I finally got round to sending my proposal for Assignment 4, critical review, to my tutor a couple of weeks ago and have had a positive response and some pointers for going forward. Exercise 4.1, which is my initial proposal, is here.
I had some concerns about this as a topic because, although I could find plenty of artists who use text in their work, I was struggling to find anything written on the subject. At the last OCA South West meeting, Doug Burton helpfully suggested a book by Simon Morley entitled ‘Writing on the wall’, and also suggested searching the USA library catalogue for other references.
My tutor felt that this was a viable topic and suggested I look outside of photography to other mediums such as video, painting, installations etc., or at least to the interrelationships between them and photography. This is reassuring as a number of the artists I have identified as possible sources for discussion work in other mediums. Andy also suggested some resources for research purposes:
As an aside, I spent this last couple of weeks in Scotland on family business but managed to have a day off to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art in Edinburgh – reflection and images to follow. One of the artist who has work on show there is Douglas Gordon, much of whose work consists mainly of text – another one to add to my list!
It has taken me several weeks to reflect on my tutor’s feedback on assignment 3 and one of the reasons for that is that I can’t work out what he’s telling me and some of what he is saying doesn’t seem to fit with what I have done, or think I have done. The sensible thing would be to go back and ask for clarification but part of me thinks that at this stage he expects me to work it out for myself. So instead, I have pondered and procrastinated, resulting in a confidence dip and a general slowing of progress.
The feedback isn’t all bad, in fact some of it is quite positive:
‘Initial research and detailed description of the subject matter and ways in which to approach the project has a strong sense of purpose. This is combined with a sense of excitement at discovering place and exploring the subject visually and intellectually. The collecting of archival photographs of the mines and the exploration on foot back to the sites was a rich area of interest for you, one can see in the supporting work and analysis that there is a richness to thinking and exploring the visual nature of land and place and also the ways in which narrative are constructed over time.’
He goes on to say:
‘I foresee no issues at this stage with your submission and would expect that upon submitting you would achieve a positive result in assessment’
In terms of the assignment itself, he picks up on my experiments with Photoshop to combine new and archive images and suggests that:
‘the idea might be too basic to produce a result that showed the complexity of the subject’He also feels that ‘the final images online are not really big enough to see the subtle effects (of layering?) and that juxtaposing the two images rather than attempting to layer them might have worked better’But then goes on to say that ‘the sense of a ghost or presence from the past does come to the fore in the set of images’
I don’t entirely understand this comment because the final images were uploaded as large as WordPress will allow and where I presented them as thumbnails, they were linked to the original media file. And with regard to the ghostly presence, this is what I was aiming for. Later in the ‘areas for development section, he suggests that I have some prints made, I do that anyway but there has been no suggestion that I should send them to my tutor, maybe I will do that for assignment 5 anyway.
My tutor is happy with my coursework; he picks up on some of my thoughts, for example on Burtynsky’s work and challenges me to think further and finishes this section with, ‘Your coursework elements have a great sense of discovery combined with thoughtful and credible commentary’.
Under the ‘Research’ heading, my tutor recognises the strength of my research but suggests I broaden the scope and include more images ‘helping the viewer to connect with the writing’ and in relation to memory, suggests I could have looked at mining archives and family photographs suggesting the national mining museum. I actually did consider that but the museum is closed from October to March which is the period I was working on this assignment. It is my intention to visit at some point over the summer so that I have more material for when I revise this assignment for assessment.
My learning log is recognised as one of my strengths, particularly reflections on study visits, hangouts and other events I have attended.
Further reading/research:
Re-Photography might be a worthwhile area to explore – specifically its uses in combination with science which is helping to understand our relationships to place and the landscape.
Klett, M., & Martinsson, T. (2016). Environmental rephotography: Visually mapping time, change and experience. In Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice (pp. 120-145). Taylor and Francis Inc.. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315642659 – The hyperlink suggests that this chapter can be downloaded, however, having signed up to the ‘Taylor and Francis group’ I am told that I haven’t purchased this content, so can’t access it and at £36, I probably won’t unless it is going to be useful going forward.
Strengths
Excellent Planning and field work
Strong Research
Learning logs has new data Inc. trips and visits to exhibitions
Areas for development
Try and have some prints made (use online lab) – Use snapmad
Create a notebook or sketchbook of ideas and imagery
Every time I go away, I take work with me and more often than not, I bring it back unopened. This last trip to Scotland was no different. I did manage to just about finish Exercise 4.4 but without the page references and images, which I have now added but other than that, I got little done.
So before I go any further with coursework, I need to reflect on tutor feedback on assignment 3 and tutor’s comments on my assignment 4 proposal. I managed to have a day off from ‘mother duties’ and visit a couple of exhibitions, so I have those to reflect on too, oh and my latest experiment with a tunnel book, possibly for assignment 6.
The other thing that is bugging me at the moment is referencing. I thought I was following the UCA’s version of Harvard but it seems I have still been using the old OCA version, at least for images as, until now, I have added copyright information below the image. I have tried to rectify that for my Ex. 4.4 post and going forward but do I need to go back over all of the other posts in this blog too? Probably, but not now. I have also been using square brackets round ‘Accessed on’ – does that matter? Again, probably but lets get it right going forward first.
I started off by questioning the relevance of this essay in a section of the course entitled ‘Landscape and Gender’ because the question of gender isn’t actually raised until about 10 pages in and it seems to me that it has more to do with culture and attitude, at least at the time it was written, 30 years ago. Having read the essay several times, as can be seen by the access dates at the end of this post, and in a need to respond and move on, I am picking up on the points that interest me most and that I feel, warrant further research.
Deborah Bright starts off by saying that landscape photography has seen a ‘spectacular resurgence in the coffee table/art book press’ (Bright, 1985:125) and questions why now? One possible answer is that landscape is seen as wholesome and upbeat amongst the well educated middle classes; a constant against a background of politics, although she dismisses this as being over simplistic. We are reminded that ‘landscape’ is a modern term originating from Western art history where is was a genre of painting, specifically Dutch painting. In the early days English landscape painting denoted prestige, achievement, ownership, place in society, and it would seem that the same applied in America and Bright believes that this also applies to landscape photography.
Bright refers to the ‘middle class‘ tourist market created in the United States resulting from a ‘nostalgia for the red-blooded rigours of a pioneer life that had become obsolete’ (Ibid p 126) Landscaped parks created in the cities, forest reserves, wilderness areas reclaimed and preserved for future generations. She refers to the rules and regulations in the use of these spaces, the pilgrimages made on certain holidays and the snapshots taken as reminders of the experience as being ‘ritualised expressions of devotion’ with religious overtones. (Ibid p 127).
‘In 1908, sixty-nine thousand tourists went to worship in the eleven national parks (in the US). Twenty years later that figure had climbed to three million’ (Ibid p 127) and asks what it was that these people were so keen to see. The answer it seems was the spectacular scenes presented to them in magazine advertisements or picture postcards or railroad advertising, so they went with pre-conceptions of what they would find. With the advent of the motor car, new roads were developed specifically aimed at attracting more middle class tourists who would spend their dollars with photography playing a central role in advertising these attractions.
In this respect, only the advertising medium has changed. Glossy brochures still play their part but more often than not, you might book your holiday online and if you do want to order a brochure you are invited to download an electronic version. Advertising on social media targets a different group of people but even so, it is still the visually stunning photographs that entice the visitors and they still go expecting to the iconic sights exactly as they were presented to them. It is still the case too that these stunning photographs don’t necessarily represent reality. Only yesterday, an article in the Daily Telegraph reported that a travel firm had been reported to the advertising watchdog ‘for allegedly using misleading photographs of holiday destinations which do not match up to reality‘. The article went on to say that ‘An investigation by the consumer group found multiple examples of companies promoting holidays through attractive photographs published online, which travellers complained had deceived them’. (Meadows, 2019).
The advent of ‘Western’ films showing dramatic scenery where you had to be masculine, e.g. a cowboy, to survive were also used for marketing purposes, from Philip Morris’s Marlboro Man to presidential candidate, Ronald Regan playing for the camera on his Santa Barbara ranch – you had to be butch to be a president. So the Western American landscape was manipulated for financial and political gain as well as being promoted as holiday destinations.
I am slightly confused by Bright’s discussion about the aesthetic of landscape photography being an offshoot of the American purist/precisionist movement and how this relates to the West Coast landscape school founded by Edward Weston, of which I can find nothing. I had expected the typical landscape photograph of this time to be more in line with Ansel Adams work – huge, dominating mountains, rather than the Weston work that I was familiar with; precise lines and shapes of shell, nudes etc. For this reason too, Eliot Porter’s work was a complete surprise to me, not only was it in colour when most of his contemporaries were still working in black and white, but it has a timeless feel to is it and would not be out of place alongside current contemporary landscape photographs.
According to Bright, for Minor White and Ansel Adams, intuition and expression were more important than visual style. She refers here to Stieglitz’s ‘ equivalence theory’ which I am not familiar with but explains this as, the photograph being ‘a visual metaphor for the feeling of the artist rather than a record of the subject’ (Bright, 1985:131) She goes on to say that Andy Grundberg challenges this because this theory does not allow you to see what the artist is feeling. I am no expert on conceptual art but my response to this is, does it have to? Isn’t this what conceptual art is about? I have made a note to further research Stieglitz’s equivalence theory and Grundberg’s responses. Reading on, it seems that Grundberg’s preference is for the more traditional aesthetic style where vantage point, composition, frame etc., results in photographs of, rather than about the subject.
In all of Bright’s examples, few women are mentioned with the exception of Hilla Becher in her section about the new topographic photographers, only there because she ‘is one half of the Bechers’, (Ibid: 131)
The comparison between John Pfahl’s and Lisa Lewenz’s bodies of work, both focused on the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island, is very telling.
Fig. 1
On the one hand, Pfahl’s beautiful, large format, almost nostalgic art works seem to suggest that the cooling towers are a natural part of the landscape, whereas Lewenz has taken quite a different approach, deliberately setting the context by photographing them from within the homes of local residents. Pfahl’s photographs are in lush colour,
Fig. 2
Lewenz’s, gritty black and white. Pfahl’s large format, limited edition prints, Lewenz’s mass produced as a calendar and sold for 6 dollar, making her work available to a much wider audience.
With each of the photographs, Lewenz includes an important date and fact, or ‘fiasco’, in the development of nuclear power, such as the date the Nuclear plant was approved without any study about how waste would be dealt with. Bright seems to suggest that this difference in approach is due at least in part to gender and suggest that women could have a key role in photographing the sort of landscape that they inhabit, referred to as ‘zones of privacy’ (Ibid, p 138), beauty parlours, shopping malls and I would add my own bugbear – supermarket car parks, etc., which according to Bright are, or at least were in 1985, mainly designed my men. Bright likens the male landscape photographer to the ‘great white hunter’ who ventures into the wild in search of their trophy – ‘where are the women’ she asks as she reels off a list of famous men. (Ibid p 139) Women were seen as having a more intimate and emotional relationship with the landscape and that their nurturing nature resulted from their reproductive capabilities. ‘Men choose to act upon nature and bend it to their will while women are nature and cannot separate themselves from it’ (Ibid, p 139). Understandably, this was dismissed by feminist groups and I must admit I find it hard to associate with people like Fay Godwin; emotional about her work, certainly if that means a passion to fight for what she believes to be right but I think she would be horrified at the suggestions that this was due to her ability to bear children.
Interestingly, 30 years later, arguments about women representation in the ranks of professional photographers whether landscape or otherwise, are as relevant as ever. Only last year, as part of the celebration of 100 years of women’s suffragette, the Royal Photographic Society launched ‘100 Heroines’ aimed at raising the profile of some of the ‘overlooked abundance of contemporary female photographic talent in what remains a traditionally male dominated world.‘ (RPS, 2018)
Bright, D. (1985) ‘Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An inquiry into the cultural meanings of landscape photography’ In: The Context of meaning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 125 – 143.
A little later that intended, I have finally sent my critical review proposal to my tutor:
Proposal for assignment 4, critical review
I am still not 100% sure of the topic for my critical review, however I keep coming back to the question of what place text has in landscape art, particularly photography. I understand the need for artists’ statements and can appreciate the contextual writing that often accompanies conceptual work but struggle to get my head round photographs where text is a key component of the artwork itself and would like to explore this further. Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Fiona Banner and Ed Ruscha come to mind as a starting point and I know there are many others. Strangely though, I find Tacita Dean’s use of text in some of her artwork quite intriguing.
I thought a SWOT analysis might help clarify my thinking:
My main concerns are that I may already have made up my mind that it doesn’t work and so question whether or not I am open minded enough. Secondly, I have so far not found very much writing on the subject although one book has been recommended – Simon Morley, Writing on the wall: Word image in Contemporary Art.
My main sources of research for this assignment will be the University of Gloucestershire library, of which I am an external member and the UCA online library.
Inspired by the discussion about territory and access in an earlier post, I have acquired a second hand copy of ‘Our Forbidden Land’ by Fay Godwin, (1990). ABE Books is a brilliant source of used books like this and at minimal cost.
This book is quite angry in places and much more political than I expected, though, as I already possess several of Godwin’s books and have watched a number of video interviews, I shouldn’t really have been surprised. Photographs are usually supported by text, often poems, in Fay Godwin’s books but in this case, most of the words are her own, explaining the political background to the photographs or the contradictions or what she saw as pure bureaucracy or miss-management resulting in restricted access that drove her so mad. There is a 19 page introduction, also written by Godwin, in which she sets out the context of the book and discusses in detail, issues of access, or rather lack of it. She compares the situation in the UK in the late 1980s compared with Austria, Norway, Denmark, Holland and the Tuscan Hills. ‘How’ she asks, can she be ‘trespassing on a moor, all alone.’ (Godwin, 1990:11)
87% of land in the UK was privately owned at this time with the biggest land owner being the Forestry Commission, closely followed by the Ministry of Defence and the National Trust and these large land owners come in for plenty of criticism. The Forestry Commission was being required to sell off woodland as a result of legislation introduced by the Thatcher Government and even where rights of way existed prior to the sale, they were not protected. Owners of large estates were developing heavily marketed ‘theme parks or heritage industries…’ ‘with the rest of their lands being even more firmly fenced’ (ibid p12). Regional water authorities were in the process of being privatised as this book was being written with concerns that surplus land would be sold off for housing development. Intensive farming practices, the use of chemicals, unhygienic slaughter houses, farming subsides going to the wrong people, all of the concerns about food safety, most of which is laid at the door of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, (MAFF) are discussed in depth.
At the start of the introduction, Fay Godwin claims that her reasons for wanting to stray from the marked footpath was to get a better view for a photograph. My own interpretation, initially at least, was that it was more to do with access to walkers, particularly in the shape of the Ramblers Association. As I got further into the text though, it seemed to me that Godwin’s concerns were more about management of the land in general rather than just access for walkers.
It is nearly 30 years since this book was published and in some respects it is quite dated. Some of the organisations mentioned no longer exists, MAFF for example has now been subsumed into DEFRA. Food safety issues mentioned such as BSE and salmonella in eggs, have moved on, though only to be replaced by other concerns and I feel sure that, were she alive today, Fay Godwin would be writing and photographing about the environment and global warming. It would be interesting to revisit, not just some of the sites photographed but also the laws, decisions and contradictions that frustrated Godwin so much. Is the countryside more accessible now than it was then? I’m not sure. I have dipped into one or two of the organisations mentioned by Godwin, though not in any great depth, to see what they currently say about access to the land they control. The Moorland Association, whose main aim according to Godwin when this book was written was to ‘prevent walkers having the right to roam on grouse moors‘ (ibid p11), refers to a ‘refreshed’ version of the Countryside Code, relaunched by Natural England in 2012, as ‘giving advice on rights of way, control of dogs around livestock and preventing fires.’ (Moorland Association, 2019) Clearly, the aim of the Moorland Association is still to manage grouse moors and there are still restrictions on access to certain areas at certain times, either for personal safety, such as in the shooting season, or for example to protect ground nesting birds.
As I walked in the Forest of Dean whilst reading this book I consciously looked out for fencing and no entry signs. Most, though not all, warned of the danger of old mine workings hidden in the undergrowth and with more than 200 coal mines in the Forest in the late 19th/early 20th century, it is just as well they are fenced off. I feel there must be a photography project there.
Source: Godwin, F. (1990) Our Forbidden Land. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.
Anne's Landscape Learning Log 