LANDSCAPES – THOUGHTS FROM DAVID BATE
David Bate has written a very comprehensive book called ‘The Key Concepts’ about many aspects of photography, tracing its history regarding the photographic genres such as portraits, landscaped, still life, documentary, art and so on. In this essay I shall be looking at landscapes in terms of its history, the types and the compositions.
Landscapes viewed as a picture dates back long before photography to religious paintings but popular landscape images emerged commercially with postcards – an early form of tourism in the early 19th century. There are postcards still today but commercially good looking landscapes are what the tourism industry survives on. It has also many other commercial uses such as architectural planning and urban planning.
Landscapes are defined by Bates as the geography or visual mapping of a space. What he says is: ‘ So what is important here is the specificity of what landscape views bring as images to social knowledge and what photography contributes to this field of vision’. I thought to myself – ‘what is he talking about’. Having never not been aware of landscape images it is difficult to imagine to be confronted with painting of an area with trees and sky or an early photograph of similar in a not-very-sharp black and white photo – having never seen one before. What is it? What is a landscape image?
Bates says it is a type of vision in a picture. Of the early photographs, John Ruskin thought the mechanism of the photo spoilt the vision of a landscape. It was crude and lacked subtlety.
But before photographs came into the picture (for want of a better word), we need to look at the popular landscape paintings of the early 19th century. The English who travelled to Italy returned home with paintings of the Italian landscape. These were not exact paintings of one area, but more like a composite of the good parts of several areas, so the outcome, a composite, was a little unreal but picturesque – ie like a picture. This is a word that became popular in describing a pleasing-to-the-eye painting (or later, photograph).
Actually composite paintings date back to Claude Lorrain (mid 1600s) where he made ‘virtual landscapes’ from several places – these being biblical. But in this essay I am looking at is when landscapes became popular and as I mentioned earlier that was with the advent of painted postcards.
An interesting outcome of these picturesque landscape paintings was that the English tried to make their gardens like a painting. Landscape gardeners became known as artists because they sculptured gardens as complicated walks involving different areas that would invoke different feelings to the observer. These were feelings of happiness, peace etc.
There are two words commonly used historically to describe landscape paintings – picturesque and sublime. The word picturesque is what I have mentioned above regarding the gardens – these landscapes evoke feelings – good feelings. When we look at the paintings of the 19th century we see things like trees and grass, leaves and fields, a desert, the sea and so on, they gives us feelings, but these feelings might be different in different observers.
So if picturesque gives us good feelings (some call it a ‘beauty spot)’, then sublime means the opposite (sometimes called the ‘bad spot’). Edmund Blake describes the difference between beauty and sublime. The beauty landscapes are what the tourist industry want to promote to tourists. Sublime is associated with danger, fear and anger – the black spot place. This could be an image of a scary looking tree in the dark or it could be a stormy night or rough seas. Even a cityscape might give us feelings of potential danger. At the extreme end of this sublime image is for instance, war landscapes. However the military might somehow have a war image that is positive or picturesque one which is used for marketing – hero men in the war field.
Confusing – yes it is. What is picturesque in one scene is sublime in another.
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Relating back these two modes of picturesque and sublime to photographs throws in another confusing issue. Photographs are meant to be truthful; ‘pure fact’, so lets look at the four periods of photography between 1825 and 1935 – experimental, factual, pictorial and new photography (which some say is a return to straight photography).
While the experimental photography is pretty straight forward, it was noted that depending on the angle of factual images, one might get a different meaning; a different feeling for instance of a photograph of a beach with no one on it could be read as peaceful whereas perhaps behind the photographer there might be an ugly mineshaft. Selective photographing is not always factual.
Bate looks at a photograph of the pyramids in Egypt by Francis Frith taken in 1862. Frith was of the view that photographs should be neither picturesque nor sublime – that they should be factual and realistic.
The work ‘pictorial’ in this sense of the period relates to things like a hard or soft focus or perhaps just making a landscape look like a beautiful painting.
Getting back to the commercial used of landscape photographs, they can provide information about the land whether scientific, geographical or even political. Are these always fact though?
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Bate then turns to discuss composition. He says: ‘a conventional good composition is keeping the eye of the spectator within the frame’.
So whatever is photographed it could be classed as picturesque if it is well composed. In fact something ugly could be seen as beautiful if composed well. Si is that picturesque or sublime?
One feeling common in many photographs is the feeling of melancholia – there is something in the subject matter that reminds the viewer of something in the past. This can be good or bad emotions.
There is pleasure derived from a well composed photograph. It gives harmony and balance; it’s organised and maintains excitement – the eye recognises order and likes it.
Alternatively, a badly composed image is not ordered and the viewer becomes disinterested.
When someone says ‘this is my sort of picture’, they identify themselves with the organisation of the scene. But what are they viewing? Bates talks about the ‘grip of emotional effect’ – meaning can we stop having a pleasurable effect from an image if it is just truthful? Some photos can be pleasurable to some while senseless and grotesque to others. Perhaps some ‘grotesque’ photographs might be unsettling but are well proportioned – good photos and are liked.
Proportion and symmetry might keep the eye of the viewer within the frame whether the subject matter provokes good or bad emotions. Bate brings in the example of a painting depicting workers toiling in a field – doing work that perhaps the viewer would not consider doing, but it is liked & creates good feelings because as well as being a factual representation, it is well composed.
When looking at photographs, Bate says of sublime: ‘as for the sublime, the relation of composition is clearly one of testing the capacity of the ego to tolerate excitement’. While you can sense outrage in a picturesque image, with a sublime image, you can feel pain and outrage etc as well.
Edward Burke writes that something beautiful is social and something sublime is anti-social. Bates adds that we shouldn’t oversimplify the words picturesque and sublime as good and bad because it depends on many issues. Here he looks at a chocolate box image of the Swiss Alps – the perfect image – picturesque, then as he looks closely he seen human figures in the foreground – they are on a track and this beautiful bit of perfect nature is not perfect at all.
Good composition satisfies the observer even if the image is distasteful i.e. there is some sort of satisfaction and therefore the feeling is that it is 'beautiful' or 'picturesque'.
The whole landscape of looking at landscapes is more complicated than meets the eye!
FOOD FOR THOUGHT!
References:
Bate, David; Photography: The Key Concepts
http://pymd.com/
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