Musings on landscape photography from a landscape ecologist's point of view

[pepeguitarra]

3. How do you perceive landscapes, and how does that influence your photography?

Or, if you're thinking what a friend told me yesterday, "You're over-analyzing. Just shut up and go take pictures," that's OK too. Thanks in advance for any ideas or discussion.

Coming from a hybrid engineering/science/artistic background, I remember one of my painting teachers who questioned me why I had drawn a tree in the middle of the painting. My answer was, because it was there! He explained that as an artist, I had license to do what I wanted, including removing the tree if that was going to help my composition. I was supposed to create my own composition. I do love the environment, work on it and help modify it in a sustainable way. However, when I see future photographs, I see forms, shapes, tones, lines, rhythm, and how best I can represent what I want to see in a photo using those elements of design. The challenge I have had several times is that nature has already done the composition for me, my job is to look for it and find it. While I photograph everything, I do feel attracted to shooting landscapes. Unlike photojournalists who can create their own composition (many times), my time is spent looking for that pre-arranged composition nature made for me. That is why I do not like digital photo manipulation and Photoshop. I have learned over the years, that my best photos are the ones of the subjects I like, so I try to shoot things that I like. I actually do my art for one client only: ME. So, I know what the client wants (most of the times). I do admire Ansel Adams because of that easiness to find the composition nature made for us. He had the right eye, and he was an ecologist.

[Daniel Casper Lohenstein]

In my avocation as a photographer, I understand a landscape as a particular location, or the view from a particular location, at a point in time.
In my vocation as an ecologist whose work and professional passions frequently focus on landscape-scale ecology, I understand a landscape as a space defined by the functioning of a dynamic set of systems of connected and overlapping processes. As a landscape ecologist, I don't tend to view the subject matter in most of what we call "landscape photography" as landscapes. I would be more inclined to categorize them as "nature photography," along with photographs of trees or flowers or wildlife. I've struggled with this dilemma on and off for over 30 years, and it's often been a factor in driving me to set aside landscape photography and focus on other genres instead.

However, in planning some projects for this summer, I really feel a desire to try capturing landscapes as I understand them from my ecologist's perspective. I'm particularly interested in making imagery that communicates how the moment in time at a given location is influenced by current or previous conditions - both natural and anthropogenic - at other locations, and in making imagery that communicates a process within a space rather than a condition at a location. I have some ideas for how to go about that. Most involve sequential series of images, but others are double exposures with combinations of fast and slow shutter speeds and/or differing DOF, or exposing the same sheet of film in a view camera then a pinhole camera, or using masks to create series of partially overlapped images on the same sheet of film. Needless to say, it will take some experimenting to get to my destination.

With that background, I'm interested in hearing any relevant thoughts, ideas, or discussion. Some particular questions I have are:

1. Do you have other suggestions for approaches I might consider to explore those concepts?
2. Do you know of other photographers doing work along these lines that I might look at for inspiration?
3. How do you perceive landscapes, and how does that influence your photography?

Or, if you're thinking what a friend told me yesterday, "You're over-analyzing. Just shut up and go take pictures," that's OK too. Thanks in advance for any ideas or discussion.

Hi,

what comes first into mind is some kind of this:

"Yet another tree snapping densitometry afficionado who claims to battle for ecology, traveling around with his giant SUV and wearing supertechnical plastic clothes from Bangladesh ..."

I think there are a few questions a landscape photographer can ask to himself, and you are in a very privileged situation as you are able to observe and reflect your own behavior as phtographer from a qualified outside view.

1. What is "landscape"? Untouched, first nature or man-made artefact, a second nature?

2. What belongs to the ecological system "landscape"? Only plants, animals, topography? Men, as protagonists or as reflectors?

3. According to 2: is an aesthetic view part of an ecological view / understanding? Is there a theory of types (Wittgenstein) in speech acts / photography acting and speaking about speech acts / photography of photography (meta)?

4. If landscape is an ecological system: does it have to be interesting / worth of beeing photgraphed / nice / amazing / unique?

5. If there are classical / conventional acclaimed and admired subjects like bizarre trees and singular rocks and wetted leaves in photography: are there conventional acclaimed subjects in ecology?

6. Do you want to break conventions in 5.?

7. Contradictio in adiecto: fine art and nature?

Again and again I repeat: look at the photography of Robert Adams. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Robert+...ages&ia=images - So, I don't think you over-analyze your photography. There are too much people shutting up and trying to achieve fine print perfection without aesthetical, anthropological and ecological interest.

Regards

[faberryman]

There is a long tradition of landscapes in Western Art. That you want to do something different, does not make them, nor those photographs which follow in that tradition, any less landscapes. I suggest you do what you want to do, and not worry about labels. Quibbling about labels won't get you very far, and certainly won't result in any images.

[Graham Patterson]

My original study and work was in geology, so when I look at a landscape I also think about tectonics, erosion/deposition, *and* the effect of people. I can't help it - that early training sticks! But I can conceive of covering all of that in a single image.

Now, ecology covers everything from the microscopic to how the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere affect the weather. And it is different from locale to locale. This has to be a portfolio, a book, or even a documentary. Showing the gestalt of a local ecology in one, or a few images, seems very, very difficult to me. But it may well be that I have been so skewed that I do not have the visual vocabulary to do it.

But one has nothing to lose by trying, especially with a topic that one finds interesting.

[CreationBear]

There are too much people shutting up and trying to achieve fine print perfection without aesthetical, anthropological and ecological interest.

But at the end of the day, how often are such Midrashim just positional goods for bourgeois gnostics?

[mmerig]

"interested in making imagery that communicates how the moment in time at a given location is influenced by current or previous conditions - both natural and anthropogenic - at other locations, and in making imagery that communicates a process within a space rather than a condition at a location."

Some particular questions I have are:

1. Do you have other suggestions for approaches I might consider to explore those concepts?
2. Do you know of other photographers doing work along these lines that I might look at for inspiration?
3. How do you perceive landscapes, and how does that influence your photography?

Your idea is interesting and challenging. My background is in vegetation ecology, usually on a community scale in a landscape context over long (decades to centuries) time-scales, so I think I see the documental or scientific aspect rather than an artistic one here.

Some comments:
Your intended audience is not clear -- at first it sounds like this is for yourself, but your "making imagery that communicates" implies there could be others. Who these could be will have a bearing on how well your images are understood, of course.

One aspect that I would find extremely difficult to handle is the "other locations" influence. Without a textual narrative, it will be hard to convey what is affecting the location in an image that is not even in it.

Nature in a landscape typically moves slower than the eye can see, so trying to convey a process that influences conditions over time will be hard to do in one image. Lots of people use sequential images (repeat photography) with years or a century or so between image capture. But maybe that is too easy.

Without "over-thinking" it, I can only come up with a few examples of showing process at a given time and place, and the big challenge and interest would be doing this for many places and types of process, and having a broad audience understand it.

As for your questions,

The first one is partially addressed above, for the second, I don't know of anyone doing what you intend to do (excepting repeat photography in the traditional sense), and sometimes I see landscapes in an aesthetic sense, sometimes as an expression of natural processes; I don't have as much interest in man-altered landscapes. Much of my photography is work-related as a vegetation ecologist, and have done some repeat photography over the years, since the about 1990 to present.

Thanks again for the interesting post.

[Alan Klein]

Being from Alaska, you have some of the most wonderful ecology to photograph. Get out there and do it you lucky guy. Just shoot and deal with categorizing it later if you want.

[Alan Klein]

Here's my only landscape shot of Alaska, the Hubbard Glacier. Is it landscape, well, it's a vanishing glacier? I guess the mountains might be landscape. Then again the water is not and either. But how would you categorize this photo Maybe we could then understand your concerns better.


Hubbard Glacier by Alan Klein, on Flickr

[pepeguitarra]

e·col·o·gy
/ēˈkäləjē/
noun
the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.
-----------------------------------------

An ecologist sees the landscape as a place where the ecological cycle of life happens. So, what does landscape photography have to do with anything other than represent that?

[bthphoto]

e·col·o·gy
a place where the ecological cycle of life happens

Actually, that's the antithesis of the landscape concept I'm after. As an ecologist, I see the landscape as a space that is defined by processes interacting over time, not a place where something happens. By way of analogy, consider a performance space, the size, shape, and character of which is defined by the performances conducted there, versus a stage that is defined by its construction and design, and which remains the same, regardless of the performances conducted there.

I understand that may sound to many as though I'm pressing some esoteric point of semantics. Some professional wildlife biologists have similar difficulties with concepts of landscape ecology and try to translate them into principles of population biology and animal behavior, because that's what they're familiar and comfortable with. However, the different is more than semantics, even if it's not immediately apparent to someone who hasn't spent 30 years contemplating it.

Consider a photograph of a stand of trees. It may be visually compelling, expansively composed, and evoke grand emotions associated with wilderness, purity, and adventure. However, could it have been conceived in a way that also leads a viewer to consider that its existence is dependent on nutrients that originated through decomposition at the top of the watershed, that its character is formed by the nature of the disturbance that set back its seral state, the seed source and distribution vectors available at the time, or that the community type it represents arrived and survived at that location through a series of events and processes that happened to synchronize at the right time? Or consider a photograph of a mountain stream. It may be visually compelling and evoke whimsical emotions associated with a sunny day on the stream bank. However, could it have been conceived in a way that also leads a viewer to consider its character as a constantly fluctuating artery transporting sediment and nutrients from one landscape position to another, providing perturbation to disturbance-dependent plant communities, and structural environments for aquatic organisms? Those are examples of the types of things I wish to be able put into imagery, and hopefully that will help illustrate the difference between a place and a process-defined space.