Martin Brent Critical Research Space

“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).

Katherine Frith likens reading adverts to peeling an onion. She pinpoints three stages to reading adverts:

1. The surface meaning
2. The advertiser’s intended meaning and
3. The cultural meaning.

She concludes that ‘advertising only “makes sense” when it resonates with certain deeply held belief systems’ (Frith: 2006: 5).

 

We were asked to choose and ad and consider the following.

1. a dominant reading
2. an oppositional reading and
3. a negotiated reading.

Post your chosen adverts to this forum with a short statement outlining why you interpret them in this way. Comment on the contributions and interpretations of your peers, addressing the following points:

• Do any common ‘belief systems’ emerge?
• Do any interpretations ‘blend and clash’?

 

The dominant theme in this ad is that the figure represents danger, the dark underpass, hooded youth with confrontational expression.

His posture appears to be challenging, threatening.  The urban built environment with shuttered business in the background, the fact theres no one else around and the youth appears to be showing a weapon, most likely a handgun.

Then on closer examination the dominant theme subsides to that of a negotiated theme as it becomes apparent the hand gun is in fact a battery power drill. The eye finds the copy to the left which is incongruous tucked into the bottom left, the copy tells you that the youths future isnt inevitably one of crime where it may well be headed now.

With some life chances through education or training the weapon becomes the tools for a new direction, a trade maybe.

The ad is for an organisation called Always A Chance after  James Cooper and James Kouzaris, two British tourists were tragically shot dead in Sarasota, Florida.  16 April 2011.  It transpired their killer could have been somewhere completely different had a training opportunity come to fruition so the parents of the boys set up the charity to encourage young people who are outside full time education and employment to re-engage with the education system or support them as they take their first steps into employment.

So I think this is a great example of an ad that uses a dominant reading that then subsides into a negotiated reading upon closer examination.

An oppositional reading could be the ad reinforces stereotypes and exploits common belief systems that inner city youths are criminals, armed and from ethnic minorities.

I would counter that the ad successfully subverts that belief system and uses it in a positive way to engage a viewer educating them in the process that their assumptions were incorrect and even if the youth was heading for criminality its not too late to prevent it.

This weeks submissions from everyone were really interesting and so were the interpretations of the how the ads should read.  This one in particular stood out to me and generated a very strong oppositional reading from myself..

Here is Clive Edwards post-

I’m not sure whether this image ever came out as an ad in its own right. Perhaps the video ad was pulled before the campaign got any commercial traction. The video ad for Pepsi achieved almost instant notoriety on its release in 2017. This is a still from the ad.

It features US mega celebrity Kendall Jenner. The narrative of the ad has her ‘gatecrashing’ a protest march. She throws off her blonde wig and joins the protestors as they march towards a line of armed police. Jenner, on reaching the police, pulls out a Pepsi and offers it to the stone-faced police officer, who accepts. Pepsi is therefore a symbol of harmony, unity and social cohesion.

That would have been the preferred reading of the Pepsi group and Creators League Studio who produced it. Jenner was chosen to front the ad because of her enormous appeal and influence as a fashion icon and social media celebrity.

There was an immediate backlash of oppositional readings, driven mainly by the #blacklivesmatter campaign, in which protestors were angered by police brutality particularly targeted at the black commmunity. Several memes and reconfigured versions of the original appeared on social media. Pepsi withdrew the ad very shortly after its release, following mounting criticism from the campaign.

This image below was tweeted with the caption: “Kendall, please give him a Pepsi”

Pepsi apologised to the campaigners,  saying that they had “clearly missed the mark. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue.” They also apologised to Kendall Jenner for putting her in that position (their words).

So there was a preferred meaning, an oppositional reading… is there a negotiated reading? I’m not sure. Does Pepsi’s withdrawal of the ad suggest that both sides accept the oppositional reading, and that universal acceptance of its wrongness is the negotiated one?

I wonder also whether the Pepsi ad was badly mistimed. At another time, when anti-police protests were not high on the news agenda… would the ad have been , if not acceptable, then at least less unacceptable.

 

My response as follows-

“Photographys plausibility has always rested on the uniqueness of its indexical relation to the world it images, a relation that is regarded as fundamental to its operation as a system of representation. For this reason a photograph of something has long been held to be proof of that things being, even if not of its truth”

(Batchen, 2002, P.139)

I have chosen three constructed images that particularly interest me.   All are fictional scenes, some based on a fictional event in a real world place, Crewdsons Brief Encounters image,  one wholly fictional being constructed from disparate elements, Marsoliers Playground 3 and one a little in between., Jeff Walls Sudden Gust Of Wind which is based on a woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai and uses real world and digitally manipulated objects to create the scene.

Crewdons and Walls work both use staged events to create a narrative. Crewdsosn use of the Motion Picture style lighting, the largely empty street except one solitary figure and the car tyre tracks combine to give a sense of the Uncanny.  Sigmund Freud in his theory specifically relates an aspect of the Uncanny derived from German the German adjective unheimlich with its base word heimlich  meaning “concealed, hidden, in secret”. He goes on to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of “repetition of the same thing,”  He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one’s steps or instances where random numbers recur.

Crewdsons work successfully exploits the feelings generated by hinting of secret events, either just about to happen or the aftermath of, in this case the twilight, the movement of the car, the only thing moving, crossing the amber light gives the car purpose.  Where is it going, is it anything to do wit the lone figure? Is it leaving the scene of something out of frame. We will never know. Despite its motion picture qualities it is of course a still image and Crewdson says that, “My hope is my pictures, although elaborately staged, convey an experience that is intensely real. While my work process is similar to film production, the final result is quite different. Photography limits the narrative to be evoked through one solitary moment.”

He goes on to describe this process as “evoking” where the viewer is left to fill in the gaps, to evoke the narrative which may be influenced by events and experience that have nothing directly to do with the image.

This is very much the method I wish to employ in my own images, although my narative may not be as overt or theatrical as Crewdsons I till need the viewer to ‘evoke’ the circumstances of how my scene came to be or where it is.

From this point of view my work is similar to Lauren Marsoliers.  In her Transition series she creates landscape and urbanscape that are wholly fictional, constructed from real world elements to create a whole ‘new’ and very convincing place.  Devoid of population there is a slight sense of uncanny but not in an ominous way. The images do not feel threatening, the lack of people doesnt seem to suggest a calamity, the images are clean, upbeat in some respects, it feels like a virgin environment on some levels but then there are signs that humans have been, maybe are there, some work in progress, a car under its cover tells the viewer people exist or existed.

While Lauren Marsolier’s work is photographic, her process is similar to painting.  “Months or years often separate the capture of elements juxtaposed in my landscapes,” she explains. “This approach reminds me of many painters who would make sketches at different locations to use as reference for their future paintings.”

Akin to the way a painter would use his sketchbook, Marsolier uses this library of farmed imagery to construct her tableau landscapes which is very much the method I am employing in my Inbetween Places project.

Where my project is different to Marsoliers is mine does not wish to divorce the captured elements from its original identity, moreover its essential that the places collected remain recognisable or capable of recognition given clues in the caption, maybe GPS or Google Earth co ordinates.  Marsolier’s work intentionally blurs the boundary between real and imagined.  This is  her intention: “I wanted the work to explore tensions between what feels familiar, natural, and what feels alien or fabricated”,

The artificial landscapes she constructs are designed to be confusing, by challenging the viewer’s notion of what is real, my manufactured landscapes also aim to confuse the viewer by moving recognisable places somewhere else.

Aesthetically my work is much closer to Marsoliers than Crewdson but the same theories are in play, a scene is created to allow invite the viewer to envoke the story. To imagine whats about to happen, why this classical Norwegian Fjord house appears to be built over a car park.  In this case what happened to the water?  My images (so far) also exist without people, I have contemplated including them but then I move to a slightly different potential reading where the viewer may start looking at the figures rather than the place.

My intention was to question peoples views of their identity based on the fixed geography of their nation state.  If people were included I think they would need to be dead pan but without the drama of Crewdsons iagery.

A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) is based on a woodcut, Travellers Caught in a Sudden breeze at Ejiri(c.1832)  The Thirty-six Views of Fuji, by the Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).

Wall photographed actors in a landscape located outside his home town, Vancouver, at times when similar weather conditions prevailed over a period of some months digitally compositing the elements.

As in Hokusai’s original, two men hold onto their hats while a third stares up into the sky, where his blows away.  Papers blow from a folder, trees bend in the strong wind also shedding their leaves.

The original woodcut shows a winding  path through some reeds leading towards Mount Fuji. Wall’s version is far more agri/industrial. Ploughed fields, telegraph poles and scarred landscape

There is no obvious reason for the characters to be there, why are they dressed in suits, what was their purpose, where is their car?   I assume they travelled from the city and not resident in this landscape. What is the purpose of the paperwork?

Whats going to happen next?  Assuming the papers are important but now lost..

I like the scaling of Walls work, he resists to fill the frame with the ‘action’ thus the people become part of the scene, very much like people depicted in a classical painting by Constable for instance. I like how he has stayed true to the woodcut yet still creates an image that stands in its own right.

 

 

 

 

References

Else Barents, Jeff Wall: Transparencies, Munich 1986

www.zoowithoutanimals.com/2014/01/28/a-sudden-gust-of-wind/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny#Related_theories

Batchen G, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History   MIT Press, 2002

www.ignant.com/2018/11/27/transition-to-a-fragmented-world-through-lauren-marsoliers-layered-photographs/