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 20^th 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