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