Put together for a class session in september 2019
Quotes from works that have informed my landscape work and critical thinking
Landscape pictures can offer us … three verities – geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kings of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact – an affection for life.
Adams, Robert cited by Wells, Liz. Land Matters (pp. 7-8).
At their most unruly and chaotic, edgelands make a great deal of our official wilderness seem like the enshrined, ecologically arrested, controlled garden space it really is. Children and teenagers, as well as lawbreakers, have seemed to feel especially at home in them, the former because they have yet to establish a sense of taste and boundaries, and have instinctively treated their jungle spaces as a vast playground; the latter because nobody is looking.
Farley, Paul & Roberts, Michael Symmons. Edgelands (p. 8).
...British land is managed – there is no wilderness; even the coastal littoral is overseen (by the Environment Agency). It follows that landscapes and vistas are human constructs, which means that aesthetic principles, as well as social mores, were and are in play within the actual shaping of land. Pictorial renderings of countryside as pastoral depict Britain as undisturbed and undisturbing, thus contributing to constructing a simplified and benign rural imaginary, to picturing countryside as safe.
Wells, Liz. Land Matters (p. 164).
...ironically, paintings were the models upon which these ‘designs’ for organizing the land were actually based; a reversal of the usual assumption that pictures are secondary representations of a pre-existing world. Nature was shaped according to how it was already seen in pictures.
Bate, David. Photography, the key concepts. (p. 91)
Representation of land as landscape, whether in romantic or in more topographic modes, reflects and reinforces contemporary political, social and environmental attitudes.
Wells, Liz. Land Matters (p. 1).
I’m troubled by the thought that when acres of wood, fen, mountain marsh, coast or grassland become designated wildlife sanctuaries, they also become another type of no-go area, enclosed by a new class of landowner – countryside managers, conservationists and large charities. No one would question that theirs is noble, well-meaning work, but it’s still shutting us out. The human is reduced to the neutral observer, removed and peering in from the prescribed path, the car park, café or picnic table. ‘Environmentally friendly’ subjugation of land is still subjugation, the process of shaping it to conform to what we want it to be.
Cowen, Rob. Common Ground (p. 137)
The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects – to fight against boredom
Sontag. On photography (pg. 42)
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.
Sontag. On photography (pg. 22)
Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited, flattered disorderly presences. What could be more surreal than an object which virtually produces itself, and with a minimum of effort? An object whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weight are likely to be further enhanced by any accidents that might befall it?
Sontag. On photography (pg. 52)
...photography is not bound by any obligation to reality; like any other art, it is a set of resources which can be put to a variety of uses, and out of which a style can be forged
Scott, C. Spoken Image: Photography and Language. Page 22.
...richness of control facilities often acts as a barrier to creative work. The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.
Weston, E. Cited by L. Wells. The Photography Reader
I’ve always considered the make and format of camera to be ultimately low on the priority scale when it comes to making pictures. I think personal vision is far more important. A sense of esthetics, a personal connection with the subject matter, an enquiring and inquisitive mind – these factors outweigh whatever equipment you use.
Kenna, M. Retrieved from http://archive.is/otxRX
A photo that needs a telephoto lens doesn't need to be taken […] why take a picture of something you can't see? If you couldn't see it yourself, who cares.
Kosuke Okahara. NHK Documentary on Fukushima nuclear disaster photographs by Okahara https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhL7XSHBvAc 5:58