Thinking about landscape
Photograph by Peter Haveland
One of my recent tasks at the OCA has been thinking about the photography curriculum, particularly at level two. Level one lays the foundations for studying at degree level and level three is highly flexible, as it it is negotiated between the tutor and the student. Currently we offer three courses at level 2 of which the student chooses two:
- Progressing with Digital Photography
- Social Documentary, and
- Landscape
Until recently Landscape has been the most popular course. Now is matched by the other two in terms of enrolments. One of the photography course leaders, Peter Haveland, whose photo above from his ‘Shrines’ series is featured above, has argued that the identification of genres and the pigeon-holing of photography into those genres is pretty meaningless.activity. This is a view which I think is worthy of serious consideration and this recent video by the British photographer Simon Roberts highlights how the situating of people in their landscape is his principle are of interest. Similiarly other photographers I admire such as Joel Sternfeld, Alec Soth and Richard Rinaldi are hard to characterise as landscape or social documentary photographers.
And yet it would be foolish to dismiss genre completely. There are clearly defined and different production standards for reportage and fine art landscape photography. And we can all recognise ‘pure’ landscape – in the tradition from Ansel Adams onwards, and the challenge is hardly irrelevant. Landscape photographers have always been ‘engaged’ whether by choice or by omission. A photograph of a field is never just a photograph, it signifies something. Politicians may still argue about climate change, but scientists are unanimous and landscape photographers have both the potential to document it and, some would argue, a moral duty to do so. None has accepted that responsibility more wholeheartedly than Edward Burtynsky.
Edward Burtynsky: Oil from Corcoran Gallery of Art on Vimeo.
All of this may seem a long way from where we started, one of Peter Haveland’s photographs of the growing number of roadside shrines. But for me the photographs pose questions. Why have we started as a nation to think that it is appropriate to mark road deaths with ’shrines’? Are they really shrines? Is it a sign of an undercurrent of religiosity or an increasing sentimentalisation – a post-Diana failure to engage with the brutal reality that thousands of people die each year on our roads. Is it easier to think of these deaths as accidents rather than needless if only we had the courage to confront the causes seriously?
Gareth Dent
It seems curious that people would choose to remember a loved one at a place of horror and death rather than a place where they were happy. If someone dies in a rented house, relatives don’t leave flowers in the garden on anniversaries, yet roadside shrines are adorned with flowers every year.
Mike
Yeah, bit late to the debate on this one, but I think the “Shrines” series really blurs the distinction between Landscape and Social Documentary photography.
It is of the place and of society in the same instance. I have been struggling to grasp the increasingly popular concept of psychogeography which keeps cropping up in many photography discussions. The essence as I understand it is the merging of psyche and location… is this an example of it ?
It could be Graeme – psychogeography is a slippery concept, not least because those originally responsible were deliberately playful in their approach. I think the critical idea is that how we feel about locations actually informs how we interact with those locations and vice-versa – you might find this article useful – it’s written in approachable language (unlike much of the stuff on this topic).
Thanks garteh… now this is taking me on a difeferent but parralele path.
If this is taken in the context of psycho-geography it is a place influencing thought and feeling and vice versa.
As someone was stated the “Diana” effect… but has anyone actually considered this might by a cyclical phenomenon as I understand the Victorians did similar things. I lived in a small town in Hertfordshire for several years and in the parish churchyard against the wall of what was once a bishops house was a “shrine” to a child who died after falling from scaffold in 1856(ish). I need to dig out an image of it and scan it, but the idea is the same. Every few years the members of the family still living in the area re-painted the sign. No doubt there are numerous other examples, and all of them will be intrinsic to the psyche of their location and embedded in their local landscape…
I need to look into this as an ongoing project methinks..
I really need to spell check BEFORE posting ! Doh!