16 September 2009
12 September 2009
Charlie Dutton - On the Nature of Being
Surfaces and planes, in superimposition, a half relfection evocative of flame, of searing, perhaps just more generally of unnatural. A surface obscuring. The effect is suggestive, tactile, familiar, ambivalent. Non?
More of Charlie Dutton's (UK) work here
11 June 2009
14 May 2009
Fragment
"Step carefully, and not much ahead",
I walk not close to the curb.
This fragment I remember
When I stray too far.
The words repeating: "Slow down".
And touch of guiding hand
On shoulders too brash to know for sure
When right to speak,
With whom to stand.
For what was done for me
Is what she, at pains, does still.
And yet still will extending forward
Beyond parental perpetual
'Til some time still distant
I stand alone, weakened without her,
Remembering this fragment.
Like discarded notebook entries
Now found, convey meaning.
Or crumbled papers from last fall
Pressed flat, reveal the cipher:
It's all for us, and that's it all.
20 April 2009
Digestible photographic gems (1)
Found Elad Lassry’s images through iheartphotography blog. Immense. I think it might be full of references. I think it might be full of “oh cool, perhaps I could write an essay about that”.
27 February 2009
22 February 2009
17 February 2009
New Post!
We had a very special delivery yesterday. Ella May. Gawd bless 'ol Longshanks. xxx
14 February 2009
9 February 2009
5 February 2009
2 February 2009
Mike Massaro - Image Whisperer!
Mike's a past/future student friend, his work is cool, you check it?
31 January 2009
The Image as Analysis
Barthes in Rhetoric of the Image1 refers to the commonly perceived weakness of images in conveying meaning; firstly to the linguist’s refusal of the status of language to any system the lacks a digital code with which to re-articulate or convey in an intelligible format that wishing to be communicated; and secondly to the problem of the photograph’s closeness to reality2. However, he valiantly (if not without qualification) rises to the challenge:
Now even – and above all if – the image is in a certain matter the limit of meaning, it permits the consideration of a veritable ontology of the process of signification. How does meaning get into an image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?3
And it is undeniable that the subjection of photographic images to semiotic analysis has proved an immensely powerful tool for media studies and has found use in a variety of institutions ranging from the commercial world of advertising to the military academy4.
In Rhetoric of the Image Barthes chooses an advertisement to illustrate his notions of the denoted and connoted messages and ideology in images. This seemingly simplistic or straightforward choice is a conscious one for Barthes because ‘the signification is undoubtedly intentional’5. But what of more complex images? Can a semiological method illuminate meaning where it is evidently less ‘undoubtedly intentional’? Images without the relatively clearer ideologies that advertising (or propagandist) images possess arguably evade such a deduction of meaning, and as such can present difficulty for a semiology of the image. Consideration of Arbus’ Identical Twins can perhaps draw out at least one of the limitations of the application of semiotic analysis to images Barthes alludes to; to throw light on the ‘limit of meaning’ to which he refers.
Figure 1 Diane Arbus Identical Twins, 1967
Building on the early work of Sausurre and Peirce, Barthes played a central role in the development of semiotics as a useful analytical tool. Acknowledging that ‘our perception and understanding of reality is constructed by the words and other signs which we use in a social context’6, he applied semiotic method to (amongst other mediums) images.
Literally speaking – denoted messages
The image Identical Twins is constituted of the iconic signs of two girls of close resemblance, or twins, standing on a brick path in front of a white wall. Barthes’ describes the denoted message as ‘a kind of Edenic state of the image; cleared utopianically of its connotations…radically objective…innocent’7; it is ‘what is left in the image when the signs of connotation are mentally deleted’8. It is for this reason that nothing further than this observation should be attempted. To make that step would require something more than the ‘first degree of intelligibility’9, which for the moment, and however artificial the ensuing discussion, must be ignored. Other denoted messages include the girls’ shared clothes – dresses with cuffs and collar, socks and hair bands – identically worn. They have identical hairstyles. The girls stand side by side, facing directly at the camera. One girl smiles, the other does not.
Barthes’ key observation with regard to the denoted image is to its ‘special role in the general structure of the iconic message’10:
The denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation, which is extremely dense11
So we are not simply then looking at a picture of two girls. In the image we would hope to find the meanings behind the denoted messages. Those twins, in that situation, should mean something.
In other words - connoted messages
The literal/denoted message carries with it its simple labelling function: “these here are identical twins”. But it is accompanied by connotations suggested by the twins – and furthermore: connotations suggested by this particular denotation of identical twins. It is important to note that the image does not denote any two people. Indeed, it is not an image of two sisters or even two non-identical twin sisters: each of these different denotations would carry different associations, different connotations.
So, what connotations are there in this image? And what then to do with these connotations? There seems a multitude of connotations in any image, only some will be visible to any individual reader, and each reader will choose his or her meanings. Therefore I intend to identify only some of the connoted messages that are visible to this reader, selected for their relevance to the suggested cultural meanings of the image outlined further below.
Firstly, the denoted message creates connotations of similarity12. We can observe that the twin girls are dressed identically (socks, dresses, hair bands), styled identically and posed identically. These are in fact a series of signifiers, each working with each other as (discontinuous) signs to thrust forward the concept of similarity. We are being forced to consider these two girls in terms of their outward appearance of similarity. One could also find connotations of reflection,
A second connotation would be that of the composition of the image, or the aesthetic signified. The girls are presented to the reader in formal, frontal terms, against a neutral – and resolutely uninformative – background. The aesthetic signified is important here – it reinforces our suspicion that Arbus in this image is concerned with our consideration of the meaning of the girls themselves, rather than the meaning of the girls’ relation to their immediate surroundings13. It also consciously lacks a prettified aesthetic, choosing for a scientific formality. Again this ushers us towards a meaning away from the consideration of beauty – both in terms of the girls (their value as aesthetic wonders is not directly Arbus’ concern here) and in terms of the image itself (this is not, nor is it intended to be, high street studio portraiture).
The subject matter itself draws associations with the popular and familiar concept of the family album. Indeed, much of Arbus’ work draws from vernacular photography to work as a stage on which to play out the themes and issues in her work. Such a use of a familiar mode can be seen as a democratic tool – Arbus wishes us to all to consider this image in terms of what we know. Using the family album as a reference point grounds the image in something we all understand (or at least think we understand) and in doing so opens up the image to all that wish to consider its meaning, rather than reserving it for an elite few with specialised knowledge.
On a similar vein, the image also draws associations with both historic photographers and photographic history in general. For example, it has been observed this image bears more than a passing resemblance to an image from the archive of August Sander14, and so what we know of Sander’s work we can sensibly and properly also compare with Arbus’. What was she intending by making this association with this particular photographer?
Figure 2 August Sander Farm Girls
The posing and the framing of the subjects in the image also allude to the earlier use of the photograph, most notable in Victorian England ‘as part of the tradition of enquiry into the health, housing, education, economic condition and moral state of the poor’15. The pseudo-scientific associations, the cataloguing and categorising empiricism (used here as much as anything as an aesthetic ‘mode’), that accompany such images are an ideal ground for Arbus to locate her discussion.
It is important to note some observations by Barthes. He grounds the image in the ‘normal system’ of language ‘whose signs are drawn from a cultural code’16, but highlights the originality of this system. Firstly: ‘the number of readings of the same lexical unit or lexia (of the same image) varies according to the individual’17. In other words: in contradistinction to the linguistic sign c-a-t that refers to the culturally agreed signified of a furry four-legged purring animal, in the visual sign, the signifier of twins leads us to a plurality of connotations. The number of readings becomes less strictly defined; expansive, but not infinite:
The variation of readings is not…anarchic: it depends on the different kinds of knowledge – practical, national, cultural, aesthetic – invested in the image18
Secondly, he comments that the connoted message is something more than its denoted equivalent – that it achieves a higher meaning, ‘the essential cipher of all possible’19 meanings. The ‘syntagmatic “flow” at the level of denotation’20 ‘speaks’ of symbolic meanings. So, for example, with Arbus’ Twins, the girls’ similarity becomes through connotation the purest idea of similarity, the archetype of reflection. And in our reading of the image, we consider this concept of similarity (and so also difference) in the abstract. This abstraction of the connoted or symbolic meaning is important to Barthes, as it links us to ideology, but is only able to do this through the ‘naturalising function of the denotation’21:
…the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story of the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence.22
The advertising image owes much of its power to this naturalising function, and much the same can be said for the seductive power of the photographic image in general23.
Rhetorically speaking – Myth and Ideology
As asked earlier –what to do with these connotations? Barthes observed that there is often purpose behind the denoted message and these connotations of the signs in an image work together to shape a particular message, a “myth”. Bignell usefully defines Barthes specific formulation of this term as a ‘way of thinking about people, products, places, or ideas, which are structured to send particular messages to the reader or viewer of the text’24; as ‘things used as signs to communicate a social and political message about the world’25.
So what of our image? It seems relatively clear that it fits within the definition of myth as ‘way(s) of thinking about people, products, places, or ideas… structured to send particular messages’: it is obvious that Arbus wishes us to consider the connotations of the image as a whole. Those connotations outlined above – similarity (or same-ness), reflection, formality, pseudo-scientific presentation, recalling the family album snapshot, referencing specific aspects of photographic history including conventions of portraiture – can be seen to come together to shape a particular message: in Clarke’s reading, that of ‘identity’26.
Clarke observation of the ‘mirror-like resemblance’ of the girls can perhaps be extended: Arbus is commenting on (Western) society’s predilections for surface appearance27 and misconceived notions of the true likeness of photographic images.
Clarke infers that through our searching of the similarities between the girls, we conclude only differences:
Eyebrows, fringes, hair, and hairbands are different. The more we continue to look, the more the merest detail resonates as part of a larger enigmatic presence and tension as to what, exactly, we are being asked to look at.28
This is likened to language itself – that our language system produces meaning in signs through difference from all other signs – and opens Arbus’ image further to a discussion about the very language of the Image on its most philosophical, semantic level.
Is this though the mythology that Barthes expounds? It would seem so: the iconic sign of identical twins is made, by will of the author/artist, to function as a signifier on another level. Yet in an important way it falls short of Barthes’ definition. Bignell re-states Barthes requirement for a myth: ‘to hollow out the signs it uses, leaving only part of their meaning, and to invest them with a new signification which directs us to read them in one way and no other’29. For our image, this seems to overshoot the mark: the undoubted plurality of connotations surely excludes the triumphant finality of the one single reading? The reading provided by Clarke is only ever one of many. And it seems churlish to suggest that this image is therefore somehow weak as a result of its lacking a clear myth. Since Barthes’ notion if ideology flows from this presence of a myth in this particular formulation, it warrants some consideration.
The limit of meaning
It is this author’s view that at this point in Barthes analysis, images like Arbus’ Identical Twins depart from those more usually exemplified in texts on semiotics30. This is directly related to the overtly political assertions that commonly underlie analysis of cultural items:
In Barthes’ work, and in the work of many semiotic critics, the analysis of culture and society is carried out from a left-wing perspective, and often closely tied to Marxist ideas.31
The ‘usual’ framing of Barthes semiotic analysis in terms of a political masking of constructed meaning under the appearance of a ‘naturalised’ message can distract the reader of images away from apolitical connotations. Use of the denoted messages as platforms on which connoted messages can be presented and discussed can be skilfully expounded without recourse to such an overtly political ‘ideology’. Indeed, in the reading of Arbus’ image given above, it is as if the image itself is some kind of semiotic analysis; the image as an analytical tool with which to consider cultural attitudes and ideologies, of issues pertinent to Arbus’ (and so much also our) generation: identity, self-perception and comparison. What Identical Twins lacks, as do many photographs, is undoubted intentionality. And this is here not a weakness in the image, it is rather its strength; and the ‘limit of meaning’, once reached and unfettered by intention, breaches the bounds of ideology into discourse at a more profound and complex level – the image as analysis rather than the image as analysed.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Richard Howard, trans., Vintage, 2000
Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath, trans., Fontana, 1984
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, Annette Lavers, trans., Paladin Grafton Books, 1973
Bignell, Jonathan, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, 2nd ed., Manchester University Press, 2002
Clarke, Graham, The Photograph, Oxford History of Art, Oxford University Press, 1997
Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Penguin, 1979
Wells, Liz, Photography: A Critical Introduction, 3rd ed., Routledge, 2006
1 In Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, Stephen Heath, trans., Fontana, 1984, pp32-51
2 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.32. This is a recurrent theme in discussions on meaning in photographic images. Sontag also articulates: “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” In Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Penguin, 1979, p.4
3 ibid. p.32. Barthes’ qualification ‘and above all if’ is key here, given his doubt as to the existence of this ‘veritable ontology’ of signification in images, something which is observable throughout all his work on the subject. Barthes described in Camera Lucida after years of writing on the subject, how he was ‘overcome by an “ontological desire”’, but ‘wasn’t sure that Photography existed, that it had a “genius” of its own’ Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Vintage, 2000, p.3
4 Bignell, Jonathan, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, 2nd ed., Manchester University Press, 2002, p.27
5 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.33
6 Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.5
7 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.42
8 ibid. p.42
9 ibid. p.42
10 ibid. p.45
11 ibid. p.45
12 Barthes would perhaps choose the seme of connotation here as ‘Same-ness’
13 or as Graham Clarke more succinctly puts it “The questions raised (about the meaning of the girls) are made more insistent by the way in which both figures are framed within a photographic space which denies them any obvious historical or social context” Clarke, Graham, The Photograph, Oxford History of Art, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.29
14 Noah’s Ark, Arbus’ Album
15 Wells, Liz, Photography: A Critical Introduction, 3rd ed., Routledge, 2006, p.75
16 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.46; Bignell usefully expands on this: “In each case, there is a material signifier, which expresses the sign, and a mental concept, a signified, which immediately accompanies it. Visual signs also belong to codes, are arranged in syntagms, and selected from paradigms” Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.14
17 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p.46
18 ibid. p.46
19 ibid. P.48
20 ibid. p. 51
21 ibid. p.51
22 ibid. p.51
23 or in Arbus’ own words “The endlessly seductive puzzle of sight” Clarke, The Photograph, p.28
24 Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.16. Barthes finds enormous currency in this notion, and his collection of essays ‘Mythologies’ revels in the analysis of seemingly any cultural artefact, from wrestling to margarine.
25 ibid. p.22
26 Clarke The Photograph, p.27-31
27 An issue that resounds even more strongly today than for Arbus
28 Clarke The Photograph, p.30
29 Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.23
30 Advertising, propagandist imagery, magazines, newspapers, computer games
31 Bignell, Media Semiotics: An Introduction, p.25
1
28 January 2009
To what extent can landscape be considered a cultural construction?
James Smillie, Mount Shasta, 1872
Stephen Shore, U.S. 97, Mount Shasta, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon. July 21, 1973.
«Landscape is a subjective formation…an ideological concept. It represents a way on which certain classes of people have signified themselves and their world through their imagined relationship with nature, and through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to external nature.»1
A ‘distinctly modern phenomenon’2, landscape as the subject of painting and photography should properly be seen as more than aesthetic, a modernist concept of form, the singular emanations of artistic genius, or the ‘pastoral salve to lull us back to some primordial sense of our own significance’3. Questions of ‘who owns or uses the spaces, how they were created and how they change’4 have increasingly become integral to critical analysis of use and representations of landscape, the early work of J. B. Jackson paving the way for close scrutiny of the ways in which culture has collectively constructed meaning5.
Photography, in both its ‘art’ and ‘vernacular’ contexts, has played a particularly important role the construction of the various meanings now embedded in the West American landscape, which reflect a search for the ‘American’ identity, essentially an extension of the conservative Christian and capitalist ideology that has characterised America since the New World settlers first arrived on its eastern shores.
This essay makes some observations on the innate verisimilitude of the photographic image as a partcularly suitable medium for conveying ideological messages, and using the examples of the deification of nature and the commoditisation of nature as experience, demonstrates that these have been assimilated into the dominant utilitarian ideology in America. Consideration is given to how these function symbolically and combine to form an American ‘identity’, before detailing some more recent American landscapes which seek to expose the complexly embedded ideologies.
The photograph and Utilitarian Origins of the American Myth of landscape
From America’s outset, a myth emerged, distilled through the protestant sensibilities of the New World settlers, of the American landscape as ‘lawless, unredeemed, or satanic’6, and reflected a ‘utilitarian bias’, an ideology that the wilderness was subservient to man, to be conquered, both in a commercial and moral sense. This utilitarianism remains the dominant ideology present in representations of the American landscape7.
Joel Snyder makes an important observation on the specifically mechanistic nature of the photograph and its ability to carry ideological messages. For Snyder, the shift in photographic practice from synthesis of a painterly pictorial aesthetic to ‘a highly glossed, glasslike surface that looked as if it had been machined on a production line…a technologically or industrially controlled mechanism’8 moves to naturalise Carleton Watkins’ statuesque images of Yosemite and the Pacific Coast within a specific representation of the American landscape as a harmonious co-existence of unspoiled scenery and rapid industrialisation. Watkins’ images were accepted as a ‘real’ visions of landscape, as themselves products of progress, conveniently failing to make reference to the ravaging of land, and the displacement of the native peoples, in the name of 'progress'. The railroad that passes through Cape Horn near Celilo, Oregan (1867) ‘disappear[s] into the land, without a trace…The appearance of the land is left undisturbed by the rails, unscarred, in its original condition’9. But his images are savvy to the pictorial traditions of painting, beautiful in the popular aesthetical (and commerical) sense. They are highly selective, and cannot be considered as separate from their intended audience – the growing ‘middle class...that allied itself with the culture of technological progress’ – who demanded pleasing, aesthetic (and photographically ‘real’) renderings of the harmonious morality of progress.
Carleton Watkins, Cape Horn near Celilo, Oregan (1867)
Deification of nature
Religious overtones are prevalent in representations of American landscape. The early writing of Timothy Dwight demonstrates the protestant appreciation for the natural beauty of the American landscape, ‘no matter how untamed’10. J. B. Jackson identifies the connection as ‘essentially religious’:
…he expresses an awareness of having glimpsed completeness, of having glimpsed the highest form of perfection [emphasis added]11
The inception and huge popularity of the national parks amply demonstrate this reverence:
…these landscapes were and still are truly ceremonial in nature, requiring both a code or personal conduct (park rules and regulations) as well as ritualised expressions of devotion (“pilgrimages” made on certain holidays and the compulsion to take snapshots of the conventional shrines of Nature).12
and this connection between God and ‘American’ nature complemented the advancement of the utilitarian ideology.
Tourism and commoditisation of the landscape as experience
After the frontier had ceased to exist, a new market for tourism rapidly grew in its place, fuelled by the commercial interests of the railroad and automotive industries, allied to the ‘Progressive Movement’s precept that the “nature experience” was a desirable antidote to the unhealthy urban life’13. Photography went hand in hand with the commercialisation of the ‘nature experience; playing the double role of promoting the landscape to the prospective visitors; and providing the mechanism, through personal snapshots and souvenir picture cards, for capturing the ‘memory’ of the visit:
They were not impressed by the wilderness itself. They looked instead for the unique, the spectacular, or the sublime, drawing their standards from stereoscopic views, picture postcards, railroad advertising, magazine illustrations, Romantic literature and landscape art. Scenic beauty was an art form, and its inspiration a preconditioned experience [emphasis added]14
Indeed, the ‘natural’ landscape was sculpted to provide an exact preconditioned experience. The automotive industry, so intrinsically part of America’s history, provided the incentive for the parks to construct new scenic roads, with ‘numbered scenic turnoffs, sited and designed to conform to conventional pictorial standards.
Nature was designed, we might say, for middle-class convenience and efficiency’15.
Unknown photographer, scenic view over the American West
Landscape and identity
The West American landscape has been used as a site for the construction of an American identity. A neat parallel can be drawn between the uses of landscape in painting in the Netherlands in the 17th century16, and representations of American landscape. Ann Jensen Adams draws attention to the historical, religious and political heritage of Holland, sketching a portrait of the Netherlands as a nation historically lacking a cultural figurehead; exhibiting widespread peasant land ownership (in contradistinction to the more prevalent European feudal model of land ownership); the importance of the extensive land reclamation projects, which through elaborate drainage systems brought hundreds of square miles of land into use; and the newly wealthy middle classes, early merchants and capitalists, enjoying new freedoms due to less control by the Church. Consequently, ‘when faced with the problem of the creation of a communal identity, the Dutch turned to their land’17. The paintings of Vermeer, van Ruisdael, Cuyp and van Goyen, symbolised a Dutch pride for the relationship they held with their land, from which they enjoyed a shared national identity. One can immediately see the connections with American attitudes to landscape: a near-deified reverence for the ‘wonders’ of 'American' sites/sights, representing something that could be claimed as uniquely ‘American’. Indeed Albert Bierstadt’s enormous canvases from the 1830s onwards were hailed (by Americans) as a ‘truly American Art’: the fact that the conventions and even subject matter of Bierstadt’s paintings belong to European traditions were neatly side-stepped in favour of fervour for a symbol within which a unique American identity could be constructed18.
Albert Bierstadt, Looking down Yosesmite Valley, 1865
For Jensen Adams, Dutch landscape painting was an entirely subjective medium, ‘a site for the working out, not of rural issues, but of urban ones’19. The important observation to make is that as a nation, based in relatively insular, nationalistic, conservative roots, America sought a collective symbolic representation through which could be mobilised the ‘intimidating social power, the virtual hegemony, exercised by the national faith in progress’20.21
Modern landscapes – Weston to New Topographics
The turn of the last century created interesting questions for the role of photography in representing the American landscape. The brief but influential American purist/precisionist movement in the 1920s and 1930s notably including Edward Weston, Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams is heavily implicated in the ideology in landscapes. Their work borrowed freely from the conventions of the picturesque and sublime, and of American Transcendentalist authors. As photographs, they adopted the acceptable and accessible fallacy that photographic images are democratic, transparent, visual experiences available to all. They reinforced the higher nature of the landscape as touched by God (and importantly, tamed by (American) man), and in doing so the ideological message of their forebears: the American landscape as rugged, powerful, awe inspiring, transcends its mere form, but an attainable vision, a commodity in itself and part of the tourist market for what it depicts. That their work was presented as high art is important. Weston and Adams’ work demonstrated that photographic representation, naturalising the myth of American identity, has achieved its complete cultural infiltration – from the highest echelons of the Art Institution, to the commonplace vernacular of the snapshot.
The New Topographics: Photographs of man altered landscapes exhibition, organised by William Jenkins in 1975 presented the American landscape by dispassionate, supposedly detached artists that ‘shun all the conventional norms of beauty and sentiment to which art and kitsch landscape photography appeal'22. These images of bleak damaged landscapes ‘returned a chill American gaze to the landscape, and in particular to the American West23, and in doing so began to speak against the prevailing American hegemony, both in broad political terms and in terms of the rhetoric that drenched photographic records of American landscape. These images have often been damagingly critiqued in line with Szarkowski’s influential analysis that the photograph 'describes everything but explaining nothing’24; but Deborah Bright usefully reminds us that although individual photographs ‘of themselves may explain nothing, the contexts in which they are produced, distributed, and consumed explain much about how we are to interpret them, including the knotty questions of their relationships to the subjects which they describe’25.
So these collected images present the American landscape not as a stage of the harmonious co-existence of man and nature in the mutual pursuit of the utilitarian dream, but rather as the reflective statement of the effect of man’s relationship with landscape. And the most eloquent of these images cleverly use or interrogate the historical conventions representation of landscape in order to expose these as mere conventions:
John Pfahl obliquely appropriated conventions of the “sublime” and the “beautiful” in his images of power stations in Power Places26 to comment on the polar extreme of the pastoral notion of peaceful coexistance, ‘the arena where the needs and ambitions of an ever-expanding population collide most forcefully with the finite resources of nature’27.
John Pfahl, Trojan Nuclear Plant, Columbia River, Oregon, October 1982
Ed Burtynsky’s body of work serves to catalogue in part the pinnacles of human ‘achievement’ and ‘progress’, for example mineral extraction works and huge oil tankers, but within a critical and reflective mode: the open cast mines striated and bare, all nature purged from the landscape; and the oil tankers at the end of their useful life, run aground and in the process of being dismantled by hand in developing countries.
Ed Burtynsky, Kennecott Copper Mine No. 22, Bingham Valley, Utah, 1983
Robert Adams’ work, accompanied by his prolific writing, attests to an oppositional political stance. His work, which presents the bleak, man-altered spaces of America, draws attention to the inconsistencies in the representation of land and nature as both harmonious to man’s existence; and the reality of man’s self-pronounced dominion over nature.
Robert Adams, Untitled, Denver, 1970-74
And Lisa Lewenz’ 1984: A View from Three Mile Island28 wittily appropriates the vernacular picture postcard / souvenir aesthetic by using a calendar format with images of the interior of houses in the vicinity of Three Mile Island nuclear power station, with the station present in the windows, in order to stimulate a debate about the place of nuclear power in society. The calendar includes various dates of nuclear-related events, like “Radioactive iodine released by Dreseden-2 reactor, Chicago, 1983”, ‘as daily reminders of the proximity of its frequently suppressed dangers’29, in order to open debates about power generation.
So we can see that from it’s earliest origins with New World settlers casting their conservative Christian gaze over the wild and untamed land, a dominant utilitarian ideology of 'progress' was constructed in American representations of landscape. Viewed as part of the search for a collective identity, this ideology utilised photography’s innate verisimilitude, in order to complete a top-down domination of the aesthetic and moral connection the average American had with the ‘American’ landscape, from the immensely popular images of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams; to the wholesale commoditisation of nature as acquirable (and tradable) experience. That these representations were on the face of it highly selective, and that a myriad of different permutations on the endlessly differing American landscape were present and seen on a daily basis by all Americans, is testament to the success of the naturalisation of the utilitarian ideology, and as an indicator of the importance of a nation’s desire to acquire a collective identity. Opposition to the ideology of progress came in the form of the dubiously objective, but certainly emotionally and commercially distant New Topographics exhibition, which developed a cogent argument for the ability of the photograph to re-consider it’s own role in constructing the prevalent ideology, and raised questions about the suitability of a rhetoric and ideology that places man at the centre of the landscape, as powerful, yet tautologically co-existent, over nature, without thought for consequence.
Bibliography
Jensen Adams, A, 'Competing communities in the “Great bog of Europe”: Identity and seventeenth century Dutch landscape painting', in Mitchell, W. T. J., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2002
Bright, D, 'Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An inquiry into the cultural meanings of landscape photography', in Bolton, R., (ed.), The contest of meaning, MIT Press, 1994
Buscombe, E, 'Inventing Monument Valley: Nineteenth century landcape photography and the Western film', in Petro, P, Fugitive Images, Indiana University Press, 1995
Hodgson, F., Primary Colours, Art Review (London, England) v. 2 no. 3 International Ed., March 2004, p. 44
Jackson, J. B., Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, 1984
Lewenz, L., quoted in Chris, C., Is the personal political? http://printedmatter.org/researchroom/essays/political.cfm
Marx, L., ‘The American Ideology of Space’, in Denatured Visions: Landscape and culture in the twentieth century (exh. Cat.), MOMA, New York, 1991
Pfahl, J., Power Places (artists statement), http://johnpfahl.com/pages/extras/ArtStatement.html#powerpalces
Snyder, J, 'Territorial Photography', in Mitchell, W. T. J., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2002
1 Cosgrove, Social Formation; quoted in Jensen Adams, A, 'Competing communities in the “Great bog of Europe”: Identity and seventeenth century Dutch landscape painting', in Mitchell, W. T. J., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2002, p.66
2 Bright, D, 'Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An inquiry into the cultural meanings of landscape photography', in Bolton, R., (ed.), The contest of meaning, MIT Press, 1994, p.125
3 ibid., p.125
4 Jackson, J. B., Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, 1984, p.150
5 J. B. Jackson’s Discovering the Vernacular Landscape has been exceedingly influential in this more expansive analysis; indeed, most of the authors of the other sources in this essay refer to Jackson’s work as the precursor to their own.
6 Marx, L, ‘The American Ideology of Space’, in Denatured Visions: Landscape and culture in the twentieth century (exh. Cat.), MOMA, New York, 1991, p.64
7 Marx identifies two further, marginalised views of American space, the ‘primitivist’ – the conscious distancing of ‘the negative attributes of civilisation – political tyranny, economic oppression, war, injustice, constraint’; and the ‘pastoral’ – the conceptual reconciliation of nature and industrialisation; which have important roles to play in the development of the aesthetic attitudes towards American space, and more practically to the establishment of national parks, always are subservient to the dominant utilitarian model, through is it’s nationalist reformulation of ‘progress’, the ‘ideological support for the rapidly expanding capitalist economy’.
8 Snyder, J, 'Territorial Photography', in Mitchell, W. T. J., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2002, p.181
9 ibid., p.188
10 Jackson, J. B., Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, p.59
11 ibid., p.60
12 Bright, D., 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.127
13 ibid., p.126-7
14 Schmitt, P. J., Back to nature: the Arcadian myth in urban America, New York, OUP, 1969, p.155; quoted in Bright, D, p.127
15 Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.128
16 The taxonomic term ‘landscape’ itself derives from landskip and refers to a popular genre of painting from that time, characterised by earth-toned ‘dunescapes’ of pastoral scenes, ferry boats and the use of iconic historical landmarks. As a genre it was adopted and developed into ‘elaborate theoretical distinctions among beautiful, sublime, and picturesque landscapes and representations thereof’ by other European painters: Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.126, Marx, L, p.62
17 Jensen Adams, A, 'Competing communities in the “Great bog of Europe”', p.44
18 A second parallel between Dutch landscape painting practices and the American use of landscape is in the seemingly contradictory or perverse depictions of land unravaged by man, or of land in harmonious co-existence with industry. Perverse in the Dutch experience because although the commercial market for the painting was the newly rich merchant middle class, the imagery in demand was nostalgic in nature: outdated ferry boats were preferred to the modern shipping canal boats; quaint and improbably old farmsteads are placed within the dunescapes, with no reference to the systematised and uniform segmented appearance, caused by the drainage systems, of the actual landscape. And so perverse in the American representations for same reasons – the selective imagery, on the basis of commercial demand, was for a landscape in which man was master, or at least getting on with nature.
19 Jensen Adams, A, 'Competing communities in the “Great bog of Europe”', p.66
20 Marx, L, ‘The American Ideology of Space’, p.70
21 Interestingly, Edward Buscombe suggests that the noticeable shift in the settings for Western films from mountainous regions to the desert plains is due to the realisation that mountains were present in the visual imagery of other countries, especially Europe; the desert was a more specifically ‘American’ backdrop to the films. Whether you agree with this connection or not, it cannot be doubted that ‘the celebration of America’s natural wonders was held to be an eminently patriotic activity’; Buscombe, E, 'Inventing Monument Valley: Nineteenth century landcape photography and the Western film', in Petro, P, Fugitive Images, Indiana University Press, 1995, p.89
22 Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.131
23 Hodgson, F, Primary Colours, Art Review (London, England) v. 2 no. 3 International Ed., March 2004, p. 44
24 Szarkowski, J., Looking at Photographs, Kew York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1973, p. 72; quoted in Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.133
25 Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.133
26 discussed in Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.135-136
27 Pfahl, J., Power Places (artists statement), http://johnpfahl.com/pages/extras/ArtStatement.html#powerpalces
28 discussed in Bright, D, 'Of Mother nature and Marlboro Men…', p.136-137
29 Lewenz, L., quoted in Chris, C., Is the personal political? http://printedmatter.org/researchroom/essays/political.cfm
1
Sekula view...
The photograph is an 'incomplete' utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability -- Allan Sekula, "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning"
Read more...
21 January 2009
MK
Something towards some photographs on Milton Keynes: angular, disguised, screening, a surprising amount of green. Works well in the modern/new landscape thing. Milton Keynes reminds me of some of Kiran Master's photographs.
Pairs 20 (A421)
Genuinely the nicest bits of our wondrous trunk road, for your delectation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)