“I suspect no landscape, vernacular or otherwise, can be comprehended unless we perceive it as an organization of space; unless we ask ourselves who owns or uses the spaces, how they were created and how they change. J.B. Jackson
My practice I think revolves around the human condition. This is a conclusion thats slowly dawning on me and becoming clearer. I used to think I shot many different subjects which is true to an extent but looking at them with a more critical eye I can now see its the human element that is the consistent feature. Even in my landscape work there will be traces of human activity in one way or another. Ive always been interested in the everyday and banal.
So I guess my gaze is directed at the world around me where humans inhabit or make their marks. The image of the beach above I suppose could be considered voyeuristic, I take the privilege of the unseen observer, not unseen via use of long lens or digital technology, i’m using a standard lens and stood in plain site, but unseen to the subjects as they are very absorbed in their respective tasks. The ‘photo session’ continued for a good ten minutes, most people stood and chatted fo similar amounts of time. From that perspective I am as much part of the scene. A photograph taken behind me of the same scene would include me as an equal part and participant and maybe such an image actually exists so given that I do not see this image as voyeuristic.
Thus my view on the world is influenced by the changes humans have made to it, I rarely if ever photograph purely natural things.
My own ‘style’ or ‘look’ I would describe as an observational one. Im looking for themes, details, often making comments that I hope my audience will spot and investigate further. Equally I am content for the audience to enjoy the image purely on its aesthetic qualities.
For this reason I do use compositional rules to help the viewer find their way around the images. In many cases following my directions will lead to a questioning of what it is exactly the viewer is looking at and my theme or comment that may not have been immediately obvious to them might merge.
The above image is purposefully zoned, Ive chosen to cut the frame into horizontal stripes, I want the viewer to look at each stripe in turn to appreciate the sparse nature of the landscape and that the effect man has had is very localised and contained, transient even. From the cactus concrete bordered shrubbery, the highway cutting through the desert, the minimal buildings and finally the telegraph poles crossing the vast nothingness vanishing into the mountains.
Ive given the image a big sky to reflect the wide open space and feeling of solitude, ive chosen to restrict the colour palette with desaturated areas and encouraged the natural yellow and red tinge of the cacti to come to the fore.
The new Topographics movement, a description coined by William Jenkins, curator of a group show of contemporary American landscape photography held at George Eastman House in Rochester is very influential to my practice.
“Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was how Jenkins had identified in the work of US photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher (hurrah, a woman!), Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. This is very much what i am also concerned with, the man altered landscape.
Sean O’Hagen in his piece in the Guardian, New Topographics: Photographs that find beauty in the banal observes
“Only one photographer, Shore, shot in colour. It seemed to heighten the sense of detachment in his photographs of anonymous intersections and streets. Shore was influenced by Ed Ruscha, the conceptualist of Californian cool, who, in the 60s, had made a series of artist’s books with self-explanatory titles such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The show also nodded obliquely at the later work of Walker Evans, who had photographed the vernacular iconography of America in road signs, billboards, motels and shop fronts”
Although I also choose to photograph the vernacular and banal, I do not pursue my subjects in the same way as Ruscha shot his gas stations, he shot them as they were. A “they are what they are” approach. See my post last week about Ruscha. I choose my subjects with a point in mind. The image above, shot near Hisperia CA is the a gigantic recently cleared plot on the new edge of town. Clearly Main Street isn’t what it was. Maybe this phase is transient but the collapse of small town America is no secret and I fear the lot will remain as it is.
Andy Grundberg has noted,
“For all its virtues in making us engage photographs more closely and complexly, the aesthetic of the equivalent…has one major shortcoming: after asserting that an apparently transparent image of the world is imbued with individual vision or feeling, it has difficulty defining what that vision or feeling is. Used as a critical instrument, the theory of equivalence is unable to determine any intended meaning in a photograph. But as a credo, it has served as the dominant aesthetic of American photographic modernist practice.”
As a photographer whose practice has evolved without the benefit of an arts based education or any real appreciation of the world of art photography until quite recently in real terms every discovery sheds new light on my practice and its incredibally exciting to discover what motivated Shore, Balts, Adams etc also motivated me before I was formally aware of their work beyond a superficial level and certainly their motivations for producing it.
To me it proves that the need to record, make sense of the world around us, the landscape according to your vision is an inbuilt trait, an obsession or need that we have to express.
Jenkins speaking of the photographers in New Topographics claims that although their photographs convey “substantial amounts of visual information,” they are, above all, aesthetic arrangements resisting interpretation. He quotes Robert Adams:
“By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet…Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil…What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the Form that underlines this apparent chaos”.
Deborah Bright says “If we are to make photographs that raise questions or make statements about what is both in and around the picture, we must first become more conscious of the ideological assumptions that structure our approaches”. This interests me and resonates, my first aim when embarking upon this MA was to understand my own practice and then be able to articulate that vision. Also as part of my journey and evolving desire to create works for gallery display this next statement concerns me.
“As part of this, we need to examine the restrictive terms of the art museum and gallery nexus and ask ourselves whether we need to seek out other markets and audiences for our work”
This is something I never really considered, as I make my own art, playing by my rules and personal motivations will it ‘fit’ into the gallery nexus, will I need to discover my own outlet?
As Lewis Baltz says “The landscape…seems more a set of conditions, a location where things and events might transpire rather than a given thing or event in itself; an arena or circumstance within which an open set of possibilities might be induced to play themselves out”
References:
J.B. Jackson, “Concluding with Landscape,” Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 150.
D Bright Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men An Inquiry Into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/feb/08/new-topographics-photographs-american-landscapes
http://www.hyperallergic.com/417634/walker-evanss-eye-on-the-city/
Andy Grundberg, “Ansel Adams: the Politics of Natural Space,” The New Criterion (November 1984), p. 150.
Lewis Baltz, “Landscape Problems,” Aperture 98 (Spring 1985).