The sky in contemporary fine art landscape

[seabird]

Please excuse me for being blunt. I read this kind of other-oriented approach often on this forum. It seems weak and mindless. Whatever happened to autonomy?

Michael, I may be over-reacting to the terms "weak" and "mindless" but my own take would be as follows: There is nothing wrong with "autonomy" (as you put it). If you have a particular vision that you are confident of, then go for it and dont spare the horses! But I hope you will acknowledge that there is nothing wrong with the more "other-oriented approach" either. I know that I benefit (= have much to learn from) from both.

A rather poor analogy might be with leadership. I'd liken your "autonomy" with leaders who are way out in the distance - barely discernible, but doing all the hard work to find the "best" path. But that can be a lonely and risky position. Sometimes those leaders get lost. Almost always they do not get the appreciation or thanks they deserve. The "other-oriented" approach might be likened to those leaders who are just in front of or among the people, walking with them and urging them on. (And yet other leaders might be behind the people, pushing. You get the idea). Those leaders might be likened with your "other-oriented" approach. They may not get to "blaze the trail", but they do get to engage/communicate/dialogue more with those around them. I wouldn't describe them as "weak" or "mindless". To the contrary, they usually end up dealing with the grumblings and other sh*t that the trailblazers aren't even aware of... The point is that the fastest progress is made when both types of leadership are evident.

You need to settle on the style that works for you. But that style wont work for everyone. There's a place for all.

I must admit that initially I wasn't overly keen on the style of the photos that prompted this thread. I didn't "get" them. But as I've looked at more of them, read the comments of others, and thought about the various points that have been made, I've come to appreciate that style far more. Both types of leadership in action?

Just my $0.02 and apologies if I sound preachy.

[paulr]

I've got a theory. The point of the New Topographics photography was to show landscape altered by man... "The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,..." [Jenkins?]

More generally, they were exploring how things typically are ... the day to day world that we actually inhabit, rather than the exceptional, the remote, the untouched, primordial.

That said, it seems like nearly all art (all forms) since the mid 1970s has been more or less about this same theme. Alienation. You know, I get it. And I've seen so much of it I'm completely bored by it. Because it's not "the essential truth" or even *an* essential truth, no matter how badly the curators and art critics of the world want it to be.

I don't get that at all. Alienation? That was a grand theme of Modernism ... turn of the century through WW2. These days I see art that's about all kinds of things. Personally, I'd be happy with more alienation art. The theme isn't new, but society and technology keep reinventing it in such new and colorful ways. Maybe that's why I listen to so much radiohead

[Brian K]

In general I'm not into the blank sky look, sometimes it works, most often I think not. I'm almost tempted to think it's out of laziness as really good skies and special moments can be hard to come across and require either luck or great persistence. It just seems that so much landscape work now is done at noon on the most common of days and the most mundane of conditions. This goes against my own desire of trying to capture special moments or beautiful scenes.

[Kirk Gittings]

The theme isn't new, but society and technology keep reinventing it in such new and colorful ways.

But people confuse subject matter that is new with photographic style being new. Ok photography in the sense of an ever changing world as subject matter is always "new". But frankly the "new topographic" look is getting rather loooong in the tooth. It is frankly both a more recent and older traditional style in that as landscape survey and post modern art it both predates and follows the grand romantic landscape style of Adams and the Modernism of Weston. It is as old as landscape photography. How more traditional is that?

[paulr]

Perhaps the first and among the best such use of an empty sky was by the early landscape photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan, Carlton Watkins, and Frances Frith. The orthochromatic wet plate emulsions let the blue sky go to a blank white, and it often became a big part of the composition as an abstract negative space. I've always felt the "New Topographics" photographers owed at least a small debt to those nineteenth century photographers, (but then again, don't all large format photographers?). It seems not to be acknowledged because those early photographers had for so long been held up as the roots of the Ansel Adams genre, the very style the New Topographics photographers were rebeling against...

Mark, you're opening up a line of inquiry that I don't think we pursue often enough: the effect of technology on esthetic trends. When new things become possible or easy, artists tend to jump on the opportunity. And when things become impossible or difficult, attention turns to other things.

Guys like O'Sullivan and Watkins took what was seen as a weakness of photography--the inability to show both land and sky with detail--and turned it into a bold esthetic. They said, in effect, "Ok, so the sky's a big white sheet. How can I use that?" And they came up with these great, graphic solutions. So much more compelling than the more common solutions of pasting skies and forgrounds together from different negatives, trying to copy the romantic esthetic of the last generation of painters.

Fast forward a few decades, and you see the phenomenon that Szarkowski noted: the first generation of photographers who could use fast shutter speeds using them to make novel work. This included Cartier Bresson, who stopped people in mid stride on the street, and Ansel Adams, who captured transient phenomena like rapidly changing mountain light and weather. As Szarkowski put it, if O'Sulivan's work was about geography, Adams' work was about weather. It was the first time in history you COULD photograph weather, at least in the sense of god beams and mountain storms.

By the 1960s, this power was old news. The New Topographers didn't have a technological motivation, but as you suggested, they found a historical one in the survey photographers. This wasn't a gimmic (at least not an arbitrary one). The idea of a survey, powered by esthetics but rooted in an ethos of objectivism, served their purposes perfectly. It also gave a direct frame of reference: here's this country, a hundred years after the first pictures.

Klett's the one who took that path literally.

[Mark Sawyer]

I agree with pretty much everything you said, Paul, especially that opening line:

Mark, you're opening up a line of inquiry that I don't think we pursue often enough: the effect of technology on esthetic trends.

Even today, the huge color digital print is leaving a heavy footprint on where the fine art photography world is at this moment in time. But for some reason, we never like to acknowledge that the machinery is as important as the man (or woman) behind it, Doubly-so in the art world, where so much depends on the "artist's magical touch"...

And if it's not the technology, it's at least the artist's decision in how to use it. Many of the early f/64 works were made with pictorialist lenses, stopped down. And the New Topographics photographers used the same sort of cameras, film, paper, and chemistry as the f/64 photographers they were seemingly rebeling against.

The printing style of the New Topographics was, I think, heavily influenced by, for lack of a better term, the established but just-newly-recognized aesthetic of the "government lab-produced" prints. These were very sharp, somewhat flat, and to a certain degree, lifeless when compared to the wide, dramatic tonal scale of the Adams/Weston style prints which had dominated for the previous three decades.

But I wouldn't take it in quite the same direction as Jenkins did in the passage Bruce quoted:

I've got a theory. The point of the New Topographics photography was to show landscape altered by man... "The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,..." [Jenkins?]

I can see how the sterile and clinically-flat prints of the NT photographers could be seen as eschewing emotion, but I'd offer that the stoicism therein was just the extreme opposite end, a counter-point, if you will, on the same emotional scale. And opinion? Frankly, the NT work is dripping wet with opinion on everything from ecology to art photography. In many ways, they're the perfect accompaniment to Ansel Adams' work; while Adams sought to respect and preserve nature by showing how lovely it was, the NT photographers confronted us with how we had destroyed it. Emmit Gowin took this to an even more intense level a few years later with his images of the ruined landscape, which was a near-perfect fusion of the f/64 aesthetic and the New Topographics concern.

Klett's work, compared to Gowin's, seems as superficial as the "Time Machine" sci-fi movies. Neat-o to see the special effects, but the message doesn't seem to hit home in such a heartfelt way. But maybe that's the weakness in capitalized Fine Art photography... artists presenting sociological/ecological concerns so that they may be better-known as artists.

Just musings after a long day at work...

[mandoman7]

Tomorrow morning I'm going to be taking pictures at daybreak.