in which it helps to reveal subconscious processes and evoke meaning. I focus on a single subject in a related series of images, which allows me to hone in on the heart of what I am after. I also have a contemplative awareness practice that is of central importance to me, and which guides and enhances my working methods and my output”5.

JMW Turner

One of the topics which I have wanted to explore for some time is the painting of JMW Turner. Turner is the great landscape artist of his times, and for many, of all time. What makes his work so characteristic and so unmistakeable, is the way in which he uses light to such dramatic effect. But it is not just light for its own sake, it is light transfiguring Nature, which was the essence of everything that he painted. Born in 1775 in the heart of Georgian London, he trained at the Royal Academy from the age of 14 and produced his first major work 7 years later – “Fishermen at Sea. Night Picture of Fishermen, Moonlight and Light on Boat”. Already the importance of way light falls across the scene is apparent, and yet the source of the light in this case is the moon (and a light on the boat) and not the sun.

What makes the work more remarkable is that it is a wholesale rejection of the hierarchy of traditional painting at the time, where epic, historical scenes were at the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement and landscape was a lowly cousin, “just rendering of what you see”. In a recent BBC programme by art historian Leslie Primo, he describes Turner as “capturing a sense of what it means to be in nature”6. Kenneth Clarke, discussing Turner as part of his Civilisation series in 1969 in an episode called “The Worship of Nature”, reaffirms that Turner’s output was Nature, first and foremost. “Everything is transformed into colour…the light, the passing storms, sunrises and dissolving mists”7.

Turner’s work is all about Nature; violent, threatening, out of control. In his 1812 painting “Snowstorm – Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps”, Primo describes the subject of the painting as “the awesome spectacle itself”8 and not the pathetic figures of Hannibal and his army on the edge of the canvas. It is the artist’s feelings about the scene that are being conveyed through the art work and not the scene itself. Tuner is looking for things in the landscape that will stand for his feelings, represent them metaphorically.

And here is the crux of the matter, and the link as I see it, with Jane Olin. In each case the emotion and the feelings come first – the painting and the photograph are manifestations of those instinctive feelings – not the other way around. That seems to me to be a fundamental approach to photography that I have not really grasped before.

One further comment on Turner which is also very relevant to my practice and my approach to landscape. Whilst Turner’s early work is about raw Nature, seascape more than landscape, but Nature nonetheless, in his later work he wholeheartedly embraces the dawning industrial age. And yet this is also Nature, newly discovered elemental forces that are driving the Industrial Revolution with its machines, “satanic mills”, and technology. In the television programme Awesome Beauty: The Art of Industrial Britain made in 2017, Matthew Collins describes this as “a celebration of industrial sublime” and “a mythic image of change” referring to Turner’s painting “Rain, Steam and Speed” of 1844.

With a lightly figured steam train emerging from a swirl of light, mist and fragmentary landscape, the painting has the characteristic features of impressionism, even before impressionism was invented, and the great impressionists who were to follow Turner, openly acknowledged their debt to him. And Turner had no need to capture a steam train in the landscape per se, his task was to express the emergence of a whole new industrial age from the organic depths of the natural world.

In photography it is a similar leap from the early realist photographers, the picturesque and ultimately the sublime work of Ansel Adams, and now into the late 20th and early 21st Century where the concern is not so much with Nature itself and its awesome visual power, but with the consequences of that the Industrial Age, its impact on the natural world and its potentially irreversibly damaging effects.

Notes

  1. Aline Smithson article in https://lenscratch.com/2022/01/jane-olin/
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. Ibid
  5. Ibid
  6. Leslie Primo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0013vd0/art-on-the-bbc-series-2-4-turner-light-and-landscape
  7. Ibid
  8. Ibid

22 02 21 Reflections on Crystel Lebas, and Land Matters by Liz Wells

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This week I have been looking at a number of different landscape photographers that I had not previously come across.

Crystel Lebas is a French photographer now living in London. In an introduction to a recent touring exhibition “Regarding Forests” organised by the Wellcome Collection (2021), she is described as being “…Interested in looking at how landscapes contain psychological significance in relation to visually concealed histories, Crystel uses photography and the moving image to address a wider understanding of the complex encounter between humans and nature”1. The exhibition is a series of large-scale colour photographs of two ancient forests – the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington State, USA and the “Yakusugi” cedar trees on the Japanese island of Yakushima. “These two primaeval temperate rainforests contain some of the oldest living trees in the world”2. What is interesting about this installation is that it is multi-sensory, including sounds from the forests and the scent of petrichor to “evoke smell of the forest floor after it has rained”3. Lebas describes how she used a panoramic medium format camera “to increase the field of vision and slow the act of looking”1 and made the photographs at twilight in order to give the intensely vivid greens and brown and multiple focus points, as well as very fine details. I am drawn to this immersive experience, and how it enhances the experience of being in the forests, which the photographs alone do not seem to deliver in the same way.

Crystel Lebas – Regarding Forests 2021. Installation

Other work by Crystel Lebas includes a series of photographs from 2005/6 entitled Blue Hour. These panoramic photographs, taken at twilight, of blue bell woods in Wiltshire, are visually stunning with their deep blue and green tones. Lebas talks of them as being evocative of “fairy tales, stories and legends” and being chosen for the symbolism that they carry. Again, the photographs were accompanied by an hour-long film Blue Hour (2005) which was previously exhibited at the V&A’s Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour (2003)’4. Interestingly, the work is also discussed in See All This Magazine No.4 Winter (2016/17) under the German title Wolflicht [twilight], in an article written by Robert MacFarlane5. Of twilight, Robert Macfarlane writes that it “prompts recollection, a sense of what has passed”6 and it is indeed an overwhelming sense of melancholy and mystery that  emanates from the work. The photographs are on one level simple, top half deep green of the forest, bottom half deep blue of the bluebells. But the overall effect draws in the viewer to look further into the near darkness and I am intrigued by this effect.

Crystel Lebas Blue Hour, Untitled 1 (2015)  http://www.chrystellebas.com

In other work, Crystel Lebas has focused on close ups of the natural world (Histoires Naturelles 2009/11) and of hidden aspects of the forest floor (Hidden Nature 2007/8), where she describes “employing photography and the moving image, to address a wider understanding of the complex encounter between man and nature”7. I am drawn to this multi-faceted approach to exploring nature and would like to take a similar approach in my work.

A further work which I would like to look at is Crystel Lebas’s book “Field Studies: Walking Through Landscapes and Archives”, published by Fw: books, 2017. In this book, “Lebas has been working in collaboration with The Natural History Museum in London, using an unexplored collection of landscape Glass plate photographs and field notes taken by British botanist and ecologist Sir Edward James Salisbury (1886-1978) in the British Isles”8.

Land Matters

This week I have also been reading Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity by Liz Wells9. In Chapter 3, Wells provides a wide ranging historical and contemporary perspective on British landscape photographers from the work of, for example, Fay Godwin and Raymond Moore in the 60s and 70s, Chris Killip and Paul Hill in the 80s and 90s, through to Andrea Liggins and Roshini Kempadoo in the 2000s. As Wells describes it: “This chapter takes contemporary British photography relating to land and landscape as a case study through which to consider ways in which ideological discourses realting to class, region, gender and ethnicity may be articulated”10. What is interesting in this analysis for me, is the progression of different approaches to landscape photography taken by various photographers, and in particular the shift from a broadly pictorial portrayal of landscape to one where the ecological and environmental impacts of industrialisation and human encroachment are overtly highlighted and challenged.

For example, Wells describes Godwin’s work as “classically pictorial”11, but also points out that in her associations with the Ramblers Association, Godwin was “concerned to highlight the effects of contemporary culture on rural areas… At one level her work was conservative, it argued for a pastoral heritage that she feared was now disregarded. But she was aware that, historically, this pastoral was a selective and idealised view of the rural….”11.

She also looks in detail at the work of, for example, John Davies whose 1987 work A Green and Pleasant Land “challenged the rural idyll through applying picturesque modes to the industrial and post-industrial landscape”12, and Chris Killip whose work focuses on the communities within the landscape where “land figures not simply as setting but as a key determining influence on the way of life of each of these communities”13.

In other words, the focus of landscape photography is turning away from the land itself to the environmental impact of human beings on that landscape and the dangers to the survival of the rural idyll, if indeed it ever really existed.

One final comment is also interesting in the way that landscape photography has shifted from black and white to colour. Wells notes that in the 1980s “colour came to supersede monochrome as the new ‘authentic’ mode of documentation”, but she also clearly notes that “debates raged” and for many black and white was associated with “serious documentary” and others viewed colour as “trivialising”14. This is pertinent to my work as I like to use both colour and black and white. I enjoy the aesthetic quality of black and white with its emphasis on shape and texture, but nature is so full of wonderful colour and it seems a shame to ignore it.  I think there is a place for both and contemporary practice seems to bear this out.

Notes

  1. https://wellcomecollection.org/pages/YLC22hEAACQAUjoc and https://wellcomecollection.org/pages/YLC22hEAACQAUjoc
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. http://www.chrystellebas.com/Blue%20hour/Blue%20hour.htm
  5. http://www.chrystellebas.com/articles.htm
  6. Ibid.
  7. http://www.chrystellebas.com/work.htm
  8. http://www.chrystellebas.com/publications.htm
  9. WELLS, Liz. 2011. Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd
  10. Ibid p162
  11. Ibid p189
  12. Ibid p170
  13. Ibid p175
  14. Ibid p172

22 02 12    Reflections on Landscape Photography

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“Photography is a system of visual editing… it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite, but infinite” (SZARKOWSKI, John. 1976. William Eggleston’s Guide New York: Museum of Modern Art).

In my practice to date, primarily concerned with landscape, I have tended towards a pictorialistic approach to taking photographs – I have wanted to capture the mood and shape of the scene and create from that a relatively faithful image that will draw the viewer into what is there. Graham Clarke describes the work of Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) a central figure in pictorialism, as being in the tradition of painters such as Constable and Corot: “those painters dedicated to a literal, realistic rendering of the thing seen rather than a carrying on of received convention”1. In Emerson’s approach, “detail, light and formal composition of the scene are central, but it was the seen rather than the scene that remained crucial. The potential for a photograph lay in what was before the camera”2.  I see much of my work to date in this light.

But there is a progression through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in the United States, where the landscape photography became on the one hand a portrait of the grandeur of the nation (for example Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams) and on the other hand, a struggle to contain and frame the vastness of the land and uncover an inner meaning. Describing Edward Weston’s Dunes, Oceano (1936), Clarke speaks of the “larger mythology of spiritual and mysterious presence. [where] …the play of light and pattern, of texture and contrast expresses an almost metaphysical presence”3.

British Landscape photography, whilst still having roots in the picturesque traditions, has tended towards an increasing social awareness, perhaps reflecting the relatively more populous and industrialised landscape, and the fragility of the traditional idyllic view of the landscape. For example in the work of Fay Godwin, there are invariably human traces and a sense of questioning the interdependence of nature and humans. In the more recent work of John Davies, the landscape has become ever more industrial and the tension between rural and urban is palpable (for example Agecroft Power Station, 1983).

But I am particularly interested in the landscape work of Don McCullin, who is best known as a war photographer but has also produced a huge collection of black and white landscapes. In a video made in 2020 to accompany his exhibition The stillness of Life at Hauser and Wirth, Somerset, he describes his work as “winter etchings with drama” and he says that “for me the landscape has to have energy. I am trying to engage the energy of this landscape and record it on film and paper”4.

I feel a strong affinity with this sense of trying to engage the energy that is in nature and channel it into my work.

Over the last week I have looked closely at the work of 4 other photographers to understand how their very diverse approaches to image making.

Firstly, I have looked at the work of Dafna Talmor and her ongoing project Constructed Landscapes. She uses various techniques such as multiple exposure and collage, to create multi-layered images that gravitate between a mixture of real and virtual, which is surreal but also recognizable.  In the text accompanying the images on her website, she describes this in more detail:

“In dialogue with the history of photography, Constructed Landscapes references early Pictorialist processes of combination printing as well as Modernist experimental techniques such as montage, collage and multiple exposures. While distinctly holding historical references, the work also engages with contemporary discourses on manipulation, the analogue/digital divide and the effects these have on photography’s status and veracity. Through this work, I am interested in creating a space that defies specificity, refers to the transient, and metaphorically blurs space, memory and time”5.

I am drawn to the drama of this approach, its cutting and slicing of reality to create a more intimate “new” space that connects the reality of the landscape with the inner self.

Secondly, I have looked at the work of Ingrid Pollard and in particular the series Pastoral Interlude from 1988. The series challenges the perception of the “idealised rural landscape”, ownership, economic development and English involvement in the slave trade. The images show black ethnicity people in rural environments and there is a heavy sense of uncomfortableness that resonates through them. Each image is accompanied by a short text that clearly articulate the alienation of the people from the setting (“feeling I don’t belong. Walks through leafy glades with a baseball bat by my side”6). The images are hand tinted, but the deceptive simplicity of the images (reminiscent of polaroids), together with the texts, carries a very heavy punch.

Thirdly, I have looked at the work of Beata Gutchow – The landscape series HC (Hortus Conclusus) might still be described as picturesque, and the images appear deceptively simple, until you realise that the perspective has been altered in all of them. The effect is disturbing. As Fergus Heron says in his essay Built Worlds: Photography, landscape and different natures, “the sense of unease in these works is produced through correspondence between form and content; depicting place that seem somehow both ancient and modern, strangely familiar and therefore unsettling”7. This is an interesting use of post-production manipulation to take the viewer from their comfort zone and force them to re-evaluate their own view of reality.

Finally I have looked at the work of Jason Orton and a very recent exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London (August 2021): Jason Orton – The New English Landscape. These works are in very subdued tones, almost dead-pan in their aesthetic, as if the image itself is not as important as the place and the setting. His biography describes how he uses photography “to develop an understanding of landscapes” and “what we value within a landscape, the ways in which we connect with the landscapes around us, and the interrelationship between landscape, history and memory”8.

In summary, it is clear that there are many different approaches to landscape photography with hugely different levels of intervention from the initial landscape photo to the final image, from the very abstract (Dafna Talmor, to multi layering (compare also Helen Sear), to the more direct but still very powerful (Don McCullin). I’m not sure yet which is the route I will take but I am far more aware now of how grat photographer’s look beyond the landscape itself and into the very fabric that defines it.

Other photographers still to explore are Jem Southam, Richard Mosse and Guy Moreton

Notes

  1. CLARKE, Graham The Photograph  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) p51
  2. Ibid p51
  3. Ibid p63/64
  4. MCCULLIN, Don The Stillness of Life, Jan-Sept 2020  https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/26511-don-mccullinthe-stillness-life/
  5. TALMOR, Dafna, http://www.dafnatalmor.co.uk/constructed-landscapes-text.html
  6. POLLARD, Ingrid Pastoral Interlude 1988 http://www.ingridpollard.com/pastoral-interlude.html
  7. HERON, Fergus 2018 https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/photography-culture/built-worlds-photography-landscape-and-different-natures
  8. ORTON, Jason 2021 The New English Landscape  https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/photography-culture/jason-orton-new-english-landscape and https://jasonorton.com/info

22 02 07 Authenticity and Representation

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“In the Photograph, the power of authenticity exceeds the power of representation (BARTHES, 1980: 89)”1

In the very early days of photography, it was axiomatic that the photographic image represented something (the Object) that was there in front of the photographer, at the point in time that the photo (the Image) was taken. And by some mechanical means, an Image of the Object was created – “an automatic reproduction by the action of light” (NIEPCE, (1839 in TRACHTENBERG, 1980: 5)”2.  Here was an undisputable difference between all previous art forms and the new art of photography. As John Szarkowski describes it in The Photographer’s Eye, “Paintings were made – constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes – but photography, as a man on the street put it, are taken”3.

And as Szarkowski goes on to point out, Baudelaire saw this as an antagonistic rival – “this industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy”4.

And yet over time, this seemingly fundamentally characteristic difference has become blurred through choice of subject matter, choices made by the photographer in creating the image, and advances made in technology of the camera itself.

So whereas Szarkowski could assuredly state that early photographers learned that “photography dealt with the actual”5, subsequent commentators have gone to great lengths to cement the link between Object and Image even as the connections are blurred. To give a couple of examples: Barthes, in Camera Lucida, describes the photographic referent as “not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers, but the necessarily real thing that has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (BARTHES, 1980: 76) and similarly “in photography, I can never deny that the thing has been there” (BARTHES, 2980, 76). In On Photography, Sontag expresses a similar view, though she tempers the link by conceding that some distortion may occur:  “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture”6.

So why, one might wonder, do Snyder and Allen feel the need to discuss in great detail the question “Is there anything peculiarly “photographic” about photography – something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures?” (SNYDER AND ALLEN, 1975: 143)7. For me, the answer lies in the fact that over time, the nature of photography, and what specifically constitutes a photograph, has indeed been blurred significantly and they discuss various different taxonomies of photographs and how each has its own flaws and shortcomings. Their conclusion, it seems to me, is that we should be wary of saying that photography is inherently different from other art forms, because in many ways it isn’t. “The documentary value of a photograph is not determined solely by Arnheim’s questions of “authenticity”, “correctness” and “truth”. We can also ask what it means, who made it, for whom it was made, and why it was made in the way it was made”(SNYDER & ALLEN, 1975: 169). In other words, context is also fundamental to our understanding of a photographic image.

One could then ask, why is the belief of a fundamental link between Object and Image still considered by many to be so important in photography?. The answer lies in the way in which photographs are now far less likely to be accepted as incontrovertible evidence of an original Object as once might have been the case. Barthes may well contend that “Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to meaning of the thing,…..never as to its existence” (BARTHES, 1980: 87), but there are many examples that show that this is simply no longer the case – for example, the faked images of the Loch Ness Monster or Joel Peter Watkins’s unicorn images in Night in a Small Town (2007).

Bringing this right up to the digital age, Fred Ritchin discusses how our perception of reality is now so conditioned by seeing photographs in multiple situations that we can easily fail to distinguish between an image and reality, or otherwise, behind it: “Part of the problem in distinguishing [new realities] is realizing that for many of us the world is largely envisioned, even if the absence of a camera, as photographic” (RITCHIN, 2009:21)8.

Even 45 years earlier, Sontag foresaw a similar problem: “what is true of photographs, is true of the world seen photographically (SONTAG, 1977: 79), and John Winogrand once described his own working practice by saying “I photograph to see what the world looks like photographically”.

In my own practice, as a mainly landscape photographer, I used to think that I was largely photographing a very real world in front of my eyes, and creating an image in its likeness, essentially copying nature if you will. I now see the act of photography in a very different way. Yes, there in a landscape in front of me, that much remains true, by I choose the position of the shot, the time of day, the camera, the lens, the focus; and most importantly, I choose the frame, I choose what is and what is not in the image. I choose what happens to the image in post-production. So this is my interpretation of that landscape at that moment in time, and in that process I see myself as much an artist, painting a picture, as a photographer, creating an image.

And to return to the statement by Barthes that “authenticity” exceeds the “power of representation”, my personal feeling is that this is no longer the case. Authenticity is important in many situations, reportage, documentary etc, but much of modern photography is fundamentally about taking a nugget of reality (though not even that these days) and building a whole edifice of imagination around it (like layers in photoshop) to create a new visual idea. Deliberate fakery is not too my taste, but acknowledged flights of fantasy and creation are the essence of creative art, and photography is as good a medium as any to facilitate this.

Notes

  1. BARTHES, Roland (1980) Camera Lucida London: Vintage.
  2. NIEPCE, Joseph (1839) ‘Memoire on the Heliograph’ in TRACHTENBERG, Alan (1980) Classic Essays on Photography New Haven: Leete’s Island Books.
  3. SZARKOWSKI, John (1966) The Photographer’s Eye New York: Museum of Modern Art (intro)
  4. Ibid
  5. Ibid
  6. SONTAG, Susan (1977) On Photography, London: Penguin, p5.
  7. SNYDER, Joel and ALLEN, Neil Walsh (1975) “Photography, Vision and Representation” in Critical Enquiry Vol. 2, No. 1 (autumn 1975).
  8. RITCHIN, Fred (2009) After Photography, China: Norton Paperback.

22 01 27 Reflections on the Nature of a Photograph

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The subject of “what is a photograph” is one of those which I find difficult, because at one level I am less concerned whether something is perceived as a being a photograph or not, as to whether the piece of art work answers the questions: is this what the artist set out to create? and is it conveying the message that the artist intended?”.

The use of the word “artist” is intentional, whether it refers to “art” or to “photography”. I see myself creating Art and the medium I use is Photography (just one medium of many in the panoply of art) – I do not see myself creating photographs because they are photographs – they are simply the means by which I can at present best convey what message I want to, and engage with an audience. But I do accept and embrace the notion that there is some inherent difference between photography and other art forms in that there is at a basic point a direct correlation – through the means of light and a mechanical device) between the object photographed and the object itself, however the photographer overlays his/her vision on the object (but that’s for a separate later entry on Bazin, Flusser, Jurgenson and others).

That said, I do like Szarkowski’s 5 basic characteristics of a photograph – The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point – as a starting point for thinking clearly about the process of photography and what a photographic image itself represents, particularly the distinction that frequently arises between the thing itself and the image produced from it – the signifier and the signified, as it were.

As Szakowski puts it: “The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer’s problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter” (1). Or as Barthes describes it in Camera Lucida “I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers, but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph”2.

It is also axiomatic in photography that frame, time and vantage point are critical elements of the act of taking a photograph, whether consciously or unconsciously. The choice of frame is as much about what will be included in the photograph as what will be excluded (“The degree to which I believe this is worth looking at can be judged by all that I am willingly not showing because it is contained within it”3. Similarly, the moment of taking the picture, the time, may be crucial in capturing the right light, the right expression, the right shadow (“This choice is not between photographing X and Y: but between photographing at X moment or at Y moment”4. [cf also Cartier-Bresson – the decisive moment]. Finally, a change in vantage point may completely alter how elements of an image overlap or are related. I particularly like the idea of multiple images taken at the same time to show that there is not necessarily a single definitive version of an event, but many aspects to it, and as photographers we have the task to make that choice and be judged by it (eg Barbara Probst (2007) Exposure #49).

Stephen Shore expresses the importance of vantage point in a different way in The Nature of Photographs: “Take one step and something hidden comes into view; take another and an object in the front now presses up against one in the distance. Take one step and the description of deep space is clarified; take another and it is obscured”5.

As a starting point for this module, I take one clear message from these taxonomies of the basic elements of a photograph. Each photograph deserves to be considered carefully and not rushed. Multiple decisions need to be taken and not all are in the blink of an eye. Take more time over each shot, think carefully about the mechanics of it, and then what the intention of the photograph is – will this set of conditions achieve the desired aim? Or does a different moment, a different location, and/or a different focus, achieve a better result?

“Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer ……. imposes order on the scene – simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus”6.

And the purpose is to bring absolute clarity to the intention of taking that particular image in the first place:

“These four attributes [flatness, frame, time, focus] define the picture’s depictive content and structure. They form the basis of a photograph’s visual grammar……They are the means by which photographer’s express their sense of the world, give structure to their perceptions and articulation to their meaning”7.

Notes:

  1. SZARKOWSKI, John (1966) The Photographer’s Eye New York: Museum of modern Art.
  2. BARTHES, Roland (2000) Camera Lucida London: Vantage p76.
  3. John BERGER (1968) Understanding A Photograph Penguin Classics p21
  4. Ibid p19
  5. SHORE, Stephen (2007) The Nature of Photographs New York: Phaidon Press Ltd p48.
  6. Ibid p37
  7. Ibid p38