Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography. William A. Ewing

I spotted this book, published by Thames and Hudson on the Amazon Website when ordering something else and thought that it sounded an ideal source of research and inspiration for my current work.  William A. Ewing has been an author, lecturer, curator of photography and museum director for more than 40 years.  He was director of the Musee deLElysee, Lausanne from 1996 - 2010, and has curated exhibitions at numerous other institutions , including MOMA, New York, the Jeu de Paume, Paris and the Hayward Gallery, London.  The book comprises and excellent preface and introductory essay by Ewing and then 10 chapters entitled: Sublime, Pastoral, Artefacts, Rupture, Playground,Scar,Control, Enigma, Hallucination and Reverie.  It covers the full range of landscape genres and sometimes goes beyond landscape.  It ranges from bucolic images through disturbing depictions of a sullied earth, to surreal and artificial landscapes where nature is chanelled and regulated.  Each chapter begins with an introductory text and there are artists' statements from the contributing photographers who include the likes of Jem Southam,  Sally Mann, Mitch Epstein, Lee Friedlander, Joan Fontcuberta, Thomas Struth, John Davies to name but a few.

I found the text to be thought provoking and illumination and the included photographers a rich source of inspiration.

I include below selected extract from the preface and introduction that particularly resonated with me and highlights indicate those that I found of particular interest.

• I have been drawn to landscape (in all its forms) more than any other genre of photography.
• Like many of my professional colleagues, though, it is the man-altered or, rather, man -inhabited kind of landscape that I find most stimulating, rather than the pristine, operatic visions of, say, an Ansel Adams.  The human footprint is simple too massive to ignore.  A focus on the 'Anthropocene' is reflected in the term I have chosen for the book's title.
• Of Calendars - it helped that the sun always shone in these pictures.
• The English really do have a great love of landscape.......all nations do something similar, but I do not know of another whose love is for such a 'pastoral' quality - a yearning for that golden mean.
• ....would have been saddened to learn that half of Britons admit that they have never stopped to admire the British Countryside and 68% say they have no idea where to watch the sunset in Britain.  They say they are far too busy.
• Then, again, we've seen a plethora of images of a particular landscape before we ever actually get to visit it, and how can reality possibly live up to the sickly air-brushed images in the tourist brochure?
• I cherish a degree of ambiguity; the images that hold my interest the most are those that hover on the fine line between the obvious and the ambiguous.
• Critic Kenneth Baker writing of Burtinsky "Aesthetics and conscience collide in photography as nowhere else in contemporary art."  That collision certainly makes for gripping imagery.
• Landscape photography is as varied a terrain as is the landscape itself.
• Of course tourism, especially, relies on imagery of alluring landscapes, steering well clear of irksome realities such as junk yards, hazardous waste sites and rivers with eddies of soapsuds and fertilizer run-off.
• Clearly the idea of the distant landscape as a site of escape, or even mystical, purifying powers, still holds sway over the human imagination.
• ...evidently a photographer working for BP will take very different photographs from one working for Greenpeace.
• By 'pleasure' I do not mean only the obvious pleasure that derives from an adept handling of aesthetics; I mean also the deep satisfaction that can stem from intelligent picture making: the moulding of something seen and felt, an judged to be important, into a convincing image.
• Compare Harry Cory Wright's serene Cuckmere Haven with Google Earth/Street View images......but Wright's vision has transformed the site; he has selected what interests him - not the hustle and bustle of the here and now, but an indeterminate time. (Also Thomas Struth's El Capitan on the frontispiece and National Geographic's image of a tourist thronged entrance to Yosemite Valley.)
• People come and go, the land is patient - it will outlast us all.
• This distinction between what is correct and conventional, but unexciting, and what is incorrect, unconventional, but exciting, divides critics to this day.
• There are those who have chosen to stay close to home, arguing that interest, beauty, perhaps even sublimity, may be found only a stone's throw away.
• All photographers focus their cameras on the real physical world.  Some say that the world is beautiful enough or fascinating enough or even absurd enough as it is and does not need any artful tinkering.  But another camp disagrees.  They point out that even classical landscape photographers have subtly tweaked things to enhance effect. (in the 1850s the French photographer Camille Silvy sometimes moved clouds around to maximise the languid atmosphere he wanted and Ansel Adams, annoyed by humanity's careless behaviour outdoors, excised its unsightly signs in his work with a bit of deft retouching.)  Likewise many of today's photographers are ready to make minor changes to nature in the service of a more forceful image. (Ironically in art this is perfectly acceptable, while in photojournalism it is a sin, when discovered, that is punishable by career death. Also in the Landscape Photographer of the Year and Wildlife Photographer of the year competitions.)
• The reshaping of the Earth is happening on a scale unimaginable to the reader of the Photographic News of 1875.
• Photographer Edward Burtynsky speaks for many of his colleagues when he notes that ' we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways'. before concluding that, 'We are capable of engineering our own demise.'
• Many modernists had, in fact, begun as pictorialists.  Practitioners of both schools held in great reverence the finely crafted print, and in the work of modernists we find echoes of the pictorialists' symbolist credo that photography could convey deep feeling, even spirituality.
• The twentieth century figure most associated with landscape photography in the public mind is Ansel Adams. ........a persuasive proselytizer, a passionate and effective environmentalist.
• ....until, in the late 1960s and 1970s, a new generation arrived with a different mind-set.
• Whereas Ansel Adams had expunged signs of civilization, the new topographics focused on them full in the face.
• Today we are essentially still in this new topographic mind-set.  However, our historical sketch would not be complete without a final landmark: what has become known as the Dusseldorf School.................under the spiritual guidance of Bernd and Hilla Becher, photographers such as Thomas Struth, Alex Hutte, Elgar Essex and Andreas Gursky, individual voices united in their appreciation of the camera's clear-sighted objectivity (falsely criticized as neutrality), skillfully controlled colour and form to make prints of landscape imagery, the imapact of which is dramatic and authoritative.
• A landscape does not necessarily have any connection with people; by definition place takes account of human presence.
• One of the strongest threads running through the artist statements from 21st century photographers is that of the political.
• Devoid of human habitation and use, or not, ultimately the land is owned, publicly or privately by someone.
• A landscape is defended.  It is controlled.  In all probability its form has been altered, even if the changes took place long ago.  Indeed we can say with assurance today that its form has been altered, as civilisation has affected climatic conditions globally; not one single place can be said to be pristine.  Use in essay.
• David Maisel 'There is no escaping the political.'
• Rob Hann adds 'I'm not documenting the brutal, creeping sprawl of corporate America; I'm seeking the magic that still exists in the spaces in-between.'............Yet these words still suggest a certain political position.
• 'The photographs I make are both personal and political', states John Davies simply.
• Today the 20th century's new topographics lives on in altered landscapes, a shorthand term for the widespread current practice of searching out and recording the myriad ways human beings transform the surface of the Earth, 
• .....most of the photographers in Landmark no longer regard landscape practice in its classic mid 20th century sense - a focus on the land devoid of human habitat, ideally in the form of wilderness (essay).  They have moved away from, if not firmly broken with the long-standing idea that the photographer stands apart from the landscape and looks at it as a passive, timeless thing......they are acutely aware of the self in the equation.
• The earlier generation looked for spiritual growth and enlightenment (some connection with the Romantic sublime); the current generation is more anxiously focused on more pressing existential issues, driven by the feeling that the clock is ticking - what are we doing to the Earth?
• ......there are still pleasures to be gained from landscape photographs that remind us of what we have lost, or grasp for alternative routes to the future.
• Each generation of photographers has a new world to contend with, full of Chekhov's good and evil.  (Michael? Ass 4?)