The sky in contemporary fine art landscape

[QT Luong]

Quite a few of us photograph color landscape photographs that celebrate the beauty of nature using dramatic light and weather. I don't really need to cite names, although David Muench would be the first to come to mind. In this style of photography, unless the sky has remarkable clouds or color, it is often minimized by a high horizon line.

This type of landscape photography is rarely, if ever seen in museums and contemporary art galleries, where you see a different approach to landscape. Three of its common characteristics are the choice of subjects (often showing the hand of man), light (not dramatic), and color palette (not saturated). I can understand why those combine to describe a certain truth. Among the work I've seen recently in galleries, I'd mention Joel Sternfeld, Sze Tsung Leong and Otto Olaf Becker.

This morning, I was looking at a link to Jan Koster's Dutchcapes (http://www.jankoster.info/dutchscape...tchscapes.html) found on Conscientious. I noticed again a compositional trait that seem fairly common in contemporary landscape photography: the use of a horizon line that is in the middle, or the lower part of an image, combined with a sky that is relatively featureless, often overcast. Have you noticed that too ? What would be the esthetic reasons for giving such prominence to "washed out" skies ?

[Bruce Watson]

It's an interesting question. I'm sure I'll be branded a Philistine, but I don't have an answer. It seems outright ugly to me. It looks just... wrong. Maybe that's the purpose?

[Martin Miller]

The influence of Minimalism.

[Darin Boville]

What strikes me most strongly in the examples you cite isn't the blankness of the sky but the predetermined location of the horizon. Koster's and Leong's horizon lines are in the identical place in each photograph. Perhaps an attempt at creating a "signature look" but I find the effort ineffectual.

Here are the links:

http://www.szetsungleong.com/horizons_index.htm

http://www.olafottobecker.de/

Muench's work certainly doesn't use the horizon's location as part of his over-the-top signature look--heck, he doesn't even seem to care if the horizon is inexplicably titled hard to the right.

http://www.muenchphotography.com/

--Darin

[Kirk Gittings]

The influence of Minimalism.

I agree, if you trace landscape photography back to the time of minimalism you first saw this trend in b&w with Adams and color with others in New Topographics. This later evolved into the color landscape aesthetic that is so overwhelmingly dominant in contemporary art today. It is often times refered to as "conceptual" but I think of it as minimalism and usually pretty devoid of concept other than a kind of aching loneliness.

Since 1975 "New Topographics" photographers such as Robert Adams,[2] Lewis Baltz,[3] Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore[4] have influenced photographic practices regarding landscape around the world. Moreover, and as a proof of the impact of this exhibition beyond the American scene, three out of the ten photographers in the show were later commissioned by the French government for the Mission de la DATAR, namely Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore.

For “New Topographics” William Jenkins selected eight then-young American photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal,[5] Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott,[6] Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. He also invited the German couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, then teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Germany). Since the late 1950s they had been photographing various obsolete structures, mainly post-industrial carcasses or carcasses-to-be, in Europe and America. They first exhibited them in series, as "typologies", often shown in grids, under the title of "Anonymous Sculptures." They were soon adopted by the Conceptual Art movement — they are currently the only photographers exhibited at the Dia Beacon, a vast space dedicated to conceptual art in Beacon, NY.

Some thirty years after its opening "New Topographics" still remains an exhibition of great impact and influence on western landscape photography, an influence that even extended to Japanese landscape photography (see Naoya Hatakeyama’s work for instance) and whose long-term effects can even be identified in contemporary Chinese photography.[7]

Wikipedia

I have to laugh when young photographers working in this mode refer to my work as "derivative" or "last centuries" aesthetic. They obviously have not looked at the post modern history of photography. Very little is truly new.


I think this aesthetic is distilled to its essence-near totally reductionist-why bother with color?-in the b&w of Sugimoto. Having said all that I actually find this work in person to be very meditative.

[Bill_1856]

Boring, ain't it?
Actually, for a good portion of the Northern Hemisphere above the tropics, that's the way things look most of the time. It's what we grow up visualizing as the real world around us.
(There are those who claim photographers such as Ansel Adams and Clyde Butcher aren't landscape photographers at all, but actually are cloud photographers.)

[Greg Miller]

I was recently noticing many contemporary landscapes with a different sky - one where the sky is a dull grayish blue interrupted by featureless nearly blown out white clouds. I noticed several photos where they all could have virtually cloned in the exact same sky over the land.

Funny , but I can't seem to recall anything else about the images...

[civich]

I like 'em. Several of them made me lean forward for a closer look. The sky as mat board. Nice concept.

[ric_kb]

Quite a few of us photograph color landscape photographs that celebrate the beauty of nature using dramatic light and weather. .....

Perhaps you aren't celebrating the beauty of nature as much as you are celebrating the dramatic in nature...

What would be the esthetic reasons for giving such prominence to "washed out" skies ?

Perhaps love of that place. Broad, even, gentle skies. Approach. Endless. contrast by juxtaposition.

Although at least two of the folios, by their titles, give a hint about the value of line. Although they don't challenge themselves much more than .....[and the rest I drop as going too arty: RL]

[Ron McElroy]

Perhaps Jan Koster's images just reflex the flat landscape of Holland and reiterates the large sky of 17th and 18th century Dutch painters.