Literature Survey

Landscape photography is a broad and varied subject but I have found that the key texts, authors, artists and images to my field are …

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, looking at the stadium and punctum of a photograph. Fay godwin’s Secret Forest of Dean because she went to a location where she had no memories or emotions for the landscape she simply went there to walk and understand the location and what made it so beautiful. Bill Brandt’s Literary Britain where he photographed key locations linked with British literature. Jam Southam’s Landscape Stories and his different projects, they all develop over a period of time and become a journey or time passing. Klett and Wolfe re-photographed the landscapes of the American West along with the great surveys of the West.  

Barthes, R (1982). Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. 25-28 

Healey, E (1986). The Secret Forest of Dean - Fay Godwin. Great Britain: Redcliffe Press and Arnolfini Gallery. 7-11.

Hayward, J. (1984). An Introduction By John Hayward (1951). In: Literary Britain. London: Victoria and Albert Museum.

Southam, J (2005). Landscape Stories. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Front fold.

Fox, W.L (2001). View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography and the Reinvention of Landscape. : University of New Mexico Press.

The books/work I want to look at next, during the Easter holiday period are…

David bate. (2009). In The Landscape . In: Photography - The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg. 89-108.

Barthes, R (1997). Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press.

Blakemore, J (2008). Black and White Photography Workshop. Cincinnati: A David & Charles Book .

Fulton, H (2001). Walking Artist. Düsseldorf: Richter.

Frank, R (2003). London/Wales. London: Thames & Hudson. 

(2013). Fifty Key Writers on Photography. Oxon: Routledge.

Klett and Wolfe

This book is almost like a photographic documentary of their journey and the process of recreating the images. We see the steps that they went through in perfectly placing the large format camera on the tripod and angling and placing it in a position that would perfectly match up to the original image. In some of the images that we see, we can understand the struggle that they would have gone through in not just placing the camera in the correct location, but because the landscape and its surrounding can change, then that makes it even harder, a better outcome I believe because we can see the change, but to photograph it would have been extremely difficult.

William Henry Jackson, Tthe Bluffs of Green River, Wyoming, c. 1885. P. 262 

Above we have an example of the preparation that Klett and Wolfe went through, picking up on every detail in creating the exact recreation of the original image. You can see the notes that they made on a copy of the original image by William Henry Jackson, circling key rocks that need to be in the correct place, because they are still part of the landscape, and horizon lines to help make sure that they can reproduce the landscape as equal and as precise as humanly possible. I like how they include these notes because an appreciation for their recreations and time spent in this really draws us in. Below is their photographic recreation of the original image (above), they even includes a man standing in the image, not posed the same but this makes it his own and we mainly focus on the landscape this way.

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe for Third View, Mike at Tollgate Rock, Wyoming, 1999. P.263

Fox, W.L (2001). View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography and the Reinvention of Landscape. : University of New Mexico Press. 

Klett’s first realisation for his passion and interest in photography and the history of images came across in 1977 when he co-founded a team t undertake the task of re-photographing work from the 19^th century. This expedition accompanied the Great Surveys of the West. This Rephotographing survey ran through 1979 and , made thousands of images, all with great mathematical accuracy, geography, history and art.

                Klett has been photographing the American West for almost 25 years t re-photograph the sites where various photographers made photographs, these photographers include William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’sullivan and others. His work focuses on mans interaction with the American landscape and by re-photographing these locations after 100 years after the original image was made, it draws the viewer in because we become fascinates with the change and what once was. We compare and contrast the images and Klett bonded with the landscapes because he knew an image maker had stood in the exact same location many years ago.

                Timothy O’sullivan photographed a site in Logan City over 100 years ago (1871) and in 1998, Klett drove down a dirt road that lead into the Mt.Irish Petroglyph District and towards a ghost town where O’sullivan photographed.  Klett begins the day around 7, by setting up a tripod and his 5x4 field camera with a polarograph pack and a copy of the original print of O’sullivans landscape he want’s to re-create. He assumes the vantage point from where the image would have been taken. Klett’s assistant, Byron, begins to locate the area best for the positioning of the camera.

                This book is also a narrative documentary as we see the journey they go through in making these images, the steps they take to create these historical landscapes and the thought and progression that went into the work. 

Fox, W.L (2001). View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography and the Reinvention of Landscape. : University of New Mexico Press. 

Rockfalls, Rivermouths & Ponds

‘Rockfalls, Rivermouths & Ponds’ is like the title suggests, get into the three sections. 

'Rockfalls' is set on the beach at Whale Chine on the Isle of White, where he was originally drawn by the roaring waves but then he was pulled to the trickle sounds from the cliff face behind him. He began to discover the tiny rivulets of particles that occasionally detach themselves from the cliff face and bounce onto the beach below. The more he stood there, the more he began to notice this becoming a frequent thing.

            ‘Rivermouths’ began from a desire to imagine the Earth engulfed by water. The Earth is erased from these photographs, drowned, as two bodies of water become combined, as the stream becomes released and flows into the sea, mirroring a psychological movement when we ourselves become exhausted and give ourselves up to death or something greater than ourselves.

            ‘Ponds’ is a project based upon a small pond which is between two fields and the moor at Woon Gumps in the far west of Cornwall. The shallow saucer was dug out of the ground a few hundred years ago and has continually used by cattle, which with their heavy presence have maintained paths through the gorse and brambles. When they are full, they are like a ‘mirrored disk or an eye reflecting the heavens’ when empty, they are described as ‘craters made by celestial objects crashing into the ground.’ 

The Red River

The Red River grew slowly but is a descriptive journey of a broken and damaged landscape, where those who lived in the farms and cottages along this polluted stream to survive their own world by their gardens and smallholdings.

 As Southam continued making these images, he also found that they took him on a metaphorical journey, where stories, myths and visions that were buried in his imagination found life in the landscape.

            The river itself is no longer than 6-7 miles and no wider than a few feet, but for hundreds of years the water has been diverted and used to aid the extraction of tine and copper ore from the mines in the valley. 

It rises on the granite spine of Cornwall at Black Rock and flows north and then west to reach the Godrevy Sea. It’s not hidden but is not much seen or appreciated by those visiting Cornwall. 

Upton Pyne

The Pond at Upton Pyne interested Southam as he because fascinated by what he called, an eyesore, which was in the middle of an agricultural and dormitory village. It was formed at the sight of an eighteenth-century manganese mine and now, the land is owned by a local aristocratic family that was involved in the mining venture. In the early nineteenth-century it was abandoned because no-one knew what to do with the mine after workings there were abandoned.

            It challenged the notions of what a village pond should really look like and this is what got Southam first interested, returning there one afternoon making the first photograph, he met a man who lived next door and with an agreement off the landowners, he has started to transform the area, and he spoke about creating an Arcadian realm around the pond. And was fine with the idea of Southam coming by every so often to photograph the process and progress.

            The more he photographed, the more it became an allegorical tale about one man’s attempt to make the world a better place. With all the work done himself, and villagers becoming sceptical about it and complaining about the mess around the pond, he kept at it.

            Southam drove past it one day and saw that a different hand had taken up the challenge. For the next three years, he followed the work of two others of the village who continued to transform this small bit of land.

            The story then became a three chapter tale. The first two are about the three year cycles of each attempt to improve the pond and the third is a short epilogue that places the site in a wider geographical perspective, with the images representing a collection of histories.

-Jem Southam. 

Jem Southam - 'Landscape Stories'

Jem Southam begins his photographical day in the early morning, before breakfast; take to the countryside of Bristol, Cornwall, Dorset, Devon and Somerset with the camera in his hand. His images seem lyrical, of the hills and the valleys, farms and farmland, coasts and cliffs, streams and ponds, all showing the subtle evolution of that location, transformed by the natural geological process and also human intervention over centuries.

               They all become almost three-dimensional images which show the natural layers of the British countryside/costal countryside and we develop, as a viewer, an understanding of the nature and how it works in these various locations. Created over a long period of time, this series of descriptive photographs show great power from an underlying allegorical language which engages and deepens out creative imagination.

                This book, Landscape Stories, is Southam’s first comprehensive collection of his work, which shows three completed pieces of work; The Pond at Upton Pyne, The Red River and Rockfalls, Rivermouths and Ponds. It also shows smaller pieces of work from series which were still in the making during the publication of this book. Southam’s brief narratives about the places where he has captured, pieced with essays from photo historians, Gerry Badger and Andy Grundberg, create an in depth context for thinking more about these fascinating landscape stories. 

Southam, J (2005). Landscape Stories. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Front fold.