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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