Bullet points for the main points in the chapter,
highlighting for my thoughts.
·
There are many uses of landscape photography,
eg tourism, urban planning, military reconnaissance, Google Maps, architectural
planning, reportage, gardening books etc
·
The point of view of the camera organises
what is there in a landscape
·
Landscape pictures pervade everyday culture
·
Across all the inventions for picturing
space, the main question about landscape remains the same: what view are we
given of that space. (Refer
back to the picture of the cottage next to Dungeness Power Station in
Photography and Reality.)
·
The environment, now dominated by the presence
of humans, as well as by any putative 'nature' itself is what is always
re-presented in landscape pictures. (see references to wilderness.)
·
The way something is pictured is as critical
as what is shown
·
The invention of photography created a problem
of truth and fidelity. Nature became
laid bare. Photographs could show too
much.
·
Painters and art critics were concerned with
notions of pleasure, sight and aesthetic views of nature in the landscape. These dominated their attitudes to
photography.
·
Photography was seen as crude and lacking in subtlety. Industrial, mechanical and
chemical. (P.90)
·
Beauty and landscape as a philosophy of art
became important in the development of photographic landscape.
·
Early photographers interested in art readily
pursued pictorial values derived from the genres of painting
·
The picturesque is of Italian origin, meaning
from the point of view of a painter.
·
Early landscape painters such as Poussin and
Claude Lorrain (Claude Gelle from Lorraine) sketched, but then combined their
sketches into idealized landscape compositions - arcadia.
·
At the time of the invention of photography
the paintings of John Constable developed this tradition in English rural
scenes and this was quickly adapted by photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson.
·
By contrast J.M.W Turner painted 'The
Sublime'
·
Page 93 - end of section Landscape here can
be seen.....
·
In 1857 Edmund Burke differentiated between
beauty and the sublime landscape. (Could an industrial landscape be described as sublime?)
·
Picturesque - a landscape scene in nature
suitable for 'picturing'.
·
Nature became the 'beautiful' to be consumed
by an increasingly urban public.
·
Gilpin et al wrote guidebooks for people to
visit 'Picturesque Britain!'
·
This is important as it anticipates modern conventions
of the tourist industry, where tourists with cameras follow in the footsteps of
earlier travellers, repeating the same picturesque scenes within their own
picturesque images. (eg
Landscape Photography workshops where people are handed a view on a plate. 'Put
your tripod in the marks left by others' and articles such as Locations Guide
and View Point of the Month in Outdoor Photography.)
·
The picturesque landscape was a calculated
response to industrialisation: to escape it. (eg The Peak District as an escape from Manchester and
Sheffield. I remember in the late 60s
the area around Hathersage being heaving with day trippers from the cities.)
·
Spawned a new industry: Tourism, which itself
threatens to ruin the picturesque quality of those views.
·
What these views give is idealised scenes of
the countryside as 'nature' or 'natural views'. (Reference Wilderness American definition as land
untramelled by man and the fact that animist cultures have no word for nature
as they are part of it.)
·
Beauty Spot!!!
·
In contrast the sublime or 'Black Spot' is a
space associated with danger, a place that is threatening, fearful and given an
aura of menace. (Industry?)
·
Turner's sublime is often represented by
scenes of the sea. (David
Baker.) Nature in all of its fury
and force. (see P94/5)
·
The sublime is something that threatens to
overwhelm and causes fear, but as a spectator the threat is at a level that can
be tolerated.
·
Horror films.
·
The city is the contemporary sublime and the
city as a threatening place is probably one of the most common attributes given
to cities now.
·
Victorian photographers photographed dark
alleys and slums; today burnt out cars, trashed buildings and dark passages are
used to invoke fear and anxiety. (Grimsby Docks? Old derelict buildings, Ice House etc. Even Bardney Beat Factory is now empty and
disused and a subject for a 'type' of photographer. Urban Exploration of Urbex.)
·
Within tourism cities are likely to be
picturesque.
·
Could
Boston with its sluice gates and River Witham opening to The Was be portrayed
as sublime. Need to look for weirs,
licks and sluices on the river. Stormy
skies, floods!
·
Nature can be shown as' gentle' (Picturesque)
or full of 'brooding anger' (sublime)
·
Potential
for developing my BOW in contrasting the River Witham and/or industry as both
picturesque and sublime. A series of
pairs of images.
·
A new category of image emerged in the 19th
century with the advent of photography: Photographic Vision. The idea of pure fact; a visual description
devoid of any human soul.
·
In straight photography it was possible to
reveal visual facts in a photographic Vision.
·
New Topographics (Top P.98) turned away from
aesthetic pleasure in photographs of the land and aimed for tonal neutrality.
·
Early photographic expeditions by Europeans
to their colonies and Americans to the 'unknown' interior of their continent
were primarily justified in terms of a topographic visual knowledge as surveys
of the land. Surveys were not aesthetic
expeditions. An art of pure description,
the 'record' of a space, a 'document' (not documentary) that would provide a
topographic description.
·
19th century exploratory expeditions had many
aims and, photographs taken on them, many motives.
·
Topographic photography
·
The neutrality of topographic photography was
difficult. (Mikkel
McAlinden - an image has many secrets.)
·
Topographic photographers found it difficult
to avoid the categories of picturesque and the sublime that is achieved in the
non-aesthetic description of the land.
·
There is something about picturesque images
that cannot be waved away or dispelled: their pleasure
·
People cling to the pleasure (beauty?) of
images despite others finding them to be appalling, clichéd, trite or senseless
·
Even if the critique is about a photograph
serving up rural myths or a romanticised view that negates the pollution or
human destruction of natural land, a spectator can appear as in the grip of
some emotional effect of pleasure, which no amount of deconstruction or
rational criticism can touch or stop. (are my images guilty of this? Am I still making picturesque images? Does it matter? Ought I to be trying for
non-aesthetic topographic images. Not
sure!!! I think I would certainly be
happier trying for the sublime. A
thought though. In order to develop the
project could I portray the River Witham three ways: picturesquely, sublimely
and topographically. I first need to
identify what they are at the moment!) (Look up Burgin: Looking at Photographs)
·
The picturesque is a form in which everything
is supposed to be 'in the right place', organised as precisely 'composed' and
controlled.
·
Good composition is about keeping the eye
within the frame. (Picturesque?)
·
Subconsciously people 'like' picturesque
images as the 'good composition' reflects the composure and organisation that
they would like to see in themselves.
·
Picturesque beauty is despised and maligned
as a 'too easy pleasure' by critics.
·
In contrast with the sublime, it is rare to
find contemporary cultural critics advocating the picturesque as a radical or
interesting form.
·
Discussion
of the picturesque is mostly in negative terms, but this underestimates the
extent to which it can be valued positively. (P104 para1)
·
Fay Godwin
quote in Jesse's book P64: I am wary of picturesque pictures.........they are a
very soft warm blanket of sentiment, which covers everybody's idea about the
countryside. It idealises the country in
a very unreal way.
·
In times of national stress (wear, disorder
etc) picturesque images are important for constructing an idealised community.
·
According to Edmund Burke, the category of
the beautiful is linked with notions of 'society'.
·
For Burke the picturesque suggests the
harmonising of individual passions to the whole (society), whereas the sublime
is linked with the anti-social and invokes passions.
·
Avant-garde art has often been associated
with the aesthetics of the sublime, precisely to invoke the unthinkable in
society.
·
It would be wrong to categorise the
picturesque and the sublime by polarising them as bad or good.
·
Panoramas ideally show the vast magnitude of
'nature' and the miniscule details of that space that photography has the
potential to record. They create a
massive spectacle, at once sublime in scale and information, yet diminishing in
that spectators can feel miniscule in them (How about panoramas from Kirkstead Bridge, Tattershall
Castle or Boston Stump.)
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