Land Matters

Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity

Liz Wells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000213447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Fotografia

In this major work on landscape photography, extensively illustrated in colour and black & white, Liz Wells is concerned with the ways in which photographers engage with issues about land, its representation and idealisation. She demonstrates how the visual interpretation of land as landscape reflects and reinforces contemporary political, social and environmental attitudes. She also asks what is at stake in landscape photography now through placing critical appraisal of key examples of work by photographers working in, for example, the USA, in Europe, Scandinavia and Baltic areas, within broader art historical and political concerns. This illuminating book will interest readers in photography and media, geography, art history and travel, as well as those concerned with environmental issues.

1 LANDSCAPE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003103585-2

TIME, SPACE, PLACE, AESTHETICS

The point of art has never been to make something synonymous with life ... but to make something of reduced complexity that is nonetheless analogous to life and that can thereby clarify it.

(Robert Adams, 1996: 68)¹

Stories are the perfect skin of time.

(Victor Masayesva, 2002)²

History turns space into place. This simple statement masks a complexity of ideological processes associated with the relation of humankind and our environment. For a start, we need to take into account the symbiotic inter-relation of nature and culture. Where nature might once have been viewed as ‘timeless’, self-regenerating, and somehow ‘outside’ of culture, we are now increasingly aware of the ecological implications of technocultural change. Furthermore, our perception of nature is filtered through cultural understandings.

There are few regions in the world that remain untouched by human presence. Indeed, most people live in regions with long histories of human habitation — even if, in some cases, sparsely populated. Traces of previous human tenancy mark the lands we inhabit. As Doreen Massey has argued, space becomes meaningful through histories told (Massey, 2005). This is a fluid definitional process with new stories — those yet to come - further adding to or shifting our sense of the character of particular places. Histories articulate differing discourses and material forces, often forming terrains of contestation as stories may be recounted from different points of view. The purpose of historical investigation may be to find new materials that enhance - or unseat - previous understandings of place and circumstances. Human action contours the landscape, and stories told give meaning to it.

In order to explore the processes involved in the specification of place, we need to consider a range of formative influences articulated through landscape practices — both the making of the landscape and its representation. Any such exploration draws upon diverse epistemological fields including: aesthetics, geography and political economy, gender and ethnicity, nationalism and territorialism, settlement and social planning, and psychology (individual and collective). Naming involves the objectification of that which is being designated. Designation of places inserts a sense of distance; in order to describe and categorise we position ourselves conceptually as somehow outside of our environment. Thus we can look on, and give it a name (whilst simultaneously being a part of it experientially). Whether this distinction is ontologically a binary — people versus environment, culture versus nature — has been a matter of dispute since eighteenth-century so-called ‘Enlightenment’ debates. We may take the distinction as partial, suggesting there is not a complete rupture between humans as species and other natural orders, perhaps following Darwin in viewing the inter-relations in terms of hierarchy of species. But we still encounter moral issues to do with relative position, power and responsibility within any such hierarchy. Our sense of our location in relation to space and place is not uniform; it plays out differently, informed by a combination of philosophic principles and understandings (religious, or otherwise), and the physical particularities of environments. The purpose of this chapter is to map and explore some of the discursive currencies that contribute to the formation of ideas about landscape. Given that this is a book about photographic practices, it also relates these to my primary concern with photography. The intention of the book is to investigate landscape photography as a critical practice. This chapter aims to ground the evaluative discussions of aesthetics and critical strategies that are central to ensuing chapters through situating analysis of contemporary representational practices in relation to broader cultural currencies and debates.

THE EMERGENCE OF LANDSCAPE

Whether noble, picturesque, sublime or mundane, the landscape image bears the imprint of its cultural pedigree. It is a selected and constructed text, and while the formal choices of what has been included and excluded have been the focus of most art-historical criticism to date, the historical and social significance of those choices has rarely been addressed and even intentionally avoided.

(Bright, 1989: 127)

Peter Kennard’s photomontage of Constables ‘The Hay Wain (1821), the farm cart replete with cruise missiles, references a well-known representation of landscape and human activity in order to draw attention to the contemporary threat of annihilation of a particular place - in this case England and Englishness. Several discourses are in play. First, of course, Constable's painting, which at the time that he painted it was intended to describe ordinary rural circumstances but later became taken up as an icon of the English pastoral. The scene has come to connote Englishness. Second, hay-making is an annual event, the harvest is brought in, year after year; there is continuity. The insertion of the missiles in the space of such patterned seasonal activity emphasises the threat to the nation and to everyday ways of life. Evaluating the critique offered by the artist, something of a paradox emerges; the image could be taken to support a traditional view of Britain, one more akin to Thomas Hardy’s depiction of the complexities of class and subsistence than the industrial and post-colonial scenarios that obtained and became the focus of socio-political debates in the 1980s.³ But as political rhetoric the composite effectively draws attention to the dangers of annihilation through suggesting what might happen if a nuclear war was played out on British land. Photomontage may not be subtle but it is effective as a tactic when the aim is to make a point quickly and directly. We grasp immediately that Britain is under threat.

In introducing a collection of essays on Landscapes and Politics, Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose acknowledge two distinct current clusters of (academic) use of the term ‘landscape’ (Dorrian and Rose, 2003). On the one hand, in geographical, sociological or anthropological terms, landscape refers primarily to everyday experience and practices as situated within and mediated in relation to the social and the topographic (the latter formed in part through histories of relations between people and land - reclamation, cultivation, urbanisation, etc.). On the other hand, landscape refers to a set of representational practices, the picturing of place (through words, sounds, visual images). Although within different academic disciplines — sciences, agriculture, social sciences, geography, architecture and design on the one hand, the arts and humanities on the other - the domains are inextricably inter-related; scientific understanding and strategic intervention are fuelled by the poetic imaginary whilst in formulating projects artists and writers research environmental issues as defined through scientific lenses. It follows that discourses relating to land and environment transcend the concerns of historically specific academic disciplines, research questions and methodologies.

Dorrian and Rose also remind us that historical separation from land, and its constitution as landscape, was concomitant with early modernity and the emergence of Capitalism. In alternative economic systems, such as feudal systems (typical of Western Europe in the mediaeval era) or hunter/gatherer nomadism, people live directly off the land; they are not estranged from basic sources of sustenance. In such circumstances there is no need to represent land pictorially as it can be seen and experienced every day; although, of course, land may be the canvas for track signs, and related information, as in aboriginal bark painting. Visual idioms also became used for storytelling — as in cave paintings, or, later, mediaeval church frescoes. Here, again, the concern was not with the representation of land itself, but the retelling of tales which variously celebrate the natural environment and natural resources as well as offering existential reassurances in the form of biblical myth. Land is also the backdrop against which the classic Greek tales, revived in Renaissance Europe, were replayed through paintings.

Urbanisation induced a gradual distancing from land (over many centuries). This surely contributed to the development of desire to represent land in itself in pictures or words.⁴ The term ‘landscape’ dates from the Flemish Tandschap’. It developed as a generic term for picturing ‘out of doors’. (Conventions regarding composition meant it also came to designate picture format — landscape, as opposed to portrait.) Landscape can be taken to encompass riverscape and seascape. Indeed, land and water are not inherently separate and should not be considered discrete. In geological terms, they interact: water both erodes and replenishes land (without water there is drought or desert). Sea covers seven-tenths of the earth, and has figured variously in human imagination from threat and punishment (The Flood) to the sublime (great waves - for instance, Turner’s depiction of Herculean struggle). That noted, there is a slippage between the generic use of the concept and use of ‘landscape’ specifically to refer to inland scenes, by contrast with, on the one hand, ‘seascape’ or, on the other hand, ‘cityscape’ or urban landscape. That adjectives are added for further precision, as in ‘urban landscape’ or ‘industrial landscape’, indicates the central association of ‘landscape’ with an idealised rural; in the industrial rural (mining, mills, nuclear power stations, coastal ship-building regions), the additional descriptor clearly indicates the otherness of that which is not pastoral.

Coastal dwellers and seafarers (naval, fishing, marine transport ...) have a continuing interest in the sea, and the littoral space of beaches or cliffs. For others, interest in ‘seaside’ dates only from the early Modern era, although the sea as backdrop within marine painting was, of course, a currency within history painting. ‘Pure’ seascape - sea painted as a theme in itself - did not appear until later, but was certainly accepted as a subject in its own right by the time of Turner or Courbet. Landscape includes water: rain, river, coast, canal, stream or waterfall, but seascape as a genre has remained slightly apart, perhaps because the ocean is less fully charted than the land. In a catalogue essay for the exhibition Sea Change (1998), James Hamilton-Paterson notes a series of developments which, he suggests, came together to shift attitudes to the coast (Hamilton-Paterson, 1998). These included the ascendance of modern sciences such as geology and, later, oceanography, with associated challenges to the dominance of myth and superstition. Romanticism, with its metaphoric interest in nature, and the medical advocacy of the health-giving properties of sea-water, together led to the coast being redefined as ‘seaside’, and a burgeoning of coastal resorts in Europe. This in turn enhanced taxonomic interest in natural phenomena that included shoreline items (seagrasses, shellfish ...) (ibid.: 10). The sea, which had once been viewed as that which lay beyond the land, became incorporated pictorially, along with the rivers and streams feeding into it.

LANDSCAPE AS GENRE IN ART

Constable remarked that ‘By a close observation of nature [the artist] discovers qualities ... which have never been portrayed before’ (Pevsner, 1997: 58). This indicates an empirical model within which the emphasis is on detailed looking in order to see. By contrast, William Blake commented, ‘No man of sense can think that an Imitation of the Objects of Nature is the Art of Painting, or that such Imitation ... is worthy of Notice’ (ibid.). For Blake art was above all a work of imagination. Clearly their attitudes to representation differ fundamentally, a difference that begs exploration.

The late mediaeval period had offered something of a turning point in the emergence of painting as a representational form. The Florentine artist and architect, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) drew upon mathematical rules which dictated that objects appear smaller in size as they recede into the distance in order to incorporate a sense of depth within church paintings. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) subsequently developed this into the principles of perspective that continue to inform two-dimensional art. His postulation of rules of image construction was intended as a means of instilling accuracy of depiction. However, as a number of recent critics have noted, pictorial composition constructed in relation to a single central viewing position also emphasised (ego-) centrality as the pictorial world appears organised in relation to the viewer. Perspective, as a system organised around a vanishing point thereby replicating the actual experience of looking into the distance, also lent itself to the emphasis on harmony of composition which emerged within topographic modes. Arguably this sense of order and harmony is pleasurable in part because the centrality of the spectator is reaffirmed perspectivally.

The late mediaeval period also witnessed developments in the material means of representation. Ernst Gombrich cites Jan Van Eyck (c. 1389—1441) as an artist whose paintings were — and remain remarkable for attention to detail, whether such famous portraits as the Arnolfini wedding couple, or the landscape settings within which he depicted people, stories and events (Gombrich, 1978 [1950]). He credits Van Eyck with the invention of oil painting. As a medium, oil allows for slower, more precise, work that (unlike its predecessor, tempera, based on egg white) facilitated the shading of one colour into another; this was particularly appropriate for rendering the subtleties of the hues of land and sky. John Berger has commented that such effects of the use of oil as method of visual rendering have come to define what we mean by ‘pictorial likeness’. He argues that oil centrally contributed to the construction of ways of seeing as the detail that it can provide crucially fuelled the analogous relation between seeing and possession: ‘To have a thing painted and put on a canvas is not unlike buying it and putting it in your house. If you buy a painting you buy also the look of the thing it represents’ (Berger, 1972: 83). He might have added that oil as a medium also operates evocatively through density, tone, light and shade, thereby enhancing desire for ownership and the metonymic effects of painterly depiction. In this respect, oil remains influential - even though its technical detailing characteristics later seemed superseded by photography.

Landscape as a genre thus began to emerge towards the end of the fifteenth century. Kenneth Clark offers a useful overview of changing ideals in landscape painting (albeit based on a binary notion of nature and the ‘natural’ as somehow other to culture) (Clark, 1976). Significantly, he remarks that a precondition for a painted landscape was a renewed sense of space, suggesting that there was a ‘curiosity about the precise character of a particular spot, which was a part of the general curiosity of the fifteenth century’ (ibid.: 41). He specifically cites topographical watercolours, for instance, in the work of the German painter, Albrecht Durer (1471-1528). In Italy the early Renaissance period was particularly characterised by interest in classical Greek ideals of art, science and scholarship. Gombrich identifies a number of key developments. He notes an Albertian emphasis upon compositional construction in Italian Renaissance art, reflecting Grecian notions of harmony as beauty (particularly related to sculpture and architecture - Michelangelo; Brunelleschi). He also contrasts Italian emphasis on classical construction with the work of Northern European artists of the period, for instance, the work of the Flemish painter, Breughel the Elder (c. 1520—69) who painted many scenes from peasant life, described by Gombrich as ‘human comedies’ (Gombrich, 1983: 298). Two parallel, increasingly inter-linked, traditions developed. On the one hand there was Italianate emphasis on classical harmony; on the other hand, there was description, which developed not only in terms of paintings and sketches - for example, the pictorial depiction or ‘mapping’ of rural vistas - but also included diarist accounts and ‘nature poetry’ (Williams, 1975).

Landscape pictures thus centrally contribute to the representation of space as place and, crucially, imply responses to particular places. For many centuries landscape had been viewed as a minor genre within art, largely descriptive in function, secondary to the storytelling and myth-sustaining operations of Christian symbolism, history painting or, later, allegorical modes such as still life. In fifteenth-century painting, landscape appears primarily as backdrop, for instance, in biblical or mythical stories (such as the landscape iconography in Botticellis ‘The Birth of Venus’, c. 1485). The exception was ‘prospect’ paintings; their overt purpose was ‘straight’ or topographic description, rather than fantasy, allegory or metaphor. Such paintings were relatively small, commissioned by early Renaissance landowners to depict their estates, for instance, Medici holdings on the Tuscan Hills. (There are several examples in the collection at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.) The representations are not simply cartographic, but detail fertile fields, sturdy livestock, lush orchards and vines laden with grapes. In other words, the pictures reflect agricultural ideals. The visual geometry is non-perspectival, somewhat akin to a mediaeval fresco, but the twin purposes of topography and reassurance of agricultural plenitude were clearly satisfied. Here we find the seeds of the pictorial imaginary. Prospect paintings also reaffirmed the social and economic status of powerful families as successful landowners. Although at one level reflecting agrarian ideals, the detailing of content (which may or may not have been accurately ‘stencilled’ from actuality) gives them a place within topographic histories.

Stephen Daniels acknowledges the influence of both Dutch and Italian prospect art on developments in England (Daniels, 1990). He notes that English prospect paintings of the late seventeenth century were normally no less than four by six feet, often constructed from a ‘bird’s-eye’ overview, and included any urban or industrial features within the estate, and immediately beyond. They were intended to make an impression of landed property, in England a primary determinate of class, status and political authority — particularly significant in the period immediately following the civil war in Britain (1642—60). As he suggests, estates were areas of conspicuous production, as well as conspicuous consumption; property represented investment and prospect art emphasised economically effective land management. He remarks that the term ‘prospect’ relates not only to vista but also to future economic endeavour. The inter-relation of economic wealth - actual or potential - and pictorial representation was marked in the social usage of such imagery. Such pictures (along with family portraits) were commonly hung in public areas such as reception rooms, ...