crafted ku # 2
Monday, May 7, 2007 at 08:35AM 
a balmy spring late afternoon • lick to embiggenAfter 4 straight years of of creating 'pure'- but not classic - landscape pictures, I am feeling restless.
As many here know, I have, to go along with my ku, added urban ku, with a little civilized ku thrown in, to my picturing repertoire. As I have done so I have also been exploring the photography of others with an eye towards those photographers whose work includes a generous heaping of landscape along with some reference to or actual inclusion of people.
My reason for this is neatly summarized by Richard Misrach when he stated that "There’s a long history of people photographing clouds for their beauty, their formal beauty, and I just don’t think you can do that any more. They’re still beautiful but there’s no way we can look at them instantly and see beautiful abstractions and forms of light, because ... those sunsets, those beautiful reds are coming out of the pollution. Some of the clouds out there are completely man made. It’s a different time and a different way of thinking."
Things are changing within the 'landscape'. More than ever, the effects of the hand of man are everywhere even though they may not be visually apparent. I can no longer glide across the surface of an Adirondack body of water without thinking about the pervasive level of pollution that exists in othewise 'pristine' appearing scenes. Many 'pristine' appearing wilderness lakes and ponds are, in fact, dead as a doornail.
In the past, my 'pure' - no apparent signs of man - landscape ku focused on the commonplace/everyday aspect of the landscape world. The reason was to draw attention to the pervasive and 'overlooked' natural world around us. An attempt to develop an awareness of the beauty which is found in the commonplace and foster a realisation that it is the commonplace that needs our protection and conservation, not just the iconic set-asides of 'monumental' and conventional grandeur.
I am not about to abandon that 'mission'. But, I feel that I can no longer exclusively picture the landscape with only a connoted presence of humankind. This does not mean that I will be seeking out obvious signs of pollution/destruction of the landscape. I am more interested in pursuing a sense of humankind interacting with the landscape - most propably sometimes for the good, sometimes for the not so good.
I also think that, for reasons attributable to a number of postmodernist influences, I will me 'manufacturing' or 'contriving' much of the human presence because I will trying to tell a story with photography which, while it may not be visually "truthful', will use the 'reality factor' of the medium to drive its point home.
Stay tuned. Please do not adjust your set.
BTW, I would very much be interested in reading about any thoughts you might have about your photography. Are you 'satisfied' with depicting just 'pure' landscapes? In today's reality, can 'pure' landscapes be anything more than a convenient un-truth which distracts us from the inconvenient truth of the state of the natural world? - this is a question, not an accusation.
Comments please.
gravitas et nugalis
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Reader Comments (16)
I've always thought of my landscapes as "man-altered" in some way - even before I'd heard the term New Topographics.
Coming from England, almost every "classic" English landscape you photograph is a result of the impact of man - forests cleared centuries ago, farmed moorland, bare fells, coastline etc etc.
I've always had something a sense of the original meaning of Landscape in what I've photographed (i.e. landscape = a patch or piece of cultivated/laboured land - though perhaps we are now in the phase of de-cultivation or post-cultivation...)
Most of my landscapes show the hand of man, but I live in a state that has one of the lowest percentages of public lands in the U.S., so getting images of a "pure" mother nature is, for all practical purposes, impossible. That's not to say I have NO pix devoid of the human touch, but not many.
"ne of the lowest percentages of public lands in the U.S."
North Dakota...Really????
All agriculture!
ohhh...right.They grow hockey players there right?
sorry to go off topic a bit...I really like crafted ku#2 for lots of reasons, but I also like the concept and look forward to more!
Mark, this post resonates with me for sure. Misrach's example of pollution-induced sunset color, your example of a lovely/pristine/dead lake, and Tim's example of the classic yet cultivated English landscape are just some of the many examples of how humanity has impacted the natural world. For good or for ill, sustainably or disastrously, and whether it is immediately visible in our images or not.
Niall Benvie talks about this sort of question; I've been reading some of his stuff lately. In his book "Creative Landscape Photography", one statement that stood out for me was: "... yet our view of nature is often a very selective one, making no clear reference to the presence or influence of people in the landscape. The slow, reluctant recognition of people as part of nature, which began in the nineteenth century, is today universally understood, though too often unacknowledged in our treatment of the natural world or pictorial representation of it. For the creative landscape photographer, there can be no more compelling story to tell than that of the need to respect the natural systems upon which we ultimately rely."
I think the concept of exploring "humankind interacting with the landscape" is a good one. Whatever the urgency, we probably don't need another barrage of images that grimly shout of stupidity, destruction and pending eco-disaster, what we need is balanced but "true" exploration of what it means to be human within and dependent upon the natural world, yet also with this incredible impact on it and responsibility for it. ("True" in the sense of my last post, something that impacts true understanding, even if the actual presentation is based in part on something not strictly factual.)
I've been thinking about this of late. I don't know what I'll do about it in my own photography, but I think I need to do something about it. I have every intention of still doing "pure" landscapes, even "pretty pictures" of an iconic nature simply because I enjoy them and they will sell. :) Nor would I go so far as to call such images "convenient un-truths", absent certain knowledge of an artist's intent to deliberately mislead or deny the other less pleasant parts of the truth. So I'd caution calling them untrue. But I do think of such photographs as only certain facets of the whole truth. Any artist must decide for him- or herself how many facets in what balance to address within their body of work.
Be that as it may, another facet that some of us need to address more in landscape work is, where are the people and what are they doing on/with/to the land? How is it good, bad or neutral? How has it changed? How does it need to change? What does it mean for the land, for us, and for the future?
BTW, I enjoy Crafted Ku #2. The light on and V shape of the trunks is visually magnetic, grabbing attention within the space. The child moving away towards the shadowed background then becomes apparent and intriguing, a small component of the frame that takes on disproportional meaning. Not that I know what the meaning is, but it makes me wonder. :)
To continue with my previous post, while most of my landscapes show, to some extent, the hand of man they do not, as a rule, show the man. To be honest, I have no desire to include people in my fine art work. I cannot explain why, except to note that I spent the past 21 year shooting people on a daily basis. The first 15 were as a photojournalist, the last 6, or so, as a university photographer.
Keeping people out of my pix might just be my way, along with shooting exclusively b/w, of keeping a divider between my work images and my personal images. No begrudging those that make an effort to include people, it's just something I want to do (for now, at least).
As Tim said, cultural landscapes are usually regarded as an Old World preoccupation, but there is plenty of paleobotany out there if you look. I'm pretty sure I have read somewhere that the patterns of flora found in the Eastern US woods are heavily influenced by native american land management techniques. The wildwood was gone long before the settlers arrived.
Most of the reading I have found for the USA centers on settler and colonial ecology, and later patterns of economic activity. As usual, those who did not write down their thoughts are assumed not to have had any. Herbert Gottfried turns up regularly in searches as someone worth reading. There is a useful summary of his concerns here:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/rdp/rdp1096/rdp1096c.pdf
Two of my favourite writers on UK or European aspects of the cultural landscapes are Oliver Rackham and W.S. Sebald. Rackham's "History of the Countryside" is a gem, although it's clear that his heart is really in the woodlands: fishponds get short shrift. There is an (abridged) illustrated version if you want to see what coppiced trees and lychets look like. W.S.Sebald's "Rings of Saturn", though sold as a novel, is a wonderful exposition of how landscapes and cultures interact: I wish I could take photographs which worked in a similar way.
For myself, the central problem in trying to communicate what I see and feel in the managed landscape is one of communication: how to get across my own deeply personal response to something without being too didactic, without lecturing or over-explaining. This is particularly true with pastoral landscapes because people already have such well-formed (fossilised) ideas about what should be shown and how they should react.
Oops. "Lynchets"
Hey Struan - I was just going to blog about Sebald...
Back OT - take the Yosemite Valley for example.
It wasn't a pristine piece of nature when the early euro-american nature worshippers discovered it - Bierstadt et al. (apart from the recent mining there which was ignored by them) it's character and landscape had been shaped by native american occupation and cultivation long before that. What they thought of as pristine nature untouched by human hand - wasn't.
Schama's Landscape and Memory while eclectic and elliptical is also a very good read on all this too.
Mark, I too read and re-read that Misrach interview and it kicked the rusty wheels in my head into motion. I think I'm in the bang-the-person-over-the-head camp and I plan on picturing blatant abuse of the land. I like Burtynsky's approach. I like the use of juxtaposition and contrasting extremes.
First of all, I love your picture Mark. It's an archetype of springtime!
Concerning your observation about the influence of mankind on the natural landscape, I had to smile a little. As you know I live in Holland, about which country the French said: "God created the world, and the Dutch created the Netherlands from the sea"." About half of our country once was sea,for not so long ago. For the rest my fellow countrymen left their their traces everywhere. So there's hardly any natural landscape to find here.
At the other hand: water- and airpollution decreased heavily since the 70-ties. So there might be hope.
But the only natural landscape we have, the sea is fished almost empty!
Does this influence my (landscape)photography. O yes, I think landscape is a combination of natural an humanmade elements.And that combination really interests me. I'm always trying to balance those two factors. Sometimes its more natural, sometimes more human. But to me my landscapephotography has to be a description and an interpretion of the DAILY landscape, even in my most romantic pictures. So no nostalgic longing back to Bob Rosses paradise.
I love flying over the Netherlands (or daydreaming with Google Maps). The field patterns in the successive waves of land reclamation are just wonderful.
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=53.310365,6.547165&spn=0.164103,0.448723&t=k&z=12&om=1
And then there's my favourite disappearing rivers in N. Germany.
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=54.347152,9.161224&spn=0.156089,0.286674&z=12
Were I rich, I would just idle around the sky taking photos of managed landscapes.....
If you're thinking about including people-ku, why not just try it?
Cheers,
Joe
p.s. Was that Misrach quote from before or after The Sky Book?
Hey Joe
the RM quote was from after the book