Cultural imaginaries & landscape photography

Unfortunately I wasn't able to go to class on Friday. But I asked someone to send me their notes so that today I'm just trying to do some research about last weeks topic on my own and tell you something about landscape photography.

The topic relates to photographers editing their pictures to kind of create an imaginary landscape.

Originally, landscape photography was mostly used to denote the background of a subject and in landscape photography there is usually an absence of human presence.

And although this type of photography often captures nature it can also feature 'man-made' disturbance of a natural landscape.

But all in all, landscape photography just captures different spaces within our world; sometimes massive and unending, sometimes small and microscopic.

Landscape pictures thus often seem boring when we first look at them, but cultural imaginaries & landscape photography make us construct narratives by ourselves, using not only our eyes, but mainly our brain when looking at a landscape photograph. Every landscape picture has a particular purpose and tells a story, and it is the viewer's job the decode that story or even become a storyteller himself and invent his own story about the landscape.

Esteban Pastorino Diaz

The South American photographer, born in 1972 in Buenos Aires, is known for editing his landscapes to look unreal/surreal. Thus some of the photographs he took of planes, for instance, look as though he had photographed a massive toy. He uses different perspectives and thus creates new ways of seeing.

This technique of making real life objects look like toys is often referred to as 'tilt-shift' photography.

He has a special blur in his pictures, that put the focus of his pictures on what he wants us to see, all the things in everyday life that we miss out on in our daily life.

I think this message that he wants to bring across with his photography and the blur in his pictures, are really interesting and powerful. It makes me realize that we should take every little thing that we see into account and maybe not just walk past and miss out on so many great things.

Diaz is a real inspiration, and I could definitely imagine doing a similar project, because I feel like this kind of landscape photography carries such an important and strong message.

'The capacity to register time is, indeed, the most important aspect I wish to emphasize. This aspect becomes evident when temporality is distorted and I create a fiction of the extension of the photographic instant and it is the extreme expansion of such instant that evidences this capacity.' (Esteban Pastorino Diaz)

Lauren Marsolier

The french artist creates 'psychological ' landscapes of the physical world by a juxtaposition of 'unrelated' fragments and objects which have been individually photographed and composed over time.

This juxtaposition of  photographic elements engages the viewer by the representation of a mental transition, meaning that by emphasizing one element in the picture, the viewer doesn't have any possibility of escape, he has to look at that very object and think about it.

'Located somewhere between fiction and reality, her  images represent a mental landscape affected by a world of constant change'.

Her depopulated landscapes give the viewer a feeling of 'dissonance and 'disorientation', which is caused by the constant shifts in our lives, due to which we can no longer completely identify with the spaces surrounding us. 

What Marsolier creates with her work is a new form of abstraction in modern life in which images and signs take a life separate to our normal notions of 'real'.

What makes her work so special in my eyes is the fact that, by taking pictures of simple objects, as for instance a house, Marsolier creates an enormous meaning and gives the viewer the possibility to engage in a thinking process about himself and the world around him with its constant changes.

Mishak Henner

The photographer, born in Belgium but now living in the UK, is considered as one of the greater photographers of the Internet and the digital age. He redefines the role of photography in the Internet age by working a lot with Google Earth, Google Maps and Street View to show the viewer what is often hidden in plain sight.  

About his project 'No Man's Land', that operated with Streetview and uncovered even 'the more unsavory aspects of contemporary urban life', Henner said that "I’d like to think that a project like "No Man’s Land" introduces a radically different notion of Street View. There’s a utopian dogma related to a lot of new technology and it should be counterbalanced with a healthy dose of dystopia."

Additionally, his work often shows his concern for themes such as identity, the information age and exploitation, especially with regards to America. This is particularly obvious in his remake of Robert Franks' photography book The Americans, where Henner has erased a lot of the original content, just leaving blank outlines where the faces, buildings and people were and renamed it 'Less Américains'.

I think one of the main things that I've learned from this research about landscape photography is summarized by Victor Burgin : 

'Seeing is not an activity divorced from the rest of consciousness'

We never just look at something without thinking about it. Seeing involves thoughts, it involves stories that we make up about the object we see and it involves become aware of ourselves, the world around us and the changes that take place without us even noticing. 

Reading: 

Victor Burgin - Thinking Photography: Photography, Phantasy, Function