- The contemporary sublime - Simon Morley
- The Photographer's Eye - John Szarkowski
- Ways of Seeing - John Berger
- The Nature of Photographs - Stephen Shore
- Land Matters - Liz Wells
- What makes a great photograph? - Michael Freeman
- Charlie Waite on Arran
The contemporary sublime
Simon Morley, Sep 2010, Tate etc issue 20
Click for full article
Key points
- Sublime in ordinary use means: perfect or wonderful (as in 'from the sublime to the ridiculous').
- However, in the art world, the term carries a different meaning and one that has changed since Romantic artists in the early 19th century began to use the word to describe their emotional responses, often frightening, beyond the bounds of reason to natural extremes: mountains, oceans and deserts.
- Joseph Addison defined this view of the sublime as an experience that 'fills the mind with an agreeable kind of horror', a concept strongly followed by Turner, John Martin, Caspar David Friedrich, Rothko and Barnett Newman.
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| Snow Storm - Steam Board off a Harbour's Mouth JMW Turner (1842) |
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| Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog Caspar David Friedrich (1818) |
- Current thinking on the meaning of sublime in art originates from renewed interest amongst post-modern thinkers and artists in the late 1970s.
- Whilst this has led to a number of different meanings of the term, these embrace the idea of human experience outside the controlling structure of the status quo, beyond the social and psychological codes that bind us, into the territory where science and reason stop and we find something worryingly different.
- What we find as sublime can be either positive, an unmediated awareness of life, or negative, discovery of inadequacy at what exceeds us.
- Within this concept lie 5 themes: (a) the un-representable in art, (b) transcendence, (c) terror, (d) the uncanny (in the Freudian sense of the emergence of repressed emotion) and (f) altered states of consciousness.
- Most sublime art nowadays tends to be installations (see Olafur Eliasson below). Painting finds it more difficult to communicate the sublime. This eclipse is part of the logic of the sublime experience itself. For what once was sublime becomes its opposite – the beautiful. It is the destiny of all art to eventually become craft (American critic Harold Rosenberg)
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| The Weather Project Olafur Eliasson (2003) Installation, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern |
The Photographer's Eye - John Szarkowski
- Seeks to express the defining characteristics of photographs
- His book was based on an exhibition which he curated in 1966
Introduction
- Photographs are 'taken', unlike paintings which are 'made'
- Early photographers wrestled with the challenge of how a mechanical process like photography could produce images that communicated a point of view
The Thing itself
- Photographs are different from reality despite being factual and
convincing
- They filter reality, reduce it in size, render it monochrome,
clarify it, exaggerate it
- The photographer has both to see reality and the photograph which
he has not yet taken and make his or her choices
The Detail
- Out of the studio the photographer cannot 'pose' the truth
- Instead he or she finds it fragmented in nature and from these
parts he or she must construct the truth
- Yet these fragments of facts cannot be put together
to produce a narrative
- However the photograph can be read as symbolically
- Szarkowski feels Robert Capa's quote 'if your pictures aren't good
enough, then you aren't close enough' signifies the narrative poverty of
the photograph as well as its symbolic power
The Frame
- Reality extends beyond the frame but the photographer inserts
within it what is important to him or her
- Furthermore, isolating a subject from its environment creates new
relationships
- The central act of photography, choosing and eliminating content,
leads to focus on the picture edge and on the shapes created within
it
Time
- Photographs always show the present, period of their creation
- However, they also allude to the past as surviving relics and to
the future through prophecy visible in the present
- Moreover, photographers discovered a beauty in freezing time to
reveal patterns, lines and shapes previously concealed.
- Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment' is less a dramatic climax (in a
story) and more a visual one
Vantage Point
- Photography continues to challenge our concepts of reality
- It uses unusual angles of view - bird's eye, worm's eye, backside,
topside, etc
- It distorts by foreshortening or not, it uses patterns of light
- Vantage point can clarify as well as obscure the subject
Book published in 1972 in support of BBC programme designed for de-mystify art for a mass audience
Seeing
- Seeing and recognition come before words, yet we use words to explain this world
- What we see is not the same as what we know: e.g. we see the sun revolving around the earth but know the opposite is the case
- What we know - from past experience and knowledge - determines how we interpret what we see
- We are also aware that we can be seen: this leads to an understanding that others may see the world differently from the way that we do
Images
- Images were first made to conjure up something that was not there
- Later on, images acquired additional meaning by outlasting the original subject and, with increasing consciousness of the individual (from the start of the Renaissance), the recognition of the artist's particular vision: a record of how X had seen Y
- Nevertheless, the meaning of image is obscured (or mystified) by learnt assumptions (culture) (such as about beauty, truth, form, genius, civilisation, status, taste, etc), a process motivated for political ends by a privileged minority
The impact of photography
- Perspective. Photography changed Western art's view of perspective. Since the Renaissance, perspective centred on a single view, the eye of the beholder. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point to infinity. The visible world is organised for the viewer as it was once thought to be arranged for God. What the camera showed was what you saw depended on where you were and when. The impact on painting was immediate: e.g. impressionists considered the visible no longer presented itself to man to be seen, rather the it is fleeting. Cubists reinterpreted the visible not through a single eye but many viewpoints simultaneously.
- Uniqueness and context. Photography destroyed the uniqueness of images. Previously paintings could only be experienced in the building for which they were designed, or if moved, then certainly not in 2 or more places at once. By reproducing the image, the camera multiplies and breaks up meaning. Furthermore, the meaning of an image will change according to its context (e.g. for advertising, on a T shirt, in a scrapbook, in a blog...)
- Cropping. Photography enables part of an image to be copied. The reproduced extract alters meaning: e.g. a single figure would become a portrait when detached from a group.
Nature of photographs - Stephen Shore
Background
- His book was published in 1998
- It follows in the tradition of Szarkowski's work by seeking to define what makes photography unique
Introduction
- The photograph is both an object and a work of art
- It functions by providing a visual grammar that exposes its meaning
- Visual language can inform and change our learnt assumptions (unlike Berger who doubts that we can see anything outside our assumptions about art and its alignment to a materialist culture)
- Photography can be viewed on 3 levels: physical, depictive and mental.
A photograph can be viewed on several levels.
To begin with, it is a physical object, a print...it is an illusion
of a window on to the world. It is on this level that we usually read a picture
and discover its contents: a souvenir of an exotic land, the face of a lover,
a wet rock, a landscape at night. Embedded in this level is another that
contains signals to our mind's perceptual apparatus,
It gives 'spin' to what the image depicts and how it is organised.
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| The Mark on the Mirror that Breathing Makes, Dieter Appelt (1977) |
Physical
- A photograph is an independent object - it can be stored and displayed, bought and sold
- The context in which the viewer sees the photograph will affect the meaning he or she draws from it
As an object, a photograph has its own life in the world. It can be saved in
a shoebox or in a museum. It can be reproduced as information or as
an advertisement. It can be bought and sold. It may be regarded as a utilitarian
object or as a work of art. The context in which it is seen effects the meanings
that a viewer draws from it
Depictive
- When the world is photographed it is changed in 4 ways - flatness, frame, time and focus
- These factors define the picture's depictive content and structure, the basis of its visual grammar, the means by which the photographer communicates his or her message
Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with
a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the
messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing
before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of culture
imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure
- The illusion of space is rendered in two rather three dimensions
- This creates a new relationship between elements in the fore- and background
- This relationship changes with vantage point
- A photographer solves rather than composes a picture by choice of vantage point
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| Knoxville, Lee Friedlander (1971) Things at the back of the picture are brought into juxtaposition with things in the front |
- Unlike the world, the photograph has edges
- Content within the frame changes the image's meaning
- The frame encloses (and makes the viewer look at) what the photographer is interested in
- The edges have their own relationship with the image's shapes and lines
- We know the world extends outside the frame but the photograph is a self contained world
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| New York, Helen Levitt, 1945The frame energises the space around the 5 figures as well as unites the disparate action around the them to create an image of New York street life |
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| El Paso Street, Stephen Shore (1975) We know that the truncated buildings, trees and sky continue beyond the edges of the frame. Yet the world of this image is contained within the frame, it is not a fragment of a larger world |
- Unlike the world, photographs are static
- They capture a scene which existed only as long as the shutter speed from one viewpoint before disorder returns
- 2 factors affect time in a photograph: the duration of the exposure (1/10000 sec or 2 seconds) and the staticness of the final image
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| Texas State Fair, Gary Winogrande (1964) Amid the motion of the swinging heads of the beast and the man, there was one instant when, seen from the camera's vantage point, the beast's tongue and the brim of the man's hat met in perfect symmetry. An instant that returned to disorder as quickly as it arose |
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| Studio 54 New York, Larry Fink (1977) Frozen moment: an exposure of short duration |
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| Sleeping Baby, Nepal, Linda Connor (1980) Extrusive time: movement in front of the camera, or movement of the camera itself, recorded as motion blur |
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| Pepper, Edward Weston (1930) Still time: the content is at rest and time is still |
Focus
- Focus creates an order of importance
- It separates a subject from its background
- Even though the image is in one plane, it can cause the eyes to change focus, sometimes in the opposite direction of spatial reality: objects further away from the viewpoint can invite closer focus than items in the foreground (see below Outdoor Theatre Cheyenne Mountain, Robert Adams)
- To eliminate the order of importance conferred by sharpness the photographer must either widen the depth of field or shoot a flat subject parallel to the film plane
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| During the Reed Harvest, P H Emerson (1886) The shallow depth of field draws attention to the 3 reed harvesters, separating them from the fourth man and marshes behind |
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| Outdoor Theater Cheyenne Mountain, Robert Adams (1968) Follow the detail of the image from foreground to background in steps, paying attention to the change in your eyes as they focus. Up to the screen your eyes focus increasingly in the distance. However, from screen to the mountain there is little change in focus, yet in looking at the sky, your focus advances rather then recedes |
Mental
- Vision automatically creates a mental image, a learned response from personal experience on how to interpret light falling on the retina
- So, we rework the depictive level of an image to construct a mental one
- Pictures exist on a mental level that may be coincident with 'what the picture is showing' but does not mirror it. The mental level develops the perceptions of the depictive level
- Although separate, the mental is honed by the photographer's choices at the depictive levels (vantage point, frame, time and focus). 'Focus is the bridge between depictive and mental levels: focus of lens, focus of the eye, focus of attention, focus of the mind'
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| Close No 61 Saltmarket, Thomas Annan (1868) By focusing on the black void at the end of this narrow passageway the photographer draws us mentally through the confined space of the image |
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| Glass, Frederick Sommer (1943) An image may have shallow depictive space but deep mental space |
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| Department of Docks, Berenice Abbott (1936) A photograph may use devices such as perspective to represent depth but have shallow mental space |
Mental Modelling
- Photographers base their photographs on mental models they have in their minds. These may operate consciously or intuitively.
- They may be rigid (e.g. interest only in narrow subject matter) or evolving over time (i.e. adapting in response to stimuli and changing perceptions, such as mindfulness of location, sounds, etc)
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| New York State, Ken Josephson, 1970 'All the while as your awareness is shifting, and your mental model is metamorphosing, you...continue to contemplate the nature of photographs |
Land Matters - Liz Wells
Introduction
Definition of 'landscape'
- Vistas encompassing nature as well as human impact on the natural world
- It examines ways in which photographers deal with issues about land, its representation and idealisation
- It looks at photographers who have questioned dominant ideas about space, place, land and environment and how they have brought their point of view to their landscape subjects, even where these are well worn or traditional
- It evaluates how content, form and metaphor combine to ask questions about history, representation and identity
- It examines how landscape photographers have challenged the assumptions about land and its relationship with class, nationhood, heritage and identity
- Space has many connotations: the unknown, what cannot be precisely defined, expanse (of land, time), a void, the trauma of uncertainty
- Space is transformed into place/ landscape by human action, either directly in shaping the land or exploring how it might be represented (in film, writing, painting, photography, etc)
- Photography contributes strongly to specifying spaces as particular sorts of places
- Landscape as a cultural concept reflects both our perception (how we 'see' and relate to our surroundings) and the use of land itself (agrarian, industrial, etc)
- Photography constructs a point of view, a way of seeing underpinned by the authority of the literal, so it is never neutral as the use of aesthetic values and photographic codes are decisions taken by the photographer
- Photographers use a range of tactics to add emphasis to their observations
Landscape pictures offer us three verities - geography, autobiography
and metaphor. ..taken together, as in the best work of 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.
Robert Adams, Truth and Landscape
Photography as a creative expression must be seeing plus. Seeing alone means factual recording. Photography is not at all seeing in the sense that the eyes see. Our vision is binocular, it is in a continuous state of flux, while the camera captures but a single isolated condition of the moment. Besides, we use lenses of various focal lengths to purposely exaggerate actual seeing; we 'overcorrect' color for the same reason. In printing we carry our wilful distortion of fact - 'seeing' - by using papers to intensify the contrast of the original scene or object. This is all legitimate procedure; but it is not seeing literally, it is seeing with intention, with reason,
Edward Weston
Edward Weston
Landscape
Time, Space, Place, Aesthetics
- Human action shapes the landscape and stories told give meaning to it
- Landscape bears the imprint of its cultural origins, whatever its aim: picturesque, sublime, noble or even mundane
- Two distinct schools of thought on the defintion of 'landscape': (a) people's everyday experience and practice on the land (e.g. reclamation, cultivation, urbanisation, etc) and (b) a set of representational practices, picturing of place
- People living off the land (e.g. in a feudal system or as hunter/ gatherers) feel no need to create images of the land, since they experience it every day
- However, urbanisation, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, created a distancing of people from the land and, as a result, increased the desire to represent landscape.
- Landcsape as a genre emerged in the late fifteenth century. Van Eyck invention of oil painting enabled the shading of one colour into another, and so allowed depiction of the nuances of land and sky. At this time also curiosity about the character of a particular spot increased.
- From this, 2 parallel traditions emerged: (a) Italian focus on classical harmony and (b) the pictoral depiction of rural vistas (topography)
- Yet landscape was seen for centuries as a minor genre within art, descriptive in purpose and secondary to storytelling and Christian history painting
- One exception was 'prospect' paintings commissioned by Italian land owners in the Renaissance (and English ones in the seventeenth century). The purposed of these was to show their estates (e.g. the Medici holdings in the Tuscan hills), embellished by agricultural ideals (e.g. highly fertile land). These were statements of status.
- The shift from landscape as a background to landscape as a subject took place in the eighteenth century with the Industrial Revolution and the fashion for landscaping gardens of the 'family seat'. This had several aims: (a) to satisfy the desire for vistas, (b) to imitate classical culture, (c) to show social status, economic success and personal ownership.
- The 19th century saw changes in landscape subject matter and style as Britain, Northern Europe and the USA experienced Industrial Revolution and increased urbanisation
- In Britain Constable and Turner developed landscape painting in 2 different directions, which in turn influenced its development in photography
- Constable focused on the close observation of nature, representing it as calm and beautiful
- Turner, however, used landscape to express man's emotion, identifying the sublime
- Photography was at first valued for its ability to record: its images where taken, not made. In this tole, it was seen as reportage, authentic and objective, but uncritical
- Nevertheless, photography also developed as a means of artistic expression, largely due its use by artists as a substitute for drawn sketches
- However established conventions of romanticising the pastoral remained in play, the 'beauty spot'
- So it was not until 1940s that major institutions began to accept (with MoMA in New York) photography as worthy of exhibition
Environment and the West
Introduction
- Landscape as a genre has been greatly influenced by North American photographers, especially those working in the West
- The long shadow cast by Ansel Adams and other eraly 20th century photographers continues to influence the American Landscape in matter, form and metaphor
- In the mid 19th century the wilderness of the American West was seen as virgin territory, ripe for conquest and exploitation
- Now environmentalists acknowledge the inter-dependence of urban and rural areas whilst recognising, despite its inherent contradiction, the importance of managing the consequently threatened wilderness
- His work is a good example with which to start an examination of ways in which US photographers have engaged with issues of land and wilderness environments
- Known for his images of Nuclear landscape the Nevada desert
- The impact of his work emerges from the tension between pictorial beauty and the subject matter
- His work has been described as ‘ethereal images of clouds, rock formations and desert seas .. juxtaposed with sobering photographs of nuclear test sites, bomb craters and desert fires’
- That subject matter covers the human exploitation of desert areas – human watching a space launch, skeletons of farm animals, remnants of magazines, huts indicating military camps, trains streaking across the landscape (reminder of the frontier, technological progres and the colonisation of the West)
- He treads an uneasy line between critique and a fatalistic sublime with gothic resonance – humans rendered transient and powerless relative to natural forces
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| The Santa Fe, Richard Misrach (1982) |
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| Hazardous Waste Containment Site, Dow Chemical Corporation (1998) |
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| Drive-in theatre, Las Vegas, Richard Misrach (1987) |
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| Battleground Point #2, Richard Misrach (1999) |
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| The Shuttle Landing, Richard Misrach (1983) |
- The making of the railroad resulted in the earliest documentation of the American West as well as the postcard imagery that followed the tourism that followed
- So too the popular stories of the outdoor adventure about a person or group overcoming a challenge
- The imagery that followed tended strongly towards romanticising the rural environment in ways that echo the 19th century ideas of land as timeless, available, sublime yet capable of being mastered with persistence and endurance (to reaffirm the North American ideals of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency
- The West embraced many ideas and values: (a) land with domestic, agricultural and business potential; (b) wilderness of spiritual worth; (c) space with the ghosts of native American history, Yankee expeditions, garrisons and conquest as well as more recently nuclear testing sites; (d) Manifest Destiny whereby man should and does conquer nature (with towns, railways, farms, mines, logging camps advancing the ‘frontier’ civilisation, including the extermination of people seen as ‘savages’
- The idea of ‘West’ is loose geography: it begins in the middle of the US landmass and ends at the Pacific Coast, leaving the Mid-West as a relatively narrow space beginning close inland to the East coast
- ‘To go West’, a movement that increased after the American Civil War (1861 – 65), was to leave established East coast cities and farmlands embraced several motives
- For all, it provided adventure. The journey was dangerous – illness, injury, attacks from Native Americans – and the process of settlement arduous – building and protecting homesteads, cultivating sometimes unpromising land in harsh climate.
- For most, it offered the promised of acquiring land with domestic, agricultural and business potential
- For some, it was a mission to extend civilisation in the face of savagery or a move from the European influenced culture of the East coast to a rugged, self-sufficiency and a closer spiritual communion with nature, or both
- This movement offered photographers opportunities to document variously the people and places of the new West as well as progress in building towns and railroads, mineral explorations and botanical research. Most of this work now resides in local or regional museums and is used for social history, whereas the later work of Adams and Weston ‘looks to the land as a source of aesthetic, transcendent subject matter’ (Sandra Phillips, 1996)
- Phillips argues that the mythology of the West embodied 2 contradictory ideas: (a) the individualist agrarian ideal of continuous progress to transform nature into a civilised garden, (b) man’s materialist capitalistic development and technology as the agent to open up the West harmoniously
- She further asserts that wilderness, rather than history, is the source of North America’s identity
- Tensions between self-reliance, corporate concerns, land rights and common interest resonate as themes explored by several contemporary photographers
- Economic interests in mining, logging, agri-business sat uneasily alongside respect for the natural environment
Conservationism and National Parks
Impact of acclaim by art institutions
- Adams was an active and committed environmentalist
- Designation of national parks was a government response to the tension between commercial (or military concerns) and conservationism
- The creation in 1890 of Yosemite, the third such national park, coincides with the end of the Western Frontier
- It was the most significant for photography, mainly because of the influence of the work of Adams, who set up his studio there
- The Park had been extensively photographed prior to Adams’ arrival, including by Carleton Watkins (1829 – 1916) and Eadweard Muybridge (1830 – 1904)
- Adams first visited Yosemite in 1916 and in 1919 joined the Sierra Club (set up in 1892 by naturalists to ‘conserve the scenery and the natural and historical objects and wildlife therein, and leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations’ – Yosemite National Park Guide
- He photographed throughout the South West, including the Arizona desert, the Grand Canyon and other parts of the Sierra Nevada. However, unlike many others who documented the region, he actually lived in Yosemite
- Being based in a particular place creates a different set of perceptions that contrasts with the voyeurism of viewing as an outsider: it enhances the awareness of the rhythms and powers of the natural
- Adams acknowledged the influence of New York photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who emphasised the notion of equivalence in photography
- The photograph offers an equivalent of the feelings and responses experienced by the photographer on seeing something significant
- The subjectivity of the photographer is clearly credited
- Finding ways to express his feelings towards his environment centrally motivated Adams’work
- One of his main legacies was his contribution to (chemical) photo technique – his commitment to exploring process and method stemmed from a desire for effective control over photography as a means of expression
- He was a co-founder in 1930 (along with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham amongst others) of the f64 group
- The group’s name signals its attention to form and detail to reveal the essence of a place or object
- The quality of the image was therefore determined by (a) the choice of subject (tree, river, vegetables) and (b) the technical proficiency in recording that subject as a means of revealing something of the characteristic of the place or object
- This approach, which sits comfortably with Edenic ideals, explains part of the high status accorded to this group historically
- f64 was also a reaction against any lingering legacy of Pictorialism wherein morality and myth informed scenarios depicted, often romanticised through soft focus
Technical mastery vs. wilderness vision
- Adams was a man of contradiction (see Sandra S Phillips)
- On the one hand, in keeping with his time, he believed, one the one hand, in the technological mastery of nature and the rights of the masses to enjoy it. He was a mechanically burdened photographer with a sophisticated collection of gadgets
- Yet, on the other hand, he believed in the special spiritual benefits of the untouched state, the spiritual necessity of wilderness
Impact of acclaim by art institutions
- His acclaim is an example of the modernist preoccupations of the curators of art institutions, thereby enhancing the influence of his work
- It also testifies to the persistence of desires for views that reaffirm the utopia of the wilderness in American identity as well as a more widespread Edenic vision (and in so doing distract from how land is being used elsewhere)
Why I write (photograph)? - George Orwell
George Orwell wrote an essay: 'Why I write'. It describes the range of reasons why authors write before going to stating why he particularly did so. The range of reasons seem to apply as an answer to the questions: 'Why do photographers photograph?'
These are, in his words:
- Sheer egoism
- Aesthetic enthusiasm
- Historical impulse
- Political purpose
- clever
- talked about
- remembered
- perhaps even, get revenge on someone who wronged you!
- beauty in the external world
- an experience that is valuable and ought not to be missed
- see things as they are
- discover truth for posterity
- to push the world in a particular direction
- alter others' ideas of what society they wish to live in
What makes a great photograph? - Michael Freeman
It is skilfully put together
Anything that is well crafted usually attacts admiration. Traditionalists regard this as essential, more experimental photographers may subvert it. However, no one serious ignores it.
Most judge a 'good' image as conceptually and technically correct
- Subject is worthwhile
- Main subject is in sharp focus
- Exposure covers the dynamic range
- Composition is satisfying
It provokes a reaction
The image must engage enough people's attention and give them something to think about. On the other hand, 'I've seen it all before' is a sign that the photograph is a failure.
However, being too aware of how others might respond can result in images that try too hard to please, that are too calculated. This opens the unresolved debate in art - what matters most: the artist's intention of the judgement of the viewer?
It offers more than one layer of experience
The photograph must work on more than one level: e..g. context - what is happening here?, emotion, powerful graphics, textural richness of the print. The image moves from good to great if it offers a way of seeing most people have not seen before, yet it strikes a chord.
It has its context in photography
A good photograph is taken with an understanding of imagery that is already out there for public view. A good photographer knows where his or her imagery fits into the context of others' work. Some strive to be like others, others for the opposite.
It contains an idea
Any real work of art must have some depth of thought. This may be a way of composing on the surface or a more intellectual idea deeper down.
It doesn't imitate
A good image does not imitate other art forms, at least not without irony. It explores and exploits its own medium. so, it helps to recognise what photography does best - documenting, reportage with expression, specific optical characteristics (e.g. flare, differential focus, motion blur, reflections, projections - like shadows.
Charlie Waite on Arran
Notes taken from a 1988 documentary film made by Charlie Waite on Arran as shown on Country Tracks, BBC1, 18 March 2012
Make an emotional connection
Charlie Waite on Arran
Notes taken from a 1988 documentary film made by Charlie Waite on Arran as shown on Country Tracks, BBC1, 18 March 2012
Make an emotional connection
- Engage with environment to have any chance of awakening interest in the viewer
- Make a landscape image an emotional, even spiritual, experience
Prepare
- Research area, especially effect of moving sun
- Prepare equipment
- Travel as light as possible
- Never execute casually - digital technology seduces snapping
Compose well
- Seek simplicty, avoid complexity
- Organise the elements (trees, river, rocks, etc) into a compelling graphic design
- Always consider contribution of each fore-, middle- and background
- Explore options to add 'depth' (or at least a flat looking image)
Be patient
- Wait for a pattern of light...
- Movement of the clouds...
- Trace of the sun....
- Change in the shadows, etc
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| Boats provide foreground interest balanced against the moutain. Use of black and white brings out contrast in texture between the boats, water, mountain and sky. Simple, not complex, image |
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| Strong lines of the rows of lavender lead the eye to the solitary tree, small and isolated in the distance. The texture of the lavender contrasts with that of the sky. Colour lies at the blue end of the spectrum. Simple image. |
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| The curves of the cloisters create rhythm as do the columns and the alternating diagonals of shadow and light. Again a muted range of colours, tones of the same hue. Simple image. |
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