PH5LPE Book Test (Part 1)

1. Project 1: Thinking about landscape

Perhaps more than any other visual art approach, landscape is beset with traditions, conventions and preconceptions. Within specifically western cultures, populations at large have very particular ideas about what may or may not be considered a piece of ‘landscape art’. These ideas include what might constitute ‘suitable’ subject matter, technical aspects (canvas ratio and orientation, compositional depth, etc.), and where we might expect to encounter images of the landscape. Consider why you enrolled on this particular course. Was it because you wanted to learn how to make ‘better’ landscape photographs and had a clear idea of the kind of imagery you aspired to create? Perhaps you thought this course would provide opportunities to get out and about, away from the computer, enjoying some fresh air? Or maybe the genre, as you presently appreciate it, doesn’t particularly inspire you but you wanted to challenge yourself?

Part One explores some of the traditional conventions within landscape art, and, in particular, some of the technical aspects. Although this course encourages you to develop a more critical approach to landscape practice, however you choose to work, you should adopt a rigorous approach to developing your practical and research skills, and demand of yourself the highest technical standards you can manage. This level of commitment is reflected in the practice of the photographers you’ll encounter throughout the course.

Exercise 1: Preconceptions

This first exercise is notionally very simple: write 300 words that explore what the term ‘landscape’ means to you.

What does it immediately evoke?

What sort of images and ideas come to mind?

Are there certain sorts of landscapes that you have a preference for?

Which landscapes do you feel an urge to photograph?

Post the results on your blog and come back to them when you’ve completed the course, and reflect on whether what you’ve written still holds true. Consider what might have influenced your current understanding of landscape, place and environment. Also, write a few lines on why you chose to study this course and what you hope to learn from it.

The purpose of this activity is to get you thinking about traditions and conventions within landscape practice, and encourage you to consider why (and indeed whether) they exist. It will also serve as an interesting reference point when you come to the end of the course.

1.1. Early Photography and Painting

“Perhaps even more than the portrait, landscape photography remains encoded within the language of academic painting and the traditions of landscape art which developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

Clark, G., (1997) The Photograph, Oxford University Press: Oxford New York. p.55.

In some respects, you are at a similar point to the early pioneers of photography. As they experimented with the technical aspects of the medium in the mid nineteenth century, they explored the possibilities of applying these to a variety of subject matter. At this point in your studies, you too should be developing your understanding of different processes and techniques, and also challenging yourself to work with different subjects as often as possible.

To expand your knowledge, as when studying any subject, you need to look at what has been done before.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Lacock Abbey in Reflection (c. 1840) Bridgeman Images.

This is also an opportune moment to consider the genesis of the photographic process, and how closely early photography related to painting. It was largely due to William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800–77) frustration at being unable to draw or paint with any degree of accuracy that the positive-negative analogue process underpinning modern photography was conceived.

At Lake Como in Italy whilst on his Grand Tour of Europe in 1833, Fox Talbot decided he would find a way to fix the image within the camera lucida, which was an aid to drawing employed by painters, including Vermeer, and a popular gadget for the upper-class Victorian traveller. It would be overly simplistic to describe Fox Talbot as a frustrated, aspiring painter – he was a gregarious naturalist who made contributions to a range of disciplines. However, it is clear that many of his photographic experiments took as inspiration subjects and views that were typical of painting and other related media.

On the other side of the Channel the earlier experiments of Niépce (1765–1833) and Daguerre (1787–1851), announced just before Talbot’s calotype process, were greeted with mixed feelings by the art establishment. Ironically these were closer to the singular artefact that Talbot originally intended to make than his process, which allowed for the mass production of photographic images. Paul Delaroche (1797–1856) famously responded to Dageurre’s process with “From today painting is dead”. However, Delaroche did not mean this quite as literally as it might seem, and believed that photography would in fact be an invaluable asset to the painter, for example by doing away with the necessity for many preliminary sketches.

“In short, the admirable discovery of Monsieur Daguerre is an enormous service rendered to the artists.”

Paul Delaroche, quoted in Moholy (1939) Pg 39.

‘Service’ seems an important choice of word here; implying, perhaps, that the usefulness of photography was limited to simply aiding the painter, rather than a creative medium for artists in its own right.

Some well-known painters who fulfilled Delaroche’s prophecy and made use of photography in one way or another include Claude Monet, Edgar Dégas, Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat – as well as many contemporary practitioners, such as Francis Bacon, and David Hockney.

Gerhard Richter, Sea Piece (Wave) (1969) Bridgeman Images.

The contribution of Eugène Atget (1857–1927) seems to prove Delaroche’s point. Atget amassed an archive encompassing many thousands of glass plate negatives, consisting of views of the street life and architecture of Paris. Atget is an elusive figure within the canon of great photographers. He supported himself by selling prints to painters, architects and stage designers as reference images, and later in his life to museums and collections. These were sold as records, however, rather than artefacts. Uncelebrated during his lifetime, his work came to the attention of the surrealists in particular. John Szarkowski (1925–2007) played a major part in championing Atget’s photography by acquiring, exhibiting and publishing a major part of Atget’s archive whilst director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Others, notably Rosalind Krauss in her essay ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’ (1982), have been critical about the retrospective placing of Atget’s work (and that of other nineteenth-century photographers) within the context of the contemporary art gallery; one reason for this is that Atget didn’t demonstrate artistic judgement by discerning the strongest works from his vast collection.

Further Reading

For a thorough rebuff of Krauss’s argument, see Tod Papageorge’s lecture published in Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography (2011) New York: Aperture.

Eugène Atget, Pont Marie (1926) Bridgeman Images.

Similar debates continue today around the validity of photojournalism and reportage work and the ‘appropriation’ of photographs from archives and other, often personal, family collections, within the art gallery context. But in the late nineteenth century, the mechanical aspect of photography was the main setback in terms of its acceptance as a fine art medium. Ironically, a more ‘photographic’ way of seeing was actually already in place within painting, thanks to the use of the camera lucida and camera obscura, which allowed Cartesian perspective and photographic realism to become the dominant visual aesthetic of western visual culture.

Photography – or rather the apparatus of photography and its particular way of visualising the world – had been in place, steering the fine arts, long before Fox Talbot, Niépce and Daguerre.

Although today we generally think of photographic images in terms of art and design, early photography was only accessible to those with quite specialist knowledge of optics and chemistry (with the associated economic implications) and so was considered part of the realm of science and its related institutions. As you’ll see, photography came to fruition within the industrial and colonial age and cannot be separated from the social contexts of the period, including scientific exploration, the advent of mass media, migration and industrialisation.

Certainly photography fulfilled many useful functions of the time: primarily to illustrate things, but also to communicate information (journalism), produce mementos of loved ones, both living and dead, serve judicial institutions (e.g. criminal mugshots), and as a method of scientific inquiry (e.g. eugenics), to name but a few applications. Even nowadays, some major art institutions have been slow to acknowledge photography as a valid practice, either within the fine arts or in its own sphere, because of its mechanical and scientific origins as well as its functional omnipresence within society.

Exercise 2: Photography in the museum or in the gallery?

Read Rosalind Krauss’s essay ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View’ in Art Journal Vol. 42 (1982) Pg 311-319.

Summarise Krauss’s key points in your learning log (in note form) and add any comments or reflections.

2. Project 2: Pictorialism

“Pictorialism” is only an exaggeration of what the Photograph thinks of itself.”

Barthes, R., (1982) Camera Lucida. Vintage: London. p.31.

Some early photographers believed that whilst it had its practical applications, photography also had potential as an expressive medium, and that it was possible to conceive of photographs not just as images that rendered an objective, optical analogy of an object or a scene, but as subjective impressions – as pictures. Some painters, such as Oscar Rejlander (1857–75), saw the potential offered by photography and adopted it as their principal mode of expression. This debate came to a head in the 1890s when the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, founded by Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901), split from the organisation that would become the Royal Photographic Society, arguing that the organisation was too preoccupied with the scientific rather than the artistic side of photography.

The Linked Ring’s philosophy was that a photographic print could be considered as a work of art, despite the necessity for some kind of camera apparatus and related chemistry. The central element to the pictorial approach was not necessarily to do with the taking or making of the exposure, but lay in the printing process. Pictorialists explored alternative ways to subvert the mainstream industrial processes, which rendered continuous tones and optical clarity from glass negatives. Instead of applying the photosensitive coatings to the surfaces of their prints as evenly and uniformly as possible, pictorialists were keen to leave visible brushstrokes and marks on the print surface, revealing to the viewer the unique hand and artistry of the maker. Alternative processes included the bromoil, cyanotype and gum bichromate processes, which all rendered images with less clarity and imposed a more atmospheric aesthetic. Imitating the more impressionistic look of other two-dimensional media such as drawing, pastels and painting was also intentional.

The making of the actual negative was also explored, most notably by Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, who created some of the first photomontages by assembling multiple negatives to create a scene with the appearance of having been captured within a single exposure. This subversion of the then undisputed belief that photography stood for accurate, truthful representation of real events and subjects was certainly one of the more radical explorations of the medium at the time.

The themes and subjects explored, however, were conventional enough and did little to challenge the art establishment. Robinson’s Fading Away (1858) was a typical sentimental narrative, and Rejlander’s The Two Ways of Life (1857) was an allegorical scenario on a grand scale. The tableau was a fairly exceptional phenomenon in terms of the history of photography, and has been re-examined in more recent years by practitioners such as Jeff Wall. Graham Clarke summarises these two seminal works of the period thusly;

“Like Talbot’s images, they depend upon a known visual language and convention, as found in the work of contemporary painters like Millais and Holman Hunt. They are, as much as Talbot’s work, examples of the photograph as a painting.”

Graham Clarke (1997) Pg 44.

However, the artifice of the ‘photographs’ of Rejlander and Robinson was met with scornful disdain by contemporaries such as Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936), who strongly believed in a purer photographic way of seeing, more akin to human vision. Emerson is something of an exception, as he accumulated a large body of work on traditional rural practices around the Norfolk Broads that collectively serves as an invaluable document of the time. In recent years, Justin Partyka has made a similarly large body of work around East Anglia, which has been related to Emerson’s work.

The norm within pictorialism was, and remains, the production of singular, one-off pieces, designed to convey the maker’s mood at the moment it was made and to satisfy the eyes of the viewer. The singular-image tradition (as opposed to working with series or sequences of images) is still upheld by ‘photography salon’ type organisations, camera clubs, competitions and other societies.

Peter Henry Emerson, A Marsh Farm (c.1886) Bridgeman Images.

Exercise 3: Establishing Conventions

Find some examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape paintings.

List all of the commonalities you can find across your examples. Where possible, try to find out why the examples you found were painted (e.g. public or private commission). Your research should provide you with some examples of the visual language and conventions that were known to the early photographers.

Annotate your examples and post them to your learning log.

Now find some examples of landscape photographs from any era that:

conform to these conventions,

break these conventions.

Annotate these examples with your notes/observations and post them to your learning log.

2.1. Modernist approaches

“Do not call yourself an ‘artist-photographer’ and make ‘artist-painters’ and ‘artist-sculptors’ laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother.”

P H Emerson, cited in Trachtenberg. A, Classic Essays on Photography (1980) New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books. Pg 100.

As you’ve seen, Emerson sought to distance photography from painting and began to explore and exploit the unique possibilities of the new medium. Whilst his photographs of rural life in East Anglia are in line with an idyllic, pastoral view of Victorian rural life, his approach and – more importantly – his view of what artistic photography could and should be, represented a change in direction for photography as art. He scorned the photographic tableau, which employed the modes of production of studio-based painters, and championed instead technical excellence whilst working from life, in the field. He departed from making softer, stylised photographs and began to make pictures that were sharply focused throughout the image. This implied a ‘democracy’ of the frame, where all of the subjects are on an equal footing in terms of their relation to other elements in the picture, and in their importance to the formation and interpretation of the scene.

It wasn’t until considerably later that this kind of simpler, yet more technically robust approach was properly defined. This is attributed to Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) who became editor of American Amateur Photographer in 1893 and set up the highly influential magazine Camera Work in 1902. Stieglitz’s contemporaries, who included Clarence White (1871–1925) and Edward Steichen (1879 – 1973), were known as the ‘Photo-Secessionists’, implying an ambition for photography to ‘secede’ from previously accepted ideas about photography, that is, serving purely practical purposes. Like their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere, the impressionistic approach was their visual style of choice. Through discourse within Camera Work and the associated 291 gallery, Stieglitz and his peers began to challenge the style and philosophy of pictorialism. The fact that it wasn’t only photography that was exhibited at the 291, and that modern artists like Picasso, Rodin and Matisse were also represented, marked a significant strategy to align photography with the contemporary art world, rather than to imitate traditional styles, as was practised elsewhere.

“The advocates of pure or straight photography feel that by manipulating a print you lose the purity of tone which belongs especially to the photographic medium in trying to get effects that can be more satisfactorily obtained by the painter’s brush.”

Clark, G., (1997) The Photograph, Oxford University Press: Oxford New York. p.168.

Alfred Stieglitz, Cubist and other cultural works of art assembled after the 291 Picasso-Braque exhibition (1915) Bridgeman Images.

1912 can certainly be identified as a defining moment within the history of pictorialism. In that year Stieglitz exhibited a collection of works, including one of the most celebrated photographs of all time, The Steerage. The image depicts, with clear photographic realism, a group of refused would-be immigrants boarding the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II to return to Europe. For Stieglitz, the image encapsulated an abstract collection of forms and tones alongside a sense of the emotional response he felt towards the scene he had witnessed.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage (1907) Image via Wikipedia.

This retained the pictorialists’ desire to render an emotional response within a photograph, but Stieglitz believed he had achieved this by embracing photography’s unique ability to reproduce optical clarity captured within a split-second. The term ‘straight photography’ was used to define this approach, and it marked a radical shift towards celebrating photography (within creative circles) for what it really was. The show was positively received, but photography still had a long way to go before being accepted more widely.

2.2. Smaller Apertures and Visualisation

Two of the best-known figures within landscape photography, Edward Weston (1886–1958) and Ansel Adams (1902–84), are indebted to the influence of Stieglitz and the Photo-Secessionists.

Weston was an aspiring artist who survived by taking portraits professionally and churning out un-challenging picturesque pictorial works. Following a meeting with Stieglitz, Weston changed direction; he took to the precisely composed, sharp and very photographic aesthetic as a valid form of artistic expression, and brought it back home to California. Ansel Adams had a similar chance encounter with Paul Strand (1890–1976). It wasn’t until 1932, however, that the f/64 group was formalised in San Francisco. The name referred to the minimum aperture of the lens (although this varies between lens designs), which yields the greatest depth of field and best optical quality throughout the image. The idea was to distinguish themselves from the softer, impressionistic imagery of traditional pictorialists.

The relationship that Adams and Weston had to the print was very different to earlier approaches. For the pictorialists, mastering control of the print was fundamental to their concept of artistic expression – understanding the different processes, techniques and chemistry, and often leaving a trace of the photographer’s brushstrokes within the emulsion on the surface of hand-coated paper. Using 10” x 8” large format cameras (sometimes called ‘plate cameras’, which take a single image at a time as opposed to being loaded with a roll of film on which multiple frames can be shot) Adams’ and Weston’s negatives were ‘contact printed’ onto a sheet of high-quality commercially available photographic paper. Contact printing is a relatively straightforward process and, although it was always the main method for printing from larger negatives (and remains so, particularly with ‘alternative’ processes such as the cyanotype), it is different to the method of ‘enlarging’ images taken on smaller formats by projecting the image onto paper, which actually allows for greater manipulation of the final print.

This meant that for the f/64 photographers, mastering the exposure in camera was essential to their creative process. This was where the real artistry lay: in the photographic technique and the pre-visualisation of the image in the first instance. The contact print is a precise analogy of the negative as made by the photographer. This approach is the antithesis to how many view photography nowadays (professionals, amateurs and the public alike) – that getting the shot right in the first place doesn’t really matter, as practically anything is easily rectified in the digital darkroom. Although as a community f/64 was not long-lived (it dispersed in 1935 due to the migration of its members away from San Francisco and the general pressure of the economic depression), the legacy of this group and its members was and continues to be widely felt.

Further Reading

Ansel Adams is best known for his landscapes of Yosemite National Park. Adams is often mistakenly credited for contributing to the area being defined as a national park, which was actually declared in 1890. However, he was actively committed to the conservation of the park. His exceptional technical skill, applied to these spectacular locations, continues to impress itself upon newcomers to photography as well as on more seasoned, critical viewers.

You can read more about Adams influence on Yosemite in: Wells. L, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (2011) London: I.B.Tauris. Pg 136-140.

Ansel Adams, Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park (c.1937) Image via MoMA.

Photographs of Yosemite certainly dominate Adams’ oeuvre, and to an extent overshadow the work of the other members of f/64. Like Adams, his f/64 contemporaries – most notably Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) – were drawn to the realism of natural forms, rather than the grittier realism of urban life that appealed to their Photo-Secessionist peers on the other side of the country. Weston and Cunningham were, arguably, more experimental in their use of photography, however. In the majority of Adams’ landscapes, the formal elements (e.g. use of perspective and composition) are not much more of an extension of painterly traditions. Weston and Cunningham expanded the photographic way of seeing further by cropping into views to make more abstract photographs. Weston’s often-reproduced Dunes, Oceano (1936) is a typical example of this. However, as Clarke points out, the image explores much more than simply the texture and form of the landscape:

“... the photographer takes an extreme American terrain (a desert) and makes of it something other than its physical appearance. The camera transposes it as part of a larger mythology of spiritual and mysterious presence. Its two primary elements, sand and light, are both subject to continuous change, but the photograph fixes a moment from that continuum and celebrates it as part of a unity of time and space, without (on the surface) reference to the social or political... Weston has made the most barren of substances, sand, into something remarkable in its effect as a visual spectacle. The play of light and pattern, of texture and contrast, express an almost metaphysical presence.”

Clark, G., (1997) The Photograph, Oxford University Press: Oxford New York. p.63.

Key to the method of the f/64, which has remained with many of today’s photographers, is the idea of ‘visualisation’ of a photograph. Adams describes this as:

“The process of “seeing” the final print while viewing the subject. With practice the photographer can anticipate the various influences of each stage of the photographic procedure, and incorporate these intuitively in visualizing the finished image.”

Adams, R (1983) Beauty in Photography. Aperture: New York p.177.

This approach differs significantly from the idea of a photographer’s roaming eye fixed to a camera viewfinder, waiting for pictures to jump into it from the activity of the scene before him. As your own photographic skills have developed, you’ve almost certainly become more accurate at anticipating how the thing you photograph will look when you review the image on a digital camera, or when you have your film processed. Understanding how lenses of different focal lengths function is one important factor in discerning between the human binocular perception of a scene, and the photographic, monocular way of seeing. Also, knowledge of exposure – how you can manage the different tones in a scene, from darkest to brightest – is essential here, and this was a particular area of technical research that Ansel Adams focused on.

Edward Weston, Dunes, Oceano (1936) Image via MoMA.

3. Project 3: The Beautiful and the Sublime

“Beauty and art were once thought of as belonging together, with beauty as among art’s principal aims and art as beauty’s highest calling.”

Beech, D., (ed) (2009) Beauty (Documents of Contemporary Art) London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. p.12.

In his introduction to Beauty, an anthology of essays on the subject, Dave Beech asserts that art and beauty have a special relationship. This is perhaps most acutely felt within the genre of landscape, and the representation of nature more broadly. Think back to the beginning of Part One, when you were asked to consider why you elected to study this particular course. Surely we all share a desire to capture, or render photographically, a sense of what impresses upon our senses most strongly and most positively?

Beauty is very much an aspect of aesthetics or, more simply, our ‘senses’. Sensuous music and sounds, luxurious textiles and textures, pleasant flavours and smells are all things of beauty. There are essentially two perspectives on beauty. The first sees beauty as something universal within human nature. Mathematical and geometric evaluations of pieces of music, human features and pictorial composition have been used to support this point of view. The other perspective argues that a sense of beauty is in fact subjective and unique, as summarised by the cliché that ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’. Beauty is almost always a matter of cultural identity as well; what is considered to be beautiful to one group of people might be vulgar and repulsive to another.

Beauty is often confused or conflated with the notion of taste. We think of taste as something that is culturally specific; for instance, a certain action within one group of people might be seen as inappropriate within another. As Peter Corrigan puts it;

“far from taste being something bizarrely individual, ineffable and innocent, it seems to lie at the very basis of social life, orchestrating it in a way that should ensure harmony and social order, while at the same time reflecting social struggles.”

Corrigan (1997) Pg 32.

Interestingly however, in A Philosophical Enquiry (1990), Edmund Burke (1729-97) describes taste as something that is in fact universal, “...the same in all human creatures” relating this specifically to flavours. He describes how we use these descriptions to apply to other, unrelated things, for example, “...sour temper, bitter expressions...a bitter fate...” in contrast to “a sweet disposition, a sweet person, a sweet condition”.

The relevance of beauty as something that relates to aesthetic harmony within the arts has been hotly contested throughout the twentieth century and continues to be a topic of discourse today. Modernist debates and Marxist critiques of beauty have made it a political matter – a bourgeois preoccupation and even a tool of repression. Dadaists like Otto Dix (1891–1969) satirised images of conventional, romantic notions of beauty and fascist ideals of perfection in his politically challenging paintings made around the dawn of the Second World War. The conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) confronted the relevance of the relationship between beauty and art by controversially placing a signed (with a pseudonym) porcelain urinal within a gallery context (Fountain, 1917). Duchamp intended viewers to consider the ideas behind the art, rather than just the object itself or the formal qualities of its representation. By appropriating an object completely and holding up an object of pure function, he divorced it from the troubling matter of aesthetics.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917) Image via creative commons.

3.1. Perspectives on Beauty and the Sublime

Robert Adams has written extensively and insightfully on beauty and photography, from the perspective of a landscape practitioner. He asks:

“Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.”

Adams, R. Beauty in Photography (1996) New York: Aperture. Pg 25.

Herein, perhaps, lies the binary distinction between beauty and the sublime.

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, [1757] (1990) Pg 53.

Whether consciously or not, the sublime is something we’ve all personally encountered, although perhaps without necessarily being able to fully appreciate or articulate what it is. Much like the idea of beauty, the sublime is a slippery term, often taken for granted or misused. It is a concept that lies behind the motivation of much landscape work, in painting and photography as well as other media.

Certainly, early pictorialist as well as topographic photographers inherited the preoccupation of the sublime from eighteenth- and nineteenth century painting. The concept of the sublime relates to the human psyche (although Edmund Burke used the word ‘soul’), which is equally fluid and an ongoing topic of discussion.

Where beauty might dominate the realm of aesthetics (taste, touch, sight), the sublime occupies the imagination. There are no such things as ‘sublime objects’, but when something triggers a psychoactive response in an individual – for example, a mountain, a waterfall or a great canyon – then you are in the presence of ’the sublime’. As Liz Wells succinctly describes it:

“...the sublime is associated with awe, danger and pain, with places where accidents happen, where things run beyond human control, where nature is untameable.”

Wells, L. Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (2011) London: I.B.Tauris. Pg 48.

As with the concept of beauty, the sublime has been subject to discourse over the centuries, even millennia. One of the earliest thinkers on the topic was the Greek philosopher Longinus (c.300 AD), whose treatise related to literature rather than to visual works. In addition to Burke, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Georg Hegel (1770–1831) and Johann Schiller (1759–1805) all made substantial contributions to the field.

Perhaps the most significant development of our understanding of the sublime in relatively recent years is owed to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who defined the sublime as not just an aspect of aesthetics, but of psychoanalysis. Freud related the sublime to his idea of ‘the uncanny’, which refers to a feeling of discomfort when seeing something that is simultaneously familiar and alien. Freud’s choice of vocabulary with which to describe this principle, ‘Das Unheimliche’, relates to being ‘not home’ or contrary to what is familiar – not just in terms of location, but also in terms of identity. The un-settlement, or more accurately, cognitive dissonance that can result from an encounter with the uncanny is what can stir the sense of the sublime.

“In many cultures, a confrontation of the sublime is a requisite rite of passage. Within my project, Threshold Zone (2008) I explored and attempted to rationalise my own response to both man-made and naturally formed underground spaces. I felt curious, and was determined to make some work in these spaces, but I was also acutely phobic of being underground, particularly when working alone.

These spaces were generally physically unfamiliar to me, yet my mind was filled with familiar fairy tales and contemporary narratives relating to the dangers that lurk below ground in the darkness. I channelled these feelings into a creative strategy, in which I placed my camera in a space referred to as the ‘twilight’ or ‘threshold zone’ of a cave; the area that lies somewhere between the ‘entrance zone’ of a cave that receives some daylight, and the ‘dark zone’ that receives none. The resulting, highly contrasting images which are presented as back-lit light-boxes, I hope illustrate my encounter with the sublime.”

Jesse Alexander, Course Co-author.

Jesse Alexander, Box Freestone Quarry, from the series Threshold Zone (2008) Image courtesy of the artist.

The sublime was a particularly common theme throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth- century painting and literature. An example of this is the German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774–1840) often-referenced Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), also known as Wanderer above the Mist. The anonymous male figure encounters the majesty and awe of the scene and the terrain before him, but we can never really be sure if he is truly bold and fearless of what lies in front of him, or whether he is terrified. Photographic artist Helen Sear, whose ongoing practice explores relationships between nature and culture, references Friedrich’s Wanderer in her two series of digital images, Inside the View (2004–08) and Beyond the View (2009–10). In these works, Sear layers different perspectives of views, and with a time- consuming digital (manual) process, picks out holes to form an intricate, lace-like patina across the ‘surface’ of the image. The obscurity of the resulting image – a simultaneous combination of a partially visible female subject and multiple views of a place – demands the eye to render some visual order from this beautiful chaos and, in so doing, establishes for the viewer a challenging inquiry into the sublime.

Louise Ann Wilson argues that a ‘feminine sublime’ has actually existed for generations, but has tended to be marginalised by more masculinist perspectives. Her conference presentation Dorothy Wordsworth’s Legacy: A feminine ‘material’ sublime approach to the creation of Applied Scenography in mountainous landscapes, says that a uniquely feminine approach to mountains has;

“remain[ed] under-recognised and on the fringes of mainstream dialogues, which – historic and present day – are dominated by masculine ‘transcendent’ sublime accounts, encounters and endeavours. The presentation explores how in Early Romanticism the concept of the masculine sublime – an intellectual and spiritual experience that transcends physical matter – came to dominate discourses on landscape. It then proposes how, in contrast, the feminine ‘material’ sublime is concerned with being located in and materially present to the physical landscape, not as a place from which to escape or disappear but to ‘reappear’ – a process she... argue[s] is transformative and therapeutic.”

Louise Ann Wilson, Into the Mountain- A Meet (2018) Into the Mountain.

Exercise 4: Perspectives on the Sublime

Is it reasonable to suggest that the sublime remains a gendered concept? Are we becoming more open to questioning previously held assumptions (unconscious) about whose view we are being asked to take?

Contribute to the conversation on this topic with fellow students and tutors on the VLE, or via this Student Forum thread.

Casper David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) Courtesy of Kunsthalle Hamburg.

3.2. ‘The Sublime’ Historically

The sublime is not simply confined to visual art works. Examples of the sublime within mythology and narrative are rife throughout all cultures. The terrifying aspect of the sublime is no more clearly expressed than in the Hollywood disaster movie, both the historically based and more fantastic. In A Night to Remember (1958) and the more recent (and yet somehow more dated) Titanic (1997) the audience is subjected to the peril of the sub-zero conditions of the Atlantic Ocean. Environmental apocalypses have been explored in movies such as Day after Tomorrow (2004) and The Road (2009). A viral epidemic threatens to wipe out mankind in Outbreak (1995), while in Arachnophobia (1990) it is spiders. (Burke recognised small animals and insects in relation to the sublime.) Perhaps most terrifying of all, screenwriters have tapped into our fear of the vastness of outer space and the possible dangers it might pose in movies such as Independence Day (1996) and Deep Impact (1998).

Further Research

Search ‘The Sublime’ on the Tate website to find a whole host of material regarding the subject.

Exercise 5: The Contemporary Abyss

Read Simon Morley’s essay ‘Staring into the Contemporary Abyss’ published on the Tate website.

This should provide you with a good overview of the sublime as a theme within visual culture.

Next, choose any body of work that you feel explores the sublime. It may be a photographic project, a work of literature, cinema, or any other medium.

In your learning log, write at least 300 words describing how you believe the work you’ve selected relates to the sublime. Use Morley’s text to support your argument.

3.3. The Zone System

Human vision is far superior to any camera, at least at the time of writing, in terms of the range of tones it can encompass within a single field of vision. Certainly cameras are getting much better at ‘seeing’ in the dark, with enhanced clarity at much higher ISO settings; however they can’t cope as well as humans can with both dark and light simultaneously. If you’re still not convinced, look out of a window from the back of a room, so that you can see whatever is on the other side of the window and some of the room simultaneously. This demonstration works best on a dull day with no lights on in the room. You should be able to see the view from the window clearly, and if you look around the room, you should be able to make out details throughout the room, even in the darkest corners. Now compare how your camera sees what you see. If you take a light reading and make an exposure for the view outside the window, the room will be very dark, if not completely devoid of any detail; if you measure and expose for inside the room, the view on the other side of the window will be completely over-exposed, with ‘blown-out’ highlights and no detail. The scenario described here is one of ‘high dynamic range’, and many of you will be familiar with the process of combining several digital images of the same scene made at different exposures. When this process is carried out with restraint and sensible artistic judgement, it can be a very useful tool to extend the tonal range of an image, but sadly many less discerning amateurs and professionals alike use the method rather unnecessarily and over-enthusiastically.

Digital HDR techniques and related software can be seen as an extension of much earlier attempts to achieve greater tonal range in finished photographs. Early photographic emulsions were considerably more sensitive to blue light than to other colours on the spectrum of visible light. This meant that landscape photographs, particularly those made on clear days, had completely blown-out skies as the negatives were much denser in the skies than the foreground, resulting in absence of detail in the (positive) print. Some photographers – most notably Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) – made a library of photographs of clouds and skies, which would be layered with a negative where the sky detail was absent in order to make photographs that were closer to human perception.

The Zone System, developed by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer (1889–1963) is essentially a way to visualise how the tones visible in a scene can most effectively be rendered onto the photographic negative. Adams and Archer sought to refine and better manage some of the many variables that affected exposure, such as developer formulae and development times, so that the photographer could more strictly control the contrast and range of tones rendered. They contrived a (slightly confusing!) eleven-point scale of tonal range, ‘0’ being pure black, ‘X’ being pure white.

In reality, both film and digital sensors can render many more ‘zones’ than just eleven. However, what the Zone System scale reminds us is that a light-meter, whether hand-held or built into a camera, is objective. Whether you point it at a dark or a bright subject, it perceives and provides an exposure value at middle grey (Zone V). Therefore, the photographer must decide where in the scene they wish Zone V to be in order to control exposure properly.

This principle may be something you’re already familiar with. However, what the practice of all of the photographers you’ve encountered so far teaches us is that, unlike other areas of photography such as portraiture, where the sitter’s gesture is perhaps more important than the exposure, or a busy street scene where we might excuse the rushed framing of an enthusiastic street photographer, landscape is generally a slower paced, more patient and, in some senses, meditative practice. As such, its viewers and critics are much less forgiving of technical mishaps and expect more from the photographer.

Exercise 6: Zone System in practice

Demonstrate your awareness of the principles of the Zone System and your ability to take accurate light readings by producing three photographs taken in relatively high dynamic range, i.e. contrasting light conditions.

Make sure that your exposure choice renders as much detail as possible in the brightest and darkest areas of the photograph.

Collate your work and any reflections in your learning log.

3.4. Photography and the City

Louis Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple (1838) Image via Creative Commons.

Since the very beginnings of the medium, the city has provided opportunities for photography, both for landscape images and also as a rich resource of other potential subject matter. One of Daguerre’s first exposures, and the oldest surviving example of its kind, was the view from his studio window. Boulevard du Temple (1838) is also the first example of a photograph of a person. Unlike the rest of the people, carts and wagons that must have been visible from the window, the tiny figure towards the lower left of the frame with his foot perched was only rendered on the plate because he remained relatively still whilst having his shoes shined during Daguerre’s ten-minute exposure. Like Fox Talbot on the other side of the Channel, Daguerre also turned to still life subjects to experiment and practice with. One of the valuable lessons we can draw from both photographers is their example of engaging with their own surroundings photographically. Although Talbot did photograph beyond his home at Lacock Abbey, Clarke is critical of some of these works. If we needed a good example to highlight the limitations of the common misconception, that in order to take interesting photographs one has to travel, surely this is it.

“The images of Paris remain passive and mute, and establish not so much the tourist eye-view, hungry for sights to record, as one that was looking for things to record... his London images, for example Nelson’s Column (1843), keep the city at a distance and follow the eye in its way within the urban world.”

Clark, G., (1997) The Photograph, Oxford University Press: Oxford; New York. p.77.

The city is a type of space that we are more likely to associate with documentary photography – or, more specifically, street photography – than the landscape genre. Photography has often been used to explore and expose the darker, seedier side and moral imbalance within cities. John Thomson’s (1837–1921) major project documenting daily urban life, Street Life in London, was published in eleven parts between 1876 and 1877. On the other side of the Atlantic, the body of work How the Other Half Lives (1890), made by Jacob Riis (1849–1914), was a substantial photographic investigation of the impoverished parts of New York City, and is often cited as an example of a morally inspired social documentary that had a direct and lasting effect upon the political context of the time.

Photographers all over the world continue to explore the seedier – as well as complex – nature of conurbations. A recurring line of investigation is that of the city, not just as one complete inter-connecting unit, but as layers of different cities or cities within cities. Sometimes these elements are briefly exposed to one another, but often they are designed to restrain their inhabitants from uncomfortable contact with each other. This is a recurring theme in fictional narrative, for example the film In Time (2011). In this science fiction thriller set in a dystopian future, the protagonist travels through the different levels of strictly controlled and guarded zones to escape from the ghetto and seek revenge upon the most affluent who live in luxury at the cost of the poorest.

Extending some of the themes of his earlier works around history, memory and disputed territories, Paul Seawright travelled to major cities in sub-Saharan Africa, exploring communities on the fringes of conurbations, both geographically and socially, for his series Invisible Cities (exhibited 2007). Invisible Cities (the title is appropriated from the book by Italo Calvino (1972)), comprises varied photographs, some of which are recognisable as landscape pictures, whilst others might be considered works of environmental portraiture. None of the titles of the photographs refer to specific locations or people, which emphasises the indistinct nature and the anonymity of these places and their inhabitants. The photograph, Bridge (2006) perhaps communicates some of these ideas most acutely.

The road bridge, presumably an interchange of major roads on the edge of a city, cleanly divides the frame in two. A yellow bus heads along the road towards the city from, we might suppose, the sanctuary of the suburbs, taking children to school or their parents to work. The sky is empty and bleak, which is echoed by the detritus that sprawls below, shielded by the flyover from the view of the bus’s passengers. The composition and social sentiment echoes Stieglitz’s The Steerage, made 90 years earlier. You’ll return to the city as both a motif and a means of making work when you look at psychogeography in Part Two, but for now, it suffices to say that the city is a valid and exciting subject for landscape work.

Paul Seawright, Bridge, from the series Invisible Cities (2006) Image courtesy of the artist.

4. Assignment One: Beauty and The Sublime

Produce a series of 8 photographs that convey your own interpretation of beauty and/or the sublime within the context of landscape. You may choose to support, question or subvert accepted definitions of these terms.

Your images don’t necessarily have to be made in the same place or type of location; however, they should complement one another and attempt to function as a cohesive series.

Introduce your work with a supporting text (around 500 words) that:

Describes how you interpreted this brief.

Describes how your work relates to aspects of photography and visual culture addressed in Part One.

Evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of your work, describing what you would have done differently or how you might develop this work further.

Identifies what technical choices you made to help communicate your ideas, and also references relevant artists and photographers who have influenced the creative direction of your project.

Explains your reasons for selecting particular views, and arriving at certain visual outcomes.

Submit your work and your supporting text, as well as extracts from your learning log or link to your blog, to your tutor by the method you’ve agreed with them. Make sure that all your work is carefully labelled with your name, student number and the assignment number.

You don’t need to wait for your tutor’s response before starting Part Two.

Reflection Task

Before you send this assignment to your tutor, take a look at the assessment criteria again. Reflect on how you think you are doing against the criteria and add notes to your learning log.