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/dutchscapes/dutchscape/Free%20Version/dutchscapes.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.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.assemblylanguage.com/artpiecepictures/Sugimoto.JPG&imgrefurl=http://www.assemblylanguage.com/reviews/Sugimoto.html&usg=__Caf5aROoSNv5RszmrXhwBGxhNY8=&h=209&w=275&sz=8&hl=en&start=31&sig2=srSePnEhOzNHdPLY-cm9VA&tbnid=BIbEf3Sv4NZVgM:&tbnh=87&tbnw=114&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsugimoto%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D18&ei=sX6hSumCOZSMtAPLwJj0DQ

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://graememitchell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/sugimoto_2.jpg&imgrefurl=http://graememitchell.com/blog/category/still-scape-work/page/3&usg=__PcSPbHeiYTe-wqCiv3zodUlD1Z4=&h=350&w=450&sz=45&hl=en&start=19&sig2=C8yRdvPKxDeat1mzhAGRIQ&tbnid=VMiLvoPGtCjpmM:&tbnh=99&tbnw=127&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsugimoto%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D18&ei=sX6hSumCOZSMtAPLwJj0DQ

[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.

[sun of sand]

Why not? Who says that blank boring bleak lonely sky isn't beautiful? Who says a big billowy cloud is? Why photograph a toilet you piss and dump in? Why photograph tide pools? If there is one subject I almost universally dislike seeing photographed it's tide pools ..especially vertically

what are the aesthetic reasons for any of this shi(? A fkn bunch of bananas is beautiful but the sky isn't UNLESS
BS

They rank cities by amount of sunshine they receive
Rochester NY would be pretty low but phoenix would be high
Now I'd much rather have the weather of santa monica -and no doubt it would rate higher than phoenix-
but I'd prefer rochester over phoenix as well


"If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity"

maybe if nothing else these photographers show us ourselves

I'd rather have these rebels than none
That's about as much as I'd care to think about it

[Gordon Moat]

I would rather see just a bit more, or just a bit less, of the sky. That way it would fall upon a Golden Section proportion in the image, rather than this cut through the middle look.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography (http://www.gordonmoat.com)

[Gary L. Quay]

The problem with the images on the site at the beginning of this posting was that it was slog to get through them. I never made it. I never stopped on one image for ver long, and I shut the page down after about 10 images. I imagined seeing them in a gallery, but I then imagined myself walking right past. I will admit that I have a conventional eye, but I don't think photography should be boring.

--Gary

[Mark Sawyer]

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.

http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g139/Owen21k/7watkins8.jpg
Carlton Watkins

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...

[Ken Lee]

Follow the money.

Journalists tell stories. Critics explain things. Curators build collections.

What appears in public spaces (galleries, museums, magazines, web sites) is often whatever makes a good story.

Gimmicks give graspable material to journalists, critics, and historians. Beauty is a only peripheral consideration, because it can't be so easily... explained. Beauty is not... interesting.

[Chuck Pere]

I suppose that someone who can make the bland interesting is better than someone who makes the dramatic boring.

[Bruce Watson]

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

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?]

At least some of the point seems to be the stark reality of what man has done to his environment. What better way to do this that to show large amounts of featureless gray sky? It induces a feeling in the viewer of being small and alone, in an ugly world. And that, I think, is largely the point.

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.

It's been 35 years. Surely they can cast around and find a new "big new idea". Or are curators only allowed one big new idea per career? Or am I just dripping cynicism this morning for some reason I can't explain? :D

[Donald Miller]

I suppose that someone who can make the bland interesting is better than someone who makes the dramatic boring.

Very succint and I agree.

[mandoman7]

Finding your own voice in the art world is a tricky business. Your not going to get there with the standard approach to scenic vistas. You might find lots of approval among your peers, even though you are essentially mimicking the shots of a master, with no introspection or revelations on any kind in the work. You can find success with that kind of work among photography based groups, and then meet resistance within a broader art community.

Work that's created with the idea of finding out what makes your vision different will have a different look. People who are bound to the do's and don'ts of the acknowledged masters won't like it, usually. Its good to decide just which group your shooting for so you don't get too frustrated, but innovation can mean departure and disassociation from a community and that carries with it the potential for disapproval.

It can also be true that work that's heavily oriented towards the personal vision can be totally boring and without beauty. Its all a matter of experimentation on some level, with our own tastes and inner level of courage, and that of whoever gets to see your work.

[Bill_1856]

I think the whole flat-sky genre was probably spawned by Joel Meyerowitz's very successful exhibition of "CAPE LIGHT" IN 1979. It was the first critically aclaimed major museum show of fine art color photography.

[sun of sand]

If you can make the bland interesting are you sure the bland was ever
That doesn't seem right to me
Maybe if you can make the dramatic boring it isn't in itself all that interesting

I'm sure if we all lived in concrete boxes and then one day wandered into some pastoral field with real soil and bugs and shi( we would be spellbound by the smallest of things
We'd much rather have a chunk of granite in our kitchen than a ladybug
We SQuash bugs if they enter our homes
Go outside and suddenly upon really
seeing
a dragonfly hover above a flower
you're motionless
not wanting to disturb it so that you may observe it

A large building in Las Vegas with a circus show and lights all over it can be walked right past
Yet I'm fairly sure more people would want to spend a week in Las Vegas than some farmers field

Maybe those who make the insignificant worthy of our time and those who make the
*(&^&*^(**^#%^&*&8&*(^%%%%%%^&
dismissable
are doing the same thing from opposite ends
-humbling us-


If a blank
empty
boring
featureless skyline can so easily dominate what would otherwise be seen as ..
maybe nature is much more powerful than we usually give it credit for

said in ANOTHER way
Bruce Lee doesn't talk a lot
Bruce Lee would still kick your a$$


Is the massive sheer rockface more important than the vast sky
Does the sky keep everything in check
Is it negative space the sky or positive space
Is it yin yang
I see the rockface as scale to the heavens
"yeah, that rock is massive! ..but that sky is



"

[Kirk Gittings]

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.

http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g139/Owen21k/7watkins8.jpg
Carlton Watkins

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...

Its interesting you should mention this as I think a popular work-Mark Klett's Second View re-photographic survey from 1977 (which made a huge splash in college art programs) may have contributed allot to this aesthetic. This project clearly validates
the intersection of these two periods and accompanying aesthetics of historic documentation and cutting edge fine art photography.

from Wikipedia:


Rephotography is the act of repeat photography of the same site, with a time lag between the two images; a "then and now" view of a particular area. Some are casual, usually taken from the same view point but without regard to season, lens coverage or framing. Some are very precise and involve a careful study of the original image. The founding work in this style was the Rephotographic Survey project, conceived in 1977 by the project's chief photographer, Mark Klett. This project engaged 120 sites of government survey photographs from the American west first recorded in the 1870s. The resulting book, Second View, The Rephotographic Survey Project, included precise rephotographs of the same locations 100 years later along with an essay by Klett on the methodology and problems encountered with rephotography. Klett revisited these sites a third time for his 2005 book Third View with a new team of photographers including Byron Wolfe, Michael Marshall and Toshi Ueshina.

[Mark Sawyer]

Its interesting you should mention this as I think a popular work-Mark Klett's Second View re-photographic survey from 1977 (which made a huge splash in college art programs) may have contributed allot to this aesthetic. This project clearly validates
the intersection of these two periods and accompanying aesthetics of historic documentation and cutting edge fine art photography.

Yes, and Klett's work entered my mind as I wrote that. He's at Arizona State University (Phoenix), while Gohlke of the New Topographics is here at the University of Arizona, (Tucson). They've had their work in the same exhibitions at the CCP, (where both have work up with almost alarming regularity), and it's clear that they admire each other's work and philosophy. I admire their work too, and hope to meet them both someday...



from Wikipedia:
Rephotography is the act of repeat photography of the same site, with a time lag between the two images; a "then and now" view of a particular area. Some are casual, usually taken from the same view point but without regard to season, lens coverage or framing. Some are very precise and involve a careful study of the original image. The founding work in this style was the Rephotographic Survey project, conceived in 1977 by the project's chief photographer, Mark Klett.

"Rephotography" was going on long, long before Klett's 1977 concept. Klett's work just has a splashier artistic style. The problem with wikipedia entries on contemporary art splashes is that they tend to be written by those involved in the splash.

[Struan Gray]

I would agree that at least part of the reason for all the blank skies is that it is a currently popular schtick, and a slightly tired one at that. It - and the central positioning of a flat horizon line - are also reactions to the perceived kitschyness of camera club rules.

But there are good reasons too. Partly, that is simply what the sky looks like in many parts of the world for most of the year. 'True' or 'honest' photography won't try to hide that fact by taking pictures only on the acceptably dramatic days, especially if it wishes to promote itself as 'documentary'.

Also, there is another simple practical reason: overcast skies change the formal aspects of a photograph so that colour relationships and two-dimensional juxtapositions become more important than contrasts of tone and three-dimensionality. The flat lighting from overcast weather makes it easier to accept a photograph as a plane of graphic elements, and not as an approximation of a real scene.

The cynic and the practical photographer in me also knows that shadows are really hard to photograph well. Garapata Beach is loved as a photographers' photograph for good reason.

Lastly, in my own experiments with abstraction and planarisation of the world I have found that the sky can be amazingly distracting. Just a bit of horizon or a hint of cloud structure, and the things on the ground that I wanted to draw attention to immediately become bit players instead of stars. I don't know if this my monkey brain trying to keep track of which way is up, or the results of hundreds of years of accumulated conventions in art history. Either way I almost always like my photographs more if I get rid of the sky altogether.

[Ken Lee]

currently popular schtick :)

The flat lighting from overcast weather makes it easier to accept a photograph as a plane of graphic elements, and not as an approximation of a real scene :) :)

experiments with abstraction and planarisation of the world :cool:

[Struan Gray]

:-p

[Brian Ellis]

I suppose that someone who can make the bland interesting is better than someone who makes the dramatic boring.

But is someone who makes the bland boring better than someone who makes the dramatic dramatic?

[Steve M Hostetter]

Why not? Who says that blank boring bleak lonely sky isn't beautiful? Who says a big billowy cloud is? Why photograph a toilet you piss and dump in? Why photograph tide pools? If there is one subject I almost universally dislike seeing photographed it's tide pools ..especially vertically

what are the aesthetic reasons for any of this shi(? A fkn bunch of bananas is beautiful but the sky isn't UNLESS
BS

They rank cities by amount of sunshine they receive
Rochester NY would be pretty low but phoenix would be high
Now I'd much rather have the weather of santa monica -and no doubt it would rate higher than phoenix-
but I'd prefer rochester over phoenix as well


"If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity"

maybe if nothing else these photographers show us ourselves

I'd rather have these rebels than none
That's about as much as I'd care to think about it
I agree w/ alittle less passion

[GPS]

"De gustibus et coloribus non disputandum est". Already the old Romans...

[Wilbur Wong]

Finding your own voice in the art world is a tricky business. Your not going to get there with the standard approach to scenic vistas. You might find lots of approval among your peers, even though you are essentially mimicking the shots of a master, with no introspection or revelations on any kind in the work. You can find success with that kind of work among photography based groups, and then meet resistance within a broader art community.

Work that's created with the idea of finding out what makes your vision different will have a different look. People who are bound to the do's and don'ts of the acknowledged masters won't like it, usually. Its good to decide just which group your shooting for so you don't get too frustrated, but innovation can mean departure and disassociation from a community and that carries with it the potential for disapproval.

It can also be true that work that's heavily oriented towards the personal vision can be totally boring and without beauty. Its all a matter of experimentation on some level, with our own tastes and inner level of courage, and that of whoever gets to see your work.

AMEN

[Patrick Dixon]

This morning, I was looking at a link to Jan Koster's Dutchcapes (http://www.jankoster.info/dutchscapes/dutchscape/Free%20Version/dutchscapes.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 ?

I like the photos, the plainness of the sky is a good contrast to the detail and strong graphic elements in the foreground, and it gives a sense of scale to the landscape - a sort-of never ending quality to it.

I think it compliments the flat landscape rather well.

[Michael Alpert]

Finding your own voice in the art world is a tricky business. Your not going to get there with the standard approach to scenic vistas. You might find lots of approval among your peers, even though you are essentially mimicking the shots of a master, with no introspection or revelations on any kind in the work. You can find success with that kind of work among photography based groups, and then meet resistance within a broader art community.

Work that's created with the idea of finding out what makes your vision different will have a different look. People who are bound to the do's and don'ts of the acknowledged masters won't like it, usually. Its good to decide just which group your shooting for so you don't get too frustrated, but innovation can mean departure and disassociation from a community and that carries with it the potential for disapproval.

It can also be true that work that's heavily oriented towards the personal vision can be totally boring and without beauty. Its all a matter of experimentation on some level, with our own tastes and inner level of courage, and that of whoever gets to see your work.

John, thank you. I only disagree with the first use of the word "different" at the beginning of the second paragraph. I would put "truthful" in its place.

In this regard, I find Jan Koster's "Dutchscapes" finely balanced and truthful. The landscape, as depicted, is open and quiet; there is no reason for the sky to be otherwise. Actually, the skies are quite varied. The sameness has to do with the seeming repetition of landscape and horizon line. But I find that sameness to be only superficial and more a judgement than a perception. On the Internet we are characteristically not looking very hard or long; we judge before we see. In this case, we, as viewers, own whatever boredom we experience. To attempt to transfer this negative feeling to these honest, meditative, and richly varied photographs is infantile.

It seems that some photographers who complain about not being accepted by museums because their images have dramatic skies are not asking themselves if their photographs have anything to offer beyond the decorative value of their subject matter. There's a world of difference between art and decoration. For many people, art means organically achieved order; form; personal vision; not chaos. With the advent of Photoshop, the possibility for producing beautifully meaningless decorative objects (with every kind of sky) has grown exponentially.

[Robert Hughes]

Michael +1. Years ago the photographic world was divided up into the "classicist" and the "degenerate" movements, with the former concentrating on formal composition, and the latter absorbed by detail and texture within the frame.

According to the classicist viewpoint, LF photographers' obsession with dramatic lighting, with clarity or swirly bokeh amounts to nothing more than fascination with decorative fluff that contributes little to the essence of a work of art. So it's not surprising that we in turn have little patience for work that seems to be naught but form.

[Mark Sawyer]

On the Internet we are characteristically not looking very hard or long; we judge before we see. In this case, we, as viewers, own whatever boredom we experience...



According to the classicist viewpoint, LF photographers' obsession with dramatic lighting, with clarity or swirly bokeh amounts to nothing more than fascination with decorative fluff that contributes little to the essence of a work of art. So it's not surprising that we in turn have little patience for work that seems to be naught but form.


And therein lies a paradox, at least for reaching a "popular" audience. There's a need for visual impact, something in some way dramatic, to arrest attention long enough to see something beyond that.

I wonder whether scale (in many cases coupled with color) is used in much the same way "dramatic lighting, with clarity or swirly bokeh" are used, a different type of "dramatic fluff" to grab and hold attention for maybe long enough, at least in the best cases...

[mandoman7]

And therein lies a paradox, at least for reaching a "popular" audience. There's a need for visual impact, something in some way dramatic, to arrest attention long enough to see something beyond that.

I believe that you can take an audience some place where they've never been, if you first gain their trust with famiiar and comfortable revelations. Maybe the problem with some modern art is that it starts with aggression and never gives you the chance to get on board with any kind of empathy.

But there are lots of examples in other art forms; theater for example, where the plot will begin with a series of familiar interactions to gain your interest. Then once the hook has taken hold, the odd revelations can begin that may take you to a place you wouldn't have gone to without the initial set-up. Another example is the musician who plays his known hits for a while and then announces the song off his new CD. Familiarity first to get them with you, then the other stuff.

Once you've shown your work for a while, you start to know which images are popular and also those that don't seem to be appreciated. You can then mount shows that have a portion of the known favorites, and then put the adventurous stuff in there somewhere to see how it goes over. Finding the place where your vision diverges from the mainstream does not have to be a crisis.

I would suggest that knowing we're on the same page is a critical issue in the beginning of nearly all interaction.

[Michael Alpert]

Once you've shown your work for a while, you start to know which images are popular and also those that don't seem to be appreciated. You can then mount shows that have a portion of the known favorites, and then put the adventurous stuff in there somewhere to see how it goes over. Finding the place where your vision diverges from the mainstream does not have to be a crisis.


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?

[mandoman7]

Please excuse me for being blunt. I read this kind of other-oriented approach often on this forum. It seems weak and mindless. That could well be. I don't even know what an "other-oriented approach" is.

Whatever happened to autonomy?

I'm not sure what you mean by this, either, but if you mean attitude, then it seems like there's plenty of that going around. Who wants to listen to an artist who thinks they have all the answers and haven't really given much thought to what they're doing? That's what's coming across in a lot of cases.

I don't think I've said anything particularly controversial, Michael. Just that I think it helps to know your audience, or at least give some thought to what you're trying to say and why someone else should be interested. If someone wants to take a big step and show something controversial, that's fine, but they do have some responsibility for the audience response on some level. Beyond that, who cares? Do what you want.

[paulr]

Great thread ... I had about ten things I wanted to say, but they've all been said by about ten different people.

I'm reiterating some things, I'm sure, but I want to suggest that of all the many things a landscape photograph might be about, drama is only one.

And drama is something that many serious landscape photographers have moved away from, since it's an emphasis that's been largely taken over by calendar photographers and others that they don't want to be mistaken for.

I've certainly seen photographs by serious contemporary artists that have dramatic skies ... but those pics don't typically dominate their bodies of work.

This conversation may have started when Weston teased Ansel, asking if he was heading out to make some more of those "ain't nature grand" photos.

[Michael Alpert]

John,

Your response to my rather harsh post completely disarms me. Although I am not in complete agreement with you, I understand that your approach is fine and well-intended. Autonomy does not mean attitude. Autonomy means inner independence. For a person trying to live within the Culture Industry, real autonomy is hard to achieve. It is a concept that Western philosophers have advocated and worried-about for centuries.

[rdenney]

John,

Your response to my rather harsh post completely disarms me. Although I am not in complete agreement with you, I understand that your approach is fine and well-intended. Autonomy does not mean attitude. Autonomy means inner independence. For a person trying to live within the Culture Industry, real autonomy is hard to achieve. It is a concept that Western philosophers have advocated and worried-about for centuries.

There is a balance point, it seems to me. I do photography mostly to please myself, and I do look for drama in the scene. I try to find drama that is inherent in the situation, rather than adding through purely photographic means, and there is a difference there.

While I do all that to please my inner muse, however muddled that muse might be, I am not immune to the responses from people who look at my photos. I'm pleased when a photographer praises one of my images, and my pleasure is proportional to how much I admire their images, or their taste in the images of others. To completely ignore any input at all from viewers goes beyond autonomy, it seems to me, and into disdain. That is, to me, always a dangerous attitude for an artist to have, despite that some who have had it turned out to be geniuses. I have no real need to lead the way to something new, but I would like people who view my photos to feel something they wouldn't have felt otherwise. I would be pleased if they thought that feeling was positive, and I'm convinced that many artists these days prefer it if the feelings their work evokes are negative or disturbing.

There is a big difference between drama that is applied and drama that is inherent in the subject. And there is a BIG difference between "drama" and "story", or between "drama" and "message". QT's images are to me powerfully dramatic in a way that makes me want to be where those pictures were made. The drama feeds that message, but it is just one tool for doing so.

Jiri's images, posted on this forum, don't have that sort of intensity. But in their peaceful renderings, they still have a dynamic and dramatic balance and tension, it seems to me, that draws me in. The message is different, the use of drama is different, but neither depend on purely photographic tricks to achieve that drama.

I doubt that either Jiri or QT really cared about me when they made those images, but I think both would be happy (as I would be with my photos) that someone like me viewing their images was drawn into a positive response. It seems to me that many search for autonomy so aggressively that they lose it, ending up being forced to please a different constituency.

I don't mine the minimalist approach, and sometimes I respond to a scene that way myself. Doing it that was as some sort of statement, though, seems as potentially contrived as thunderstorms spewing bolts of lightning.

Rick "who likes Vaughan Williams's third symphony as much as his fourth" Denney

[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.