Part 1

The exercise asks the student to find three examples of landscape photographs that are being used to assert a particular ideological point of view. Describe how the image communicates its intended message.

Lungs

Before it’s too late, WWF France (2008) TBWA\Paris

WWF France presents a clear visual image which presents the viewpoint of the importance of trees to the atmosphere. Here WWF has brought together two clear representations on the idea of clean air, one where trees produce oxygen that we as part of the second representation, as humans our lungs use the oxygen allowing us to survive. By presenting a green landscape where the trees have been planted into groves in the shape of lungs which have now been scarred by logging. The clean graphic design elements and semiotics make the communication is clear here, we need oxygen from the trees without the trees, we cannot fill our lungs.

The graphic advertisement above, ‘Before it’s too late’, elaborately demonstrates how visual manipulation through graphic design invokes emotional manipulation through semiotics, through the use of an image similar to the ones used to prevent smoking.

Wyoming

The original open country, BVK Advertising Agency, Wyoming Tourist Board (2016)

Harking back to the early age of America and to the early age of photography, this image shows the state of Wyoming as the land in the same state as photographed by Watkins and O’Sullivan. America as Manifest Destiny.

The photographer has used the Adams zone system to create a countryside which, although mountainous and grey, has been granted a golden sheen by the sunrise burning through the morning mist. The figures in the foreground are placed slightly off to the left, again harking back to the composition idea in a landscape scene that a figure or shape can be placed in the foreground to give a sense of scale.

Glenfinnan Monument

Glenfinnan Monument, Visit Scotland

By placing the road leading to the monument in the bottom middle of the scene, the photographer forces the eye up the line and into the main body of the scene. The landscape is presented in a format resplendently similar to the landscapes of Turner and Cozens, tame and peaceful, ideologically conquered by man and for the most part unadapted by man. The loch mirrors the sky and flows off into the blue-grey distance bordered by the mountains. It presents the idea of a land welcoming and peaceful, wide vista unspoiled and untouched.

In the foreground is the monument, the statutes gaze off into the peaceful lands, in contradiction to what the monument is representing, which is the Jacobite highlander who died fighting the cause but who was then driven out of the land to go overseas so that the new landlords could farm sheep in the lands formerly owned by the Jacobean clans, which was done as part of the highland clearances in the name of progress and modern land management.

Part 2

Consider an issue that you feel strongly about. Design an image that you think will have a persuasive effect upon the viewer.

The issue that I chose is one which many in the local area feel strongly about. A member of a local council has declared that no one is interested in the remains of a Jacobean battlefield and that a large industrial park should be built on the land.

Landscape format image, green fields separated by a path running off into the distance. In the foreground stands a small monument dedicated to the dead buried on the battlefield (for that it is what the green fields are) In the mid-distance two slightly shadowy faint figures stand heads bowed before a cross. The crosses are transparent and are multiples, spread across the fields, representing the dead. In the back of the image, bulldozers rip up the land, pushing over distant crosses while two large industrial cranes tower over the fields.

Banner in the top left of the image, History should be forever, not until politicians forget.