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IC w8 images with and notes on Landscapes

  • HildeMaassen
  • Mar 14, 2020
  • 9 min read

Updated: Aug 15, 2020

How to go from land into landscapes


"Photography as an expression can be seen as an exaggerated point of view. Let's be satisfied with showing an impression for now." - Jan Coppens (Claude Magelhaes) - 1967


“Does landscape photography remain encoded within the language of academic painting and the traditions of landscape art which developed in during the 18th and 19th centuries”? (Clark 1997 ,p 55)


The meaning of a photograph, its efficacy as an image, and its value as an object, are always dependent on the context within which we "read" it. (Clark 1997, p 19)


Viewers tend to devour images without digesting them (Knorr 1991, p127)



Note; Seeing all the images I will write about, on the screen, might change its meaning and status.


A “landscape whether cultivated or wild, is already artifice before it becomes the subject of a work of art. Even when we simply look, we are already shaping and interpreting … Landscape pictures sill breed landscape pictures” (Andrews, 1999, p1)


Is this a good scene to photograph?


  • The picturesque

  • The sublime

  • Context of consumption and display

  • Westhetic approaches

  • Vernacular /topographical/objective approaches

  • Critical /environmental/ subjective


Henri Fox Talbot - the haystack - 1844

Henry Fox Talbox 1844 the Haystack “icon, symbol” of the British ideal. Shaping landscape in a frame 19th century


  • Stylistic

  • Pittoresk

  • Esthetics

  • Ideal



In a ted talk by Denis Dutton I learned last block that people all over the world actually like the same landscape whether they are familiar with it or not.


Frederic Church landscape with elements we’ve evolved to find attractive.

A well-known study from 1992 investigated this phenomenon. The landscape we prefer is identical to the Pleistocene savanna of the type found in Africa. Evolving hominid hunter collections that favored this type of savanna had much greater survival rates. It is a landscape with direct evidence of wildlife, variegated cloud patterns, evidence of water, low-hanging fruit-bearing trees (food sources and easy to climb to escape predators), alternating open and wooded spaces. The study is by Gordon H. Orians and Judith H. Heerwagen. "Evolved responses to Landscapes, 1992)




Landscape painters and photographers


Social harmony, victorian, urban live, myth, in stead of social reality,

Still a copy or critique , countrysite

Visual vocabulary

Gaze privilege tourist: just the beautiful things not reality


The picturesque is enlisted in the definition of what the country means; it becomes a patriotic term, a touchstone of national characteristics (Taylor, p25)


Thoma Gainesbourgh - Landscape in Suffolk
John Costable East Bergholt - Suffolk 1776-1837 Hampstead
Richard Wilson - Falls of Niagara 1770/1780 (he never saw them himself
Theodore Rousseau - the pool with a stormy sky - 1865/1867
Camille Silvy - French - River Scene -1858 Albumen silver print
Roger Fenton - Shadow of the Valley of Death - 1855 (wet collodium cannot register clouds)


How is it changed?


Pictorialism was the first movement in which photography was seen as an independent art form. The movement arose from attempts to equate art photography with painting and etchings of the time. Pictorialists mainly wanted to try to convey the use of light and other characteristics of paintings in their photos. Black and white photos, a blurry or blurred image = often gives an impressionistic effect.

Technic Soft focus filters and / or lenses used and manipulation in the darkroom. From 1898 photo paper with a rough surface as a tool The Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1911 described this as “achieving personal artistic impression”.

Robert Demachy, speed - 1904

  • Not realism

  • Ideal, Arcadia, idyllic

  • Tamed,

  • Mythological,

  • ·Picturesque,

  • Esthetic

  • Harmony (social)

  • Ambiguity

  • In / straight

  • Light

  • Focus (Depth of field)

  • Painterly style

  • Gaze privileges tourist

  • The moment that the light is right

  • Critical?

  • Capture motion

  • Original vision


Peter Henry Emerson Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff, Life and..., 1886
Alex Timmermans - Storytelling- 2015 (wet collodium, Petszval lens

With the enormous revival of analog photography and its techniques, the wet collodion technique is also back. The look and feel is recreated on large plates with slow shutter speeds and lenses of the time.


Alfred Stieglitz (from naturalism through pictorialism to modernism, magazine Camera work)

The 'Equivalents' series; are abstract photos of clouds. These images were symbolic in nature (symbolism is an extension of romance in which a shared iconography is replaced by personal metaphor). Technically it was a challenge to photograph clouds because orthochromatic film was not sensitive to blue light. As a result, the clouds appeared against a white background. Clouds were the most democratic topic he could think of, Stieglitz said. The other success of the series was that no one had previously photographed 'nothing' just to present an abstract form from a representative palette. The photos were revolutionary at the time and received enormous praise. - Shape, sky, romanticized, symbol, feelings



Edward Steichen (through pictorialism to modernism) romanticized, later more straight in focus


Edward Steichen
Léonard Misonne 1927 - Kelchterhof - bromoil- light, painterly
William Turner, 1843 - The Entrance to the Via Mala -light and time; write with light
Claude Monet - waterlilies -1906- Impressionist (stop when the light is changing)

Combined images by Gustav Le Gray

Gustav le Gray 1856 - see Border -similar to painting - composited
Gustav le Gray 1856 - see Border -similar to painting - originals

  • Vernacular

  • What is a original image?

  • Framed own reference, conventions codes, what is an original vision,

  • Postcard culture

  • Popular in calander

  • “Disneyland”

  • Is Instagram the new mirror glass


“Postmodern culture is often characterized as an era of “hyper-representation” in which reality itself begins to be experienced as an endless network of representations” (Mitchell 1995, p 16)


Timothy O’sullivan 1867 - Fissure Vent at Steamboat Springs, Nevada

O'Sullivan: Characterized wildness, own frame of reference, vast open spaces, frontier culture, extreme landscapes, sublime is scale and presents. Paintings; are similar, spiritual,


Albert Bierstadt western landscape 1870/1880

Bierstadt ; sublime, massive, scale, nature, harder to control, spherical perspective

Subject matter, cultural idea, reference for photography


WH Bartlett 1837 no foreground, idea to fall in, no human intervention; only gaze at it

(America en Alps) - photography mainly on shape, without political and mostly no human reference; West; land empty


William Henry Bartlett -1038 - View Below Table Rock Medium
Ansell Adams - 1940 - Yosemite

Ansell Adams; ecstatic’s, ideal image and land, spiritual presents, sublime, pure scene

The Kolb Brothers photographed in the Grand Canyon ca 1900 where they awakened very experimentally to come to special images.


Edward C. Curtis has mainly photographed Native Americans but also often in the landscape. This has become his work. I have been able to see some of the books he has made in small editions.

Edward D. Curtis - Canyon De Chelly – Navaho, 1904 – Platinum Print

The Series Surflands of Joni Sternbach has, for me, same kind of atmosphere. Is it because people are going in the same direction?

Joni Sternbach - 2015 - beach Santa Barbara -wet collodium

Hans Aarsman traveled through the Netherlands in a delivery van in 1988-1989 to photograph typical Dutch scenes with a technical camera, 4x5". He took a lot of photos of cows. This "Beerta" was finally good. Only after studying the photo did he discover why; all photos are facing the same way; just like in old wooden puzzles for children.

Hans Aarsman - Beerta -1988

Hans van der Meer made 2 books about touchball fields. The first Dutch fields are the second European fields. In all photos you see the player in the meadow often surprising surroundings. But why do they remind me of the cows in the photo of Hans Aarsman. Or is that just a reflection of my idea about this game?


Probably it is the way in which in this and the other 3 pictures above the people / cows are divided in the plane. It takes me back to the Design academy ca. 1988 where we had the course "optical grammatical studies. The study guide of that time says about this: Optical grammatical studies includes acquiring knowledge of, insight into and skills related to the grammar of the image in a broad sense, formal and substantive visual resources, learning to deal with all phases and facets of the work and design process, developing observational skills, developing and stimulating a critical attitude, acquiring technical skills Plus experimenting with and researching of properties and application possibilities of color, color type, color tone, color brightness, color contrast, light-dark, dimensional contrast, shape contrast, rhythm, texture, abstraction, material and material applications.


This sounds wonderful. I have now found the description, but at that time we called it "placing dots". For 4 hours straight, 13 weeks we put dots with a diameter of 5mm on a white A2. I really had no idea what it was about, but I was good at it. (A reincarnation of at least Michael Angelo according to the teacher). After 13 weeks, dashes were added.


Later I found out that it was about design, rhythm, composition, frame, feeling. That is probably what appeals to me in these 4 photos; the place where the dots are placed.

Hans van der Meer - European fields -book 2006

This act of naming is an act of taming. From its inception Photography has been involved in inception and detailing environments, helping culture to appropriate nature (Wells 2011, 3)

“Own the world”


The most grandiose results of the photographic enterprise is to give us a sense that we hold the whole world in our heads, as and anthology of images (Sontag 1977, p3)

travel photography -unknown
Francis Frith - Egypt

Every day the urge goes stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of it’s likeness, it’s reproduction” (Benjamin 1935, p5)


Henri Cartier-Bressons -Sunday on the banks of the Seine -1938

Feel like you have seen it through photographs

We have retreated into a simplified and often completely fake vision of the world (Curtis 2016)


2008 - My son, 11 years old, reacting on an image of Martin Parr, the tourist gaze (Photofestival Breda)

It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that fun was had” - Sontag 1977, p9


We cannot claim to have really seen anything before having photographed it” - Zola in Sontag 1977 , p.87


Snapshots and selfies shared with the world to prove "I was there" (google search)

At what moment did photography shift from an occasional, isolated, individual fantasy to a demonstrably widespread, social imperative? - Batchen 1997, p36



Postmodern photographer; about images and human relationship with it.


Gursky; human impact on the land, how we experience; when men is present more important

Left: Andreas Gursky, Rhein II - 1999/2015. 

Right: Andreas Gursky, In “Amazon,” 2016


Mischa Keijser -Mare (relations nature and man, imperfection) -2016

I thought the only way you give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet, to see the innocence. And then we can understand what we must preserve (Salgado in Hattenstone 2004)


Nick Brandt - Dust -2016

Why can’t beauty be a call to action? Being politically correct does not signify much unless the work is both visually and conceptually compelling. To be compelling there must be tension in the work (Levi Strauss 2003 p9)


Edward Burtynsky Sudbury, Ontario Canada- 1996

The aesthetics are equivalent to the desire that we feel the beauty that we long for, yet once we come to terms with the fact of it’s subject matter, the content puts us into a state of realization (Burtynsky in Blaustein 2011)



It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” Baudrillard 1994, p2


We are entering a time when it will no longer be possible to tell any original from it’s simulations. Thing an sign, nature and culture, human and machine; all these hitherto dependable entitles appear to be collapsing in on each other (Batchen, 2001 p.129)


Royal Roads by Charlotte Bogaert

- Composed; stitched


A cross-section of streetlife in the Netherlands, as it was built since 1967, Willem-Alexander’s (king) birthyear. Photographed in all seasons and weather conditions, on quiet moments and busy days of festivity, during typical Dutch events such as carnival, Kings's Day, fun fair, four day hike, neighbours day and New Year's Eve. The photographs are like paintings of the Dutch masters, the longer you watch the more you discover. "This book is not just a representation of typical Dutch scenes, it is also a typical Dutch representation of those scenes." Bas Haring, philosopher and writer



Sources





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© 2019 by Hilde Maassen 

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