It does question whether or not taking photographs at all known locations could end up as plagiarism, certainly, when a site becomes popular, there is an inspiration in looking at what others have done.
PetaPixel – Is This Plagiarism or Crazy Coincidence in Landscape Photography?
The exercise asks the student to prepare a Slideshow to present their ongoing work with Assignment 5.
The exercise asks the student to consider a few points when creating the slideshow.
The exercise ensures the student that complex software such as Final Cut is not required and that the student should familiarise themselves with whatever software they plan to use.
At first, I was tempted to use PowerPoint for the slideshow, but after looking at the application, I felt it did not meet my needs. I then considered Windows 10 Videomaker but found again that the software did not meet the requirements I had. In the end, I used Nero Video which I was familiar with and while it did not have all the refinements I wanted it suited the exercise.
Gathering more of the work together I decided to continue to use the alphabetical sequence as it fitted with the original document which started the project and guided the brief.
After processing the images, I worked out a template for the images and the text and started to create the slideshow. I was heavily influenced by “Looking at the Land” curated by Andy Adams, which I viewed in the previous exercise. I really like the clean, clear layout and I felt it was suitable for the treatment of my work.
Once I had the images in sequence within the application, I started to examine the look and design and tweaked the layout slightly. Then I watched the slideshow and changed the timings to allow more time for the viewer to read each image.
After draughting and finalising a narration piece, I used Audacity and Lame to produce the narration. Slicing the narration into paragraphs which then allowed me to move them about to improve the timing and sequencing.
Once I had changed the timing on the images to fit the narration better and again increase the amount of time for each image, which now also included a transition. I felt that there were still too many quiet moments in the slideshow, so I chose a piece of music available via creative commons, the piece was chosen because it met the requirements for a peaceful Celtic sound.
Once again, I reviewed the slideshow adjusting the timings to suit what I wanted. Even in the final version, I am still not happy with the transitions, but it was one of the few which were not too over the top.
The slideshow can be viewed below.
On review, while the exercise has introduced the treatments of online exhibitions to me for my own work, I am not sure that it is the correct treatment for the Assignment.
I feel that the presentation, being Audio/Video, does not meet the requirement of the brief, which is to make a number of accessible pieces which can be viewed and touched by individuals with visual impairments.
I will however not discount the concept of an online exhibition as it is a good way to show and display certain works.
The exercise asks the student to examine the post by Sharon Boothroyd on the WeAreOca website and watch the online exhibition of work.
The online exhibition is Looking at the Land — 21st Century American Views which was curated by Andy Adams for the website Flakphoto.
The exhibition is an interesting view of the American landscape and the lives of the American people and how the interact with the landscape.
We are asked to leave a comment on the WeAreOca page; a copy of which I have pasted below.
Initially, I was taken aback by the silence but quickly reflected on the position of the curator, who would have had the impossible task of finding and fitting a sound to each image. Such as clash would have interrupted the peacefulness of the exhibition.
Watching full screen, in a darkened room, allowed me, as the viewer to concentrate on each image and examine the representation and context of each image. I did not pause or manipulate the timing, but let the Vimeo video to run at the pace decided by the Curator (Andy Adams).
Overall, it gave an interesting view of the ongoing changes within America, while we have suburban views, industry peaked over from the background. Sand dunes representative of Ansel Adams images, had powerlines running through the image, demonstrating the ongoing changes made by man on the landscape.
The student is asked to familiarise themselves with the process of print-on-demand applications and experiment with book design by supposing that that for this exercise that they will be producing a book to present their photographs for Assignment 5.
The exercise suggests setting up an account with a print on demand service, such as Blurb, Blookup, Lulu, or tradeprint.
I downloaded Blurbs Bookwright software, as it fitted the profile of the exercise, was simple to use and provided the required print to PDF feature.
Before I started working on the proof, I examined the rationale for printing my work for Assignment 5. To be honest I am not quite sure that the brief and the work fits in with being presented as a book.
As part of the exercise, I returned to browsing a number of monographs and art books to try and get familiar with the differing styles of layout, editing and sequencing of the images. Two books stood out as either end of the spectrum
The first is Sons of Sinbad (Villers, A, 2006), which documented Villers journey from the Red Sea to Kuwait on Dhows between 1938 and 1939), the book contains hundreds of monochrome photographs of not only the people but their cultures and landscapes. Each section comes with a map and very detailed text on the journey.
The second is Land (Godwin, F, 1985), once past the introductory text, the reader is left to browse through the photographs as they jump geographically around the country. The images presented on ivory paper, allow the monochromic images a chance to define themselves and stand out from the page.
I feel that the work I am producing for Assignment 5 is closer in nature to Godwins Land, then to Villers, Sons of Sinbad. Although having given it the subject a lot of thought, the work could be expanded in detail, to become a similar style.
The main stepping stone for me was the introduction, similar in nature to a musical piece, without a good hook, it can be difficult to draw the audience in, so I muddled over the introduction for some time.
While the work for the Assignment is not complete, I have attached the PDF to this part of the learning log as required by the exercise. I still have quite a bit to go to complete the Assignment.
Certainly, the exercise has taught me several lessons. One of which is that my design skills need a good polish and I have quite a bit of learning about the layout and design of a book. Overall this has been an interesting exercise as it has pushed me to explore different options for displaying my work and made me consider how I can expand on a brief to produce a different piece of work later on.
Godwin, F., 1985. Land. William Heinemann Ltd.
Magnus, L., 2013. The Public Catalogue Foundation Oil Painting in Public Ownership Southern Scotland. 1st ed. United Kingdom: The Public Catalogue Foundation.
Villiers, V., 2010. Sons of Sindbad. (s.n.).
The next two exercises are of great interest to me. During my level 1 course, an exercise asked that I put together a set of photographs as a proposal to the magazine article.
To be honest, I was never happy with the results, it was not the images that let me down, rather it was the presentation and the actual words of the article. I used Lorem Ipsum as the article text and it just did not feel right.
Now, in the next two exercises, I have to present a sample of a book and a slideshow, both of which, to me, must look better presented. It is time, that I, as an artist, start to consider how I want to present my work. For this, I am going to have to battle against my dyslexia and my visual impairment, so that I can improve my work, my presentation skills and my professionalism.
Things have come to a grinding halt after I received a telephone call from the NHS. I have been waiting for an operation for quite some considerable time and suddenly there was the chance of an appointment at another hospital.
I decided on balance that it was better in the long term that I have the operation now, rather than wait for a more convenient time as I am in some considerable pain.
However, this will give me a chance to consider my preparation work for the next two exercises.
The exercise asks the student to search for different companies which offer inkjet and C-Type printing. Then take note of the prices and choices available from each company and then create an imaginary order for a print, preparing the image exactly as specified by the print company.
I decided that the working concept for a print, that a standard A2 size would be suitable for the presentation of an image within an exhibition. I then searched the internet for viable companies who would be able to provide what I wanted.
| Company | Paper Size | C-Type | Cost | Giclee Print | Price per Print |
| Spectrum Photo | A2 | Fuji Matt | £23.06 ex VAT | Not Available | N/A |
| Just GICLEE | A2 | £20.00 ex VAT | |||
| Peak Imaging | A2 | Satin Matt | £11.80 ex VAT | Hahnemuhle Photo Lustre 260gsm | £19.84 ex VAT |
| Loxley Colour | A2 | Lustre | £9.94 ex VAT | Hahnemuhle Bamboo 290gsm | £22.58 ex VAT |
| The PrintSpace | A2 | Matt | £16.42 ex VAT | Hahnemühle Bamboo
|
£20.84 ex VAT |
Given the required durability of the work, as it will be touched, the Giclee prints will have to be highly durable. Given that Giclee prints on Bamboo are fairly delicate, I have reviewed the process and would consider using Haemulid Pearl instead as it is reputed to be highly durable.
PrintSpace offered a sample pack for £6 plus £3 delivery which contained a sample of C-type and Giclee prints on different papers. On receiving the pack I was surprised at the quite subtle differences certain papers had over the quality and definition of the image. I do feel at least a little better informed on their paper quality and print quality.
Coming from a fairly technical background, I was, and at times still, are unconvinced about the quality of inkjet prints. During an exhibition of work at the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, I noticed that one or two of the Giclee inkjet prints which showed line marks and imperfections within the print on display. This appears to have been down to the paper selection used when printing for the exhibition.
I prepared two files using the instructions provided by the PrintSpace company, converting the final image to their print profiles which I downloaded from their website. Following the instructions provided on the website,
https://help.theprintspace.co.uk/articles/1885931-how-to-prepare-your-file-for-print-upload
The first is a C-Type Print – Concorde. It is prepared as 300ppi, A2 Paper Size, 1 Inch Border, Colour Profile is C-Type Kodak Metallic. The final image is shown below (figure 1.)
Fig 1. Concorde
I chose this print type as it provided a very smooth, shiny surface print which made metals really clear.
The second is a Giclee Print – Church. It is prepared as 300ppi, A2 Paper Size, 1 Inch Border, Colour Profile is Hahnemuhle Pearl. The final image is as shown below (figure 2.)
Fig 2. Church
I like the harder smoother surface the Pearl provides
Can inkjet be treated as a photograph? Yes, it can, while it is distant from the original processes of development and printing, it provides a modern alternative for printing an image.
This Assignment is to write a critical essay on a subject encountered so far during this course. I have chosen New Topographics and the influence of the New Topographics group on Landscape Photography.
The New Topographic group changed the way in which the landscape was photographed and viewed by the use of minimalism and breaking away from the scenic view of western art and incorporating expressionist and conceptual art ideologies as well as environmental issues and messages.
The concept of the untamed sublime landscape of the American West was hatched long before Carlton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan photographed “pristine” landscapes during their Journeys with the US Geological Survey. Painters such as Asher B. Durand and William James Stillman painted sublime wildernesses such as Katterskill Clove, 1866, June Shower, 1854 and Study of Upper Saranac Lake, 1854.
Asher B. Durand, Kaaterskill Clove, 1866
Asher B. Durand, June Shower, 1854
William James Stillman, Study of Upper Saranac Lake, 1854
This idea of an unspoiled wilderness was reinforced by Ansel Adams with images such as Dunes, Oceano, California, c.1963
Ansel Adams, Dunes, Oceano, California, 1963
The images produced by the New Topographics group, however, flew in the face of that idea to challenge the myth of the American Dream and the untouched landscape.
The New Topographics group, made up of photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Hilla and Bernd Becher, and Robert Adams, challenged the ideology of Lady Liberty and the Manifest Destiny, these photographers, possibly influenced by the themes of Alienation, loss and the Superficiality of Society in J.D Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’, wanted to show that in post WWII America, Manifest Destiny had thrown off her Red handkerchief headscarf, dropped her blue boiler suit and joined the naked “Free” generation of peace, love, and LSD. The failure of American might in Vietnam was reflected in the failure of the American dream. The expansion of society into the open areas of the states had resulted in literally castles built on sand, which was the result of the bust following the post-WWII boom.
The New Topographics group explored the concepts of the New America, one where the failure of the dream had to be accepted and that identity is created not from one’s uniqueness but from one’s connection to others through commonality.
While Robert Adams photographed the tract houses sitting alone in the desert, the houses waiting for some form of further development to be built around them, he showed the finality of a ‘man created landscape’ without condemning those who had tried to build on these ‘new’ frontiers.
Robert Adams, Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969
By selecting these scenes Adams incorporated the view of a stagnant movement; the second grand mass movement of people from the East Coast through to the undeveloped lands of the Midwest, Arizona, and Utah has run out of money and steam, leaving the front runners to watch as the land slowly reclaimed what they had tried to build their future on.
Lewis Blatz reformulated the Film and Television view of the Wild West frontier town with ‘Park City’. Here instead of tract housing rotting in a desert, Baltz captured the slow march of the building of a Prime holiday Resort amongst the dry and snow-capped hills of Utah; Only by looking at the quality of the buildings can you see that they are going up rather than coming down. Baltz showed that here the boom generation had seen a landscape that was profit ready for development and change.
Lewis Baltz, Park City #61, 1980
Between Adams and Baltz the two faces of America are portrayed, rich and poor, boom and bust. Both reflecting on human control on the environment and the power of money within the continuing American dream, by avoiding any ideas of romanticism and artistic beauty they were able to document unemotionally the way in which man has come to alter nature.
Hilla and Bernd Becher who are most well-known for ‘Pitheads, 1974’ took a different approach with their images,
Pitheads 1974 Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher 1931-2007, 1934-2015 Purchased 1974
excluding people from their industrial collections, their collected images demonstrated a Linnaean approach to their subjects; Categorising them and by showing these selections together, creating a taxonomy of industrial architecture, which addressed the idea of form and function and how the industrial landscape was formed through man-made developments.
Certainly, in the case of the Becher’s, the landscapes challenged the perceived aesthetics of Landscape photography. Their methods were based on a fixed set of rules, image format, uniform light, uniform distance, consistent composition and consistent restriction to the monochromatic range, as set by Ansel Adams, equates to precise uniformity of the image. By staying firmly within the boundaries of Topography, the Becher’s have avoided introducing other factors such as historical values or set location boundaries. In examining the images, we can see that the Becher’s have returned their subjects to a similar form of art, that of the icon. Like the Becher’s images, religious icons were simple small portraits which were hung together within churches. Like the Becher’s pitheads, these religious icons had a constant set of guiding rules when they were painted. Becher’s subjects grouped together have a flow as the eye moves from one subject to another, consciously looking for differences in the beginning before the eye resets and we see the overlooked beauty in the formation of the subjects. But unlike the religious icons, Hilla and Bernd Becher’s images such as Loomis Coal Breaker, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA (1974) show no hope, only despair as the subject lies doomed, defunct and dying.
Loomis Coal Breaker, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA (1974)
The New Topographics group concentrated on the American West, the advertised land of the empty country, roamed by cattle and the Marlboro Man, a country where at the time of the mass development of the land, the road trip had become commonplace. Idealised by Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider and Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ the road trip became a marker between the last of the frontier land exploration and the foreshadowing reality of the recession and the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble. This landscape of motels, fuelling stations, garages and small towns, scattered across the grasslands and deserts were photographed by John Schott, and Frank Gohlke. Schott in is work ‘Route 66 Hotels’ shows a landscape filled with Whitewashed Adobe buildings, neon signs, and empty plastic chairs. Concrete tepees with high thin Tv aerials and air conditioners bolted to the sides, sit clustered together, hideaways from the sun and the open road.
John Schott New Topographics #121 Untitled. 1973
Schott photographs these buildings so that they can be identified and cataloged as part of a taxonomic group of roadside life. His dispassionate framing of the subject so that it can be viewed almost as if one was passing them in a car, possibly tired from the journey at ready to pick the next random stop.
Strangely, the scenes produced by Schott and Gohlke would reappear as an influence on others; for example, in the design, structure, layout, and buildings of the fictional town of Radiator Springs in the Disney Movie ‘Cars’. Instead of Schott’s concrete Tepees, there is instead a row of concrete traffic cones.
Radiator Springs, Still from Disney’s Animated Movie ‘Cars’
Gohlke in his series Grain Elevators, gave differing views of the structures, unlike the Bechers, Gohlke took his photographs from different distances and angles, capturing the structures in a static state. For the majority there no people in Gohlke’s images, shadows fall across vehicles and ground alike. Only in ‘Grain Elevators being repaired, Minneapolis 1974’ do we have people,
Frank Gohlke Grain-elevator-under-repair-Minneapolis-MN-1974
but the figures are tiny against the vast structure, they are the faceless workers, only there to restore the grain elevator to its former state. His photo ‘Landscape St. Paul 1974’ predicts the rise of the out of town shopping mall.
Frank Gohlke Landscape St Paul Minnesota 1974
Large scale carparks, dotted with street lights dominating the landscape. Gohlke also photographed the idea that the landscape was produced by the movement of the tectonic plates, a landscape undergoing a change which if man made could only be done by a large scale nuclear weapon in series Mount St Helens. Gohlke photographed the large scale destruction visited upon the landscape by the eruption.
Frank Gohlke Aerial View Logs and debris in south end of Spirit Lake 4 or 5 miles N of Mt St Helens Washington, 1981
This later work by Gohlke ties into one of the main influences to come out of the New Topographics group, which is the impact of man-made change to the environment and the issues being caused as a result of climate change. Change which has happened mainly due to mass consumerism in the West but also due to the changes in farming techniques and the expanding change of land use for housing due to population growth.
From these works, it can be seen that the New Topographics groups were amongst the first to use art as a tool for political agitation. The groups’ work can also be seen as using Landscape photography to perform cultural criticism, examining the dichotomy of the need for more land whilst trying to save the environment.
The New Topographics group turned landscape photography and landscape art on its head; by focussing on what most people passed by, ignored or just did not examine, they changed the perspective on looking at the landscape as well as how the landscape is viewed as a tool and a source.
1551/2000 Words.
1924 words
John’s Columbia Blog. 2019. Introduction to and Re-Reading the New Topographics. | John’s Columbia Blog. [ONLINE] Available at: https://johnlusisphoto.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/introduction-to-and-re-reading-the-new-topographics/. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Dennis, K., 2015. Eclipsing Aestheticism: Western Landscape Photography After Ansel Adams. Expressions of Environment in Euroamerican Culture / Ancient Bodies in Nineteenth Century British Literature and Culture, [Online]. November, 1-23. Available at: https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/6920 [Accessed 19 April 2019].
X-TRA. 2019. X-TRA. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.x-traonline.org/article/new-topographics-photographs-of-a-man-altered-landscape. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Higbee, L., 2013. New Topographics and Generic Transformation in Landscape Photography of the 1970s. Dissertation for MA. Florida, USA: Florida State University.
Tate. 2019. New topographics – Art Term | Tate. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/new-topographics. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
ScherpteDiepte. 2019. ScherpteDiepte. [ONLINE] Available at: http://journal.scherptediepte.eu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=scherpte;rgn=main;view=text;idno=m0701a01. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
http://www.metmuseum.org. 2019. No page title. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dura/hd_dura.htm. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Smithsonian American Art Museum. 2019. Asher B. Durand | Smithsonian American Art Museum. [ONLINE] Available at: https://americanart.si.edu/artist/asher-b-durand-1364. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Smithsonian American Art Museum. 2019. William James Stillman | Smithsonian American Art Museum. [ONLINE] Available at: https://americanart.si.edu/artist/william-james-stillman-6227. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Tate. 2019. ‘Gas Tanks’, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, 1965-2009 | Tate. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bernd-becher-and-hilla-becher-gas-tanks-p81237. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Fosco Lucarelli. 2019. Absence of Style: Lewis Baltz and the New Topographics – SOCKS. [ONLINE] Available at: http://socks-studio.com/2015/10/16/absence-of-style-lewis-baltz-and-the-new-topographics/. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
AMERICAN SUBURB X. 2019. New Topographics: “Landscape and the West – Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography” (2005) – AMERICAN SUBURB X. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/05/new-topographics-landscape-and-the-west-irony-and-critique-in-new-topographic-photography-2005.html. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Frieze. 2019. New Topographics | Frieze. [ONLINE] Available at: https://frieze.com/article/new-topographics. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
John Schott | Photography. 2019. John Schott | Photography | Additional “Route 66 Motels” Photographs . [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.johnschottphotography.com/p905773474/h3544dda9#h3b3132fa. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Frank Gohlke – Artists – Howard Greenberg Gallery. 2019. Frank Gohlke – Artists – Howard Greenberg Gallery. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.howardgreenberg.com/artists/frank-gohlke/featured-works?view=slider#7. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Places Journal. 2019. Frank Gohlke: Thoughts on Landscape. [ONLINE] Available at: https://placesjournal.org/article/frank-gohlke-thoughts-on-landscape/?cn-reloaded=1. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Ignacio Villarreal. 2019. Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke Opens. [ONLINE] Available at: http://artdaily.com/news/25582/Accommodating-Nature–The-Photographs-of-Frank-Gohlke-Opens#.XOu-24hKiUk. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
http://www.mocp.org/detail.php?type=related&kv=1294&t=objects
Museum of Contemporary Photography. 2019. Museum of Contemporary Photography. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.mocp.org/detail.php?type=related&kv=1294&t=objects. [Accessed 29 May 2019].
Cars, 2006. [DVD] John Alan Lasseter, United States of America: Pixar Animation Studios.
The following is a full extract from my initial attempt to write the Assignment. I found in the end that I was getting too bogged down in the subject and that it was turning out to be less of a critical essay and more of a narrative essay. I then changed the subject idea after coming to the conclusion that I was just getting nowhere. Subsequent Assignment 4 submission here
Assignment 4 Memory of a Photograph.
Write a critical essay based on one of the subjects so far encountered.
For me, the memory of a photograph exercise arrived at a synchronous point of time as I had just been handed an A4 folder full of pieces and paper and photographs which were taken during holidays as a child.
For me, this was a return to a landscape from childhood, a holiday of confusing and conflicting images. The three main memories of the holiday were chickenpox, tanks and freezing on Hadrian’s wall. Were these memories supported by a set of as yet unseen photographs?
The photographs are all Polaroid, a gift from my father to my mother, and an exciting new way of seeing images to us. No longer did we have to wait until we returned from holidays to review our experiences, these could be viewed instantly as long as you waited the requisite one minute while fanning the air with the print. I never really did see my father hold a camera, he was rarely behind the lens, rather he stood off to one side calling guidance, preferring to gaffer and not be seen.
My memories of Warcop are of a small village, reminiscent of C.Henry Warrens idea of the typical British village, whitewashed cottages with all roads leading to the village green where benches sit and towering behind the village church with its wooden lychgate. Small shops selling fresh fruit and local vegetables, with the general hardware store somewhere in the middle of a row. A review of google maps shows me a completely different landscape, a small group of houses and a parish hall. What is it I remember; what landscape is etched on my mind?
The small blue shutter cottage looks at me out of a photograph, I faintly remember the building, sitting on the edge of a lane; which lead off into the Warcop Training grounds in the Dales, where the Army demonstrated their firepower, technical superiority and might by having Chieftan tanks hurl high explosives at shattered targets. The boom from the tank’s cannons rattling the large window where we sat at eat. Usually, these practices were undertaken in the morning and we would later walk up those hills when it was safe, clambering over punctured metal and tossed earth. A treeless flat landscape filled with grass, mud, bog torn up by tank tracks and tires. I never considered until today the possible dangers of climbing on these targets; had the army been using Depleted Uranium rounds, what considerations were taken to the environment and to any visitors to the land? All I can remember is the landscape in every direction was MOD land and that when the red flag was up, the whole landscape was forbidden and dangerous, I could only walk it accompanied.
The photographs continue to tumble out, they were once stuck by a single sellotape strip to gridded paper, the adhesion on the tape has like some of my holiday memories long gone. Almost certainly the collection that I have is selective, no doubt some are lost having fallen from the collection or mixed into another pile yet undiscovered. These memories show a forgotten landscape, a waterfall, a riverside path worn through dry brown grass, a castle, the handwritten notes beside the spaces tell me of things I cannot remember, I appear to be there in the image, but I cannot recall the place.
I can recall the long drive through the dales, where my father driving in the wrong direction tried to head for Durham, we ended up sitting roadside at a stream, I recall we did that a lot, during spring weekends and damp autumns. Always a stream bank and always the car tiled slightly off-road, a tartan rug laid on the grass.
I recall the wind and the scratchy woolen jumper my mother had knitted and presented to me as a Christmas present. Chickenpox itch and woolen scratches as I stood directionless on Harridans wall. I could not tell why side of this historic barrier I was on, once side grass, then a stone strip and then a small cliff dropping thirty or forty feet. To my ten-year-old mind, I somehow could not imagine the immense diving barrier these stones represented. I stared out over farmland to distant hills, the wind driving through me. To me Hadrian’s wall was just like the border, an invisible line so easy to cross and pass. I had never considered the work and power required to divide a landscape and have the power to say “this is mine. Not yours”
There are more empty spaces than there are polaroid’s, what am I missing, what parts of the holiday can I not remember, what did I see that I cannot recall. I have no postcards, no other photographs, only vague memories. What exists beyond what I have forgotten, where are the owners? I have a faint recollection, but not enough. I have a memory of sitting in a taxi drivers café under a large soot covered viaduct, the post-industrial landscape of buildings beginning their fall from grace into dereliction, was this the same holiday or another time. I cannot trust what I remember to fully create the land I holidayed in. I feel the sadness at the loss of industry in that town as we were undergoing that at home, I still do feel sad, looking up at the grand viaduct knowing that people would pass over this town and it would fall further into disrepair.
Another photo represents abbey ruins. What was their importance, obviously owned by heritage or church? Then I remember, like Scotland, large parts of the landscape are in private ownership. Thirty percent of the land has lain in the hands of the gentry of generations. High amongst that ownership is the Duke of Buccleuch. The church of England has just point five percent ownership. Where during these times on holidays did, we set foot on land which was not owned by someone and which was free and unclaimed.
Perhaps, some of the memories are idealistic, forged from the media of the time, television showed the pastoral landscapes of “Last of the Summer Wine” and “All creatures great and small”, some harking back to a gentler pre-war time of Britain and the other a village out of time, untouched by poverty, pollution or punk. Certainly, both were used to present the picture of a calm countryside and mill towns much like Constable with the Hay Wain, both hiding from the reality of poverty, rioting, and deprivation.
Even now the paintings of the Yorkshire Dales are Turneresque, Paul Butterworth in Yorkshire Dales produces a version of the Dales where it is green hills, fields separated by stone dikes glowing under a golden sun, or it is as in Simon Anthony Wilsons Scorched Moor a foggy, barren scape of yellow gorse under grey-blue smoke and mist. Towns and villages and people are missing, a return to the people less landscapes of Georgian times, again the landscape painting is there as a power symbol. Art as a possession and the power of the view.
Much like the power of selection shown by my mother who produced the photographs and my own power of selection by what memories I can and cannot recall, whether these memories are real or stitched together from memories of a selection of TV programmes.
1218 words/2000
References
https://www.saatchiart.com/paintings/yorkshire-dales/feature?hitsPerPage=100
Project Brief – Following on from the research undertaken regarding the loss of historical landscape due to land development. This project aims to research and photograph Jacobean doocots (dovecots) in the East Lothian district. The project will be guided by the doocots listed in the 1937 publication ‘Transactions of East Lothian Antiquarian and Field naturalists Society Vol 3’ which listed the doocots and their state at that point in time.
Influences and Research – Images will be captured and presented in the style of the New Topographics group. The project is influenced by Hilda and Bernd Becher, and Edward Burtynsky. The research will be guided by the 1937 paper.
Locations will be gathered together using maps and digital footprints; arachnological and historical guidance from websites as to the locations, positions, and state of each of the doocots as to guide me to the doocot. Information from the Scottish archaeological group and from Canmore will allow me to obtain a fixed GPS position. In the event that a doocot has been destroyed whatever in that GPS position will be photographed. The research will also help in accessibility issues. Some access may have to be obtained where the doocot has fallen into private possession.
Likely Treatment – Doocots will be photographed at a set distance using the same parameters as possible, angle, height, position relevant to the camera in an attempt to capture scenes which will be comparable with each other. Images will be monochrome from digital 35mm. The text for each Doocots will be taken from the 1937 document and will include size, shape, style, and number of pigeons roosting at point of the design.
Potential Outcome – The final collection will be displayed in a gallery as part of an installation. The images again will be marked with braille text allowing visitors with visual impairment to read the photographs through touch. Each image displayed will have a full braille description of the image as well as a standard card with details.
Budget/Resources – Since I am unable to drive myself and with mobility issues, I will be using a vehicle for transport, this will be used to carry the photographic equipment as well.
In the event of any issues with an image I have already scheduled in time for reshoots
All images will be taken digitally and then go through Post Processing before Printing and Braille Marking before being mounted in Frames.
Estimated Schedule – the project will take 900 hours in total, not including travel time.
This project builds upon the work undertaken during part 3 of the course, culminating in my work on Assignment 3; and is constructed on the ideas presented in that work.
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Leonard Scott Landscape 