Making sense of my portfolio submission and assignments 3 and 5

Not unusually I have been having a bit of a crisis as assessment submission time approaches. This particular version of the landscape course effectively commits you to a course of action early in the proceedings – which can be a bit challenging if you feel you’ve developed in the interim and the work you started with may no longer feel “true” – even if you acknowledge its benefit in moving you towards something that does. A warning – this post is going to be long and rambling because I am trying something unusual for me – putting my thinking down in words.

After a somewhat hare-brained start – spurred on by the general enthusiasm for the Olympics – I rapidly picked up on my interests in perspective and memory that I was starting to develop in People and Place. From early on I picked an interest in perspectives that led me to think about Japanese paintings, and that in turn led me to thinking about seasonal symbolism in classical Japanese art and literature. This seemed a solid starting point – here was something I could use my camera to investigate, and that might form an interesting structure for later assignments. I struggled however, to find a clear path from those classical images to modern photographic practise. Reading around Japanese photography it became clear that there was actually a gap in that path.

While I was reading around Japanese photography trying to find a bridge I also did something I’ve not done properly in my previous course – acquire and digest some of the recommended books. In the process I discovered Sugimoto and Hatakeyama – the first attracted me for his philosophical approach, the second for his measured investigation. Both make extensive use of very similar images taken in series either to make a point or investigate a subject. My course for Assignments 3 and 5 was set.

In parallel however I continued with my explorations of fukei – landscape images with a hint of time passing through – based on symbols from early Japanese literature. And now we come to the crunch – I have three strands of work to present for assessment – in a format that only really admits two (portfolio and four seasonal images from same location) – and preferably one. If there’s something I’ve learned in the last few months its that presenting multiple ideas in a single piece of work is likely to lead to confusion and dilute whatever it is I’m trying to explain or explore.

Seasonal symbolism

I’m undoubtedly quite pleased with some of these shots – it’s still a subject that interests me but it poses a genuine difficulty which I’ve touched on previously. Without the background it looks like a collection of pictures of flowers, leaves and other figurative material without any obvious cohesion. It may have meant something to the mediaeval Japanese courts but for me it’s become more of an academic exercise which helps me better understood the poetry and art, rather than a subject in itself. I did consider producing the images on Japanese paper, but I feel this risks descending into simple pictorialism – which would be OK if that were my intent, but doesn’t feel convincing if it’s a desperate attempt to shout “Japanese”.

Cereal Field

I started this in response to the exercise which required me to shoot from the same location once during each season, but over the year it has developed into more than that. In an interview for SeeSaw magazine Jem Southam describes his working strategy as follows: “Once fixed on a site, I revisit it regularly, and gradually assemble a body of work that is a response to a slow absorption of the site …” He then adds some references to other research and discussions with people at the site which are less relevant to my experience here, but the initial sentence captures quite a lot of what I feel about this group of photos. In an artistic sense this is my field...I’ve watched it change and grow, I’ve recorded it’s development over the course of the year – and in some ways it’s like a clock marking of the passage of the year (and the seasons of course) with its subtle changes and differences. What would be a more fitting way to represent the four seasons in my portfolio?

Four seasons photo

This developed out of my interest in Japanese art, and my discovery of a genre of Japanese paintings which show  all four seasons in a single image – sometimes a pair of images across two folding screens. Over the course of the year I have assembled sufficient images from exactly the same location – I recorded the position of my tripod using the joins in my patio slabs - to spread the seasonal changes across a single image which can also be read as a simple allegory of the progress of life. This feels like an ideal way of presenting the “four images from exercise 15” even if it is a somewhat creative iteration of the precise brief.

So far so good – but what of the assignments – do they support this development?

Both assignments consist of series of similar shots which could be considered typologies in the Becher mould – given the similarities of presentation and content. I do not see them in quite that way. As I understand it the Becher typologies are about similarities and often reflect the modernist idea of form following function.

Wave studies

These are very consciously about difference. I was using photography to explore – challenge even – the ideas I picked up from Sugimoto’s work about the constancy of the sea and its link to the past. There are not intended as a typology in the Becher sense, because I would maintain that they demonstrate continuous variability, rather than consistency – and in any case waves have no function, so in one sense the form is of little relevance. In another sense the form is everything, as without the variation in form at the intersection of land and sea these photos would all be identical.

Triple point

I struggled a little for a subject for Assignment 5, but found myself drawn back to the coast.The “triple point” of the title , the visual point where land sea and sky meets represents in some way the limit of man’s environment. Sometimes this limit is totally natural, sometimes it has had structure or function forced on it. Again I would see the series as a study of the differences in form that can be found around the limit.

Where is this going?

I believe I have talked myself in to a position where I can say with some certainty that the work I have produced in the latter half of this course has been focused on difference – differences in wave forms, differences in land forms and differences in nature brought about by time and sometimes the action of man. Interestingly, from this end of the road I think I can understand how I got here. The two series for assignments 3 and 5 seem to fit quite well with the cereal field series – even the 4 seasons image can be seen as an extension which merges the individual differences into a single image.

All this seems to talk to the ideas expressed by Liz Wells among others at the seminar I attended in Newcastle months ago, about landscape as a documentary practise. How I take these ideas forward into the documentary course I have yet to work out.

Naoya Hatakeyama: A Short Summary

Born in 1958, Naoya Hatakeyama is one of a relatively small number of Japanese photographers to make a significant impact in the West. Sample biographies, such as the one associated with the Prix Pictet, suggest that he made his mark in Europe before making much impression in the US.

In common with the other photographers on my short-list for Assignment 4 Hatakeyama has a clear interest in the interaction between humanity and its environment. Unlike Godwin/Misrach this does not seem to be based in environmental protest, although I do see some similarities with the approach of Adams – who turned a landscape tradition on its head. Some commentators have suggested that Japan does not have a tradition of the sublime – much of Hatakeyama on the other hand clearly invokes exactly that.

His early works concentrate on the extraction of limestone from quarries all over Japan – initially the excavations themselves, and subsequently the factories as well. Lime Works – published in 1996 - brings together these two strands into a single work which, without the inclusion of a single human figure manages to convey the sheer scale of the operations. Blast – close-up shots of quarrying detonations continue the invocation of the sublime.

His work divides into a number of series which, seen together as in the LA Galerie website, clearly interweave in their ideas.  In the foreword to Lime Works Hatakeyama talks of the idea of the quarries being in some senses a negative of the cities built from the excavated material, so his progression to detailed images of cities seems almost inevitable. His Ciel Tombe series, and similar shots taken in underground locations can be seen as an extension of his interest in Limestone quarrying – and excavations in general – while his Rivers series focuses on the idea of taming nature with the use of concrete. The bleak formality of this series, with its vertical panorama format and central horizon line, emphasises  the idea of nature under control. In nature limestone formations are frequently shaped and moulded by water – I’m not clear if Hatakeyama intended this but there is a strong sense of irony in the idea that we have dug the limestone out and used it to shape and mould rivers.

Assessing his legacy is more difficult. He is certainly at the forefront of Japanese photographers in terms of recognition, but in a market/art that seems to be dominated by western imagery his place is uncertain. As far as I can tell he was adopted by European galleries significantly before his first shows in America. Part of the issue, I believe is that his photography, like so much Japanese photography appears to be about “understanding” rather than “campaigning”. His works does not have the obvious eco-political leanings of Misrach and Godwin, nor the myth-debunking status of Adams. For me this is a major attraction – but for the western art world as a whole I’m not sure that’s true.

References

LA Galerie: http://www.lagalerie.de/hatakeyama.html accessed 14 March 2013

Art IT Asia: http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_feature_e/8ZSVrwuvFzis4cA3t6Cq/ accessed 14 March 2013

Lisa Sutcliffe on Naoya Hatakeyama: http://blog.sfmoma.org/2012/10/a-bird-a-blast/ accessed 14 March 2013

Lime Works: Naoya Hatakeyama: Amus Arts Press, 2002

How do I present my portfolio for assessment?

This is beginning to bother me. I’ve been developing the images for the four seasons section in line with some of the seasonal words (kigo) that feature in tradition haiku as seasonal signifiers, but unless you know this then they could possible appear as a series of unconnected images.

I think there are a couple of options open to me:

• I could provide some supporting text – easy but not particularly creative, and potentially turns the series into a text-book;
• I could add some appropriate Japanese calligraphy – technically easy but I don’t have access to a source for the calligraphy, and again it may need explanation;
• I could, as suggested by one of the tutors on the Newcastle study visit I mentioned this to, make them more physically Japanese. Obvious suggestions might be printing on Japanese paper – technically more difficult but perhaps useful for the panoramics, I could present them on a scroll of some description.

Any combination of the above might also work – might even be necessary - but I am attracted to the last idea. There are a number of things that I need to look at and think about in more detail though.

• Technical issues – Japanese paper is generally expensive and more importantly absorbent – so I will need to trial some prints, and may have to choose images with specific properties to pull this off. I have bought a pad of sumi-e paper, and a pad of Japanese ink painting paper from the Heaton Cooper Studios in Grasmere for some experiments which I’ll report here when I‘ve finished. Scroll making is something I’ve not really begun to think about – but there seem to be two options – print on paper and mount to a fabric scroll, or print to a transfer film of some kind and use the scroll as the image base. Again some experimenting may be in order.
• Artistic issues – Is this simply rather shallow pictorialism? This is more difficult. As with western photography, there was a fairly strong strand of pictorialism in Japanese photography which persisted well into the 1930s (ref: The History of Japanese Photography, Yale University Press, 2003 pp144 et seq) which relied in its early stages on techniques such as gum bichromate and bromoil printing, and traditional subject matter. This technique centred approach was rejected by later practitioners and as in the west pictorialism was eventually overtaken my more modernist agendas.
• Japonisme – swallowing Japanese ideas into art is hardly new – it certainly exercised the minds of the impressionists, and art has moved on considerably since then, so the idea could potentially be considered backward looking – although I’m not attempting to replicate a painting, nor copy Japanese images. I would see the approach as a further reference to the Japanese heritage I’m referencing in the images
• In addition to this thought there is the tendency, discussed by Grundberg in an essay in Crisis of the Real, for photographs to be more frequently seen as objects – hence the scale of works by the likes of Wall and Gursky. In a Japanese context I’ve already discussed Sugimoto’s inclusion of images into glass stupas to draw attention to the philosophical intent of his photos.

The upshot of all this is that I’m going to experiment with some different presentation methods to see what the outcome is.

Thoughts on Landscape

Not taken many photos recently as I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research, and the Christmas break has given me plenty of time for reflection. The first line of thought was spurred by a forum discussion on what constitutes a “Landscape” photograph.
The European term “Landscape” appears to derive from a word meaning to a system of man-defined spaces in the environment, whether individual fields or tribal lands. Then it is suggested that it fell into disuse, before being revived by 15th century Dutch painters who appear to have used it as a term for pictures of scenery – which were just beginning to be seen as artworks in their own right. It was then some years before it started to be applied to the actual scene in addition to the picture itself. Wikipedia seems reasonably well referenced on this particular subject, and there is also a potted history here.
In this context – to my mind at least – Landscape carries connotations of ownership. I’ve seen it suggested, although I can no longer find the source, that the original Dutch landscape paintings were made to help land owners or sellers show off property. The, frequently ornate, frames I associate with classical landscape paintings also imply some form of containment and limitation. By painting and framing the image the landscape has been captured, controlled and preserved. This ethos seems to me to carry forward into photography – the early pioneer photographers in the American West were capturing the landscape in bite-sized chunks for presentation to the middle classes who could enjoy a snatch of the sublime in their living rooms (see extended discussion in Land Matters: Liz Wells). At this point I start to struggle because I’ve been a long time admirer of Ansel Adams, a more recent master of the genre. But much as I admire the beauty of his images (not to mention his stunning command of the medium) it has been argued e.g by Grundberg in Crisis of the Real (and I tend to agree) they are undoubtedly of a static, unchanging landscape and devoid of human life.

This seems to be another theme of western landscape images – their permanence. For a more recent example the works of Cornish or Rowell seem more about the transience of light and its impact on the landscape rather than the changing nature of the environment itself. Even the New Topographic photographers seem to me more concerned with the impact of man on the environment than with the evolution of the environment or its impact on man. While this undoubtedly opens the door to the use of landscape as documentary photography – a key theme at the “Futurelands Now” seminar I attended – it effectively continues the idea of the environment as something we own/partition/manipulate – perhaps even victimise.
The history of landscape art in Japan seems at first glance to have followed a similar trajectory, initially starting off as a mere incidental in religious imagery before breaking out to become an art form in its own right. But on reflection I think that there are some key differences – at least up to the point of westernisation and probably beyond. One is the absorption of popular religious themes into the images – in particular Shinto ideas of the importance of the natural world and the seasonal cycle and Buddhist ideas of impermanence. This gives rise to the production of idealised landscapes featuring elements of one or more seasons and the inclusion of birds and animals – often as seasonal symbols. In other words a much more fluid concept of a landscape painting.

This approach was dramatically impacted by the introduction of western cultural ideas in the late 18th Century and beyond, since which time the preferred approach of Japanese artists and photographers appears to have shifted back and forward between ‘realist’ western approaches and more traditional Japanese ideas. This has been equally true of photography, which has been through pictorial phases which sought to make images that appeared like tradition Japanese ink-paintings for example, through western influenced works such as Moriyama and more recently a desire to produce ‘Japanese’ works.
Another difference which I perceive – which is not to say it is inarguable – is the manner in which Japanese paintings at least have been produced and presented. Wood block printers made careful use of the colour of the background material (contrary to modern photo wisdom which appears to argue for no ‘pure white’ except in specular highlights for example) and the images were frequently produced and displayed ‘full bleed’ or in relatively light weight forms such as hanging scrolls, emphasising the frailty of landscape and removing the separation between image and surroundings produced by a frame. These are landscapes which change, and in which we participate.
Even the words for landscape carry subtly different meanings to the European versions. There are two common synonyms in use - “keikan”  carries overtones of objectivity and physicality – a bit similar to the German word ‘Landschaft’ which is where I started this ramble. The other word is Fukei – which is more subjective and carries with it a sense of atmosphere and place. In Setting Sun, Anne Wilkes Tucker deconstructs the original pictograms for Fukei as follows:
The first symbol ‘fu’ in the original Chinese means a flow or wind, the second symbol – found also in keikan – means a view. Hence landscape is not considered static, but transient and ephemeral. Ueda Shoji takes this one stage further and by engaging in (effectively) word play with the symbol for light evokes light flowing through the scenery.
A related temporality is found in Sugimoto Hiroshi’s Seascapes photos which he has explicitly stated are about “time’s arrow” and which he has deliberately reconnected to the religious origins of Japanese landscapes by presenting them in a modernised stupa or reliquary.
How much this temporality is reflected in other Japanese landscape practise I have yet to discover, but for now I think it captures something of the essence of what I am trying to portray in my seasonal photos, and I can only hope that perhaps others will see something of the same when I have the final portfolio assembled in a few months time. The same is true of my use of images of nature, as discussed in this post Geese - it matters if they're coming or going.

Perspective

Perspective – it’s an interesting concept. A dictionary definition is “a technique for depicting volume or spatial relationships on a flat surface” and as a starting point that doesn’t seem unreasonable. perhaps the most interesting part of that definition is the use of ‘a’ rather than ‘the’. It is clear that there are a variety of ways in which this might be achieved.

The tradition Western approach is based on a perception of physical reality in which the viewer is effectively at the centre of the image. Objects further away appear smaller (which reflects the simple physics of seeing), and often fainter or less distinct – again reflecting the physics of the viewing experience – atmospheric haze, limitations of eyesight and so on. We are so used to this approach that we seldom think about it – it’s how the world appears to us, so any photo that produces the same effect is “realistic” and any that doesn’t is odd.

As explained in the course notes, in this model similar sized objects closer to the camera appear larger than those further away, and lines converge towards a vanishing point. But in reality that is not true. Similar sized objects are exactly that – their size does not vary with viewing distance. And parallel lines most certainly don’t – in traditional geometry – meet at infinity. They don’t meet.

Traditional Western perspective solves a particular set of problems – how to represent what the eye sees from a single viewpoint, how to show 5 sides of a cube from a position on the 6th side. It is well suited to bound books which display single images in a limited space. But there are other problems it doesn’t solve. For example, how to illustrate a view seen from a moving viewpoint – for this western or linear perspective requires movies – essentially rapidly changing single viewpoint images which fool our brain into believing we are moving. It also restricts our ability to communicate the passage of time. This is not really an issue in painting, where we can choose elements to tell a particular story – but as several philosophers have observed a photo is literally a moment in time.

Enter axonometric perspective – the type favoured by Chinese/Japanese culture until their contacts with the west, and perhaps even the west until the Renaissance or thereabouts (c.f. the Bayeaux Tapestry). If you are reading a scroll, which you continuously wind on, losing the RHS of the image and gaining new LHS with every passing moment then single point perspective doesn’t really work. True you could paint an extremely wide panorama, but the limit is a 360% rotation rather than linear movement and if you wanted to see the whole picture you would need a very wide wall or a magnifying glass.

Distant objects become vanishingly small and foreground objects distort quite oddly – in short you start to lose some ‘realism’ because this isn’t how our eyes see.

The Chinese/Japanese solution was to use a set of rules in which parallel lines don’t meet at infinity and an object in the foreground retains its relative size compared with something of the same size in the distance. To western eyes this is quite strange, but it means that as you unroll the scroll you are not fixed to a single viewpoint- so you effectively walk through the image.

A third approach – also adopted by eastern cultures - was to simply vary the viewpoint. The benefit of this system is that it allows the artist to produce a single image (as opposed to a scroll) which creates the impression of a moving view point, allows the artist a choice of which elements to emphasise by painting them ‘larger than life’, and still retains something of the visual effect of normal sight from the various viewpoints. It is this technique, combined with the convention of simply placing more distant objects higher up the painting which creates the slightly disconcerting effect of traditional oriental wall hangings.

In western art similar concerns about how to create space on a flat surface appear to have influenced the Cubists and, much more recently, David Hockney

In my written blog I have analysed one of these paintings - "Landscape with Waterfall" by Tsunenobu, an artist of the Japanese Kano school. I can’t post a link as I can’t find it on the web but the effect is like an extreme version of the compression produced by a very long lens.  Interestingly it still makes use of aerial perspective and sharpness, with the more distant objects increasingly indistinct. Use of colour is not an issue as it is an ink drawing on a sepia ground, but there is also limited use of diminishing perspective within the individual elements of the overall painting.

To my mind a clear benefit of this approach is the ability to represent time in a single image. It is not necessary for every individual element to have happened, or be visible, at the same time. Because the image has become a temporal narrative it allow the portrayal of, for example, all four seasons in a single image – a regular oriental motif which is emphasised by the use of symbolic elements – cherry blossom, geese, mist etc. Although this is not unusual for painting,  photography has until recently been fairly solidly locked into traditional perspective by simple physics. Some , such as Duane Michals have sought to push the boundaries of this by using shots in short series. Digital techniques, however, allow the opportunity to combine multiple viewpoints in a relatively convincing manner, to give something of the feeling of an oriental wall hanging.

The image on the left is my first attempt to address some of these issues. It is, admittedly, a bit of a cheat as, the waterfall are from Iceland and the other two shots are from Switzerland, but at this stage I am simply exploring the technical possibilities of this approach to a landscape photograph.

It certainly manages to capture some of the feel of a town in the foothills of the Alps, and I would like to think that there is the sense of a journey for the waters from the snow fields at the top to the wide rivers at the bottom.

In Zen Buddhist terms – which informed a lot of Japanese art in particular - I think there may also be a reverse reading, from bottom to top, reflecting the nature of the struggle to move from the relative comfort of the lowlands to the airy open peaks of enlightenment. Certainly that is captured in the painting I was trying to imitate, although I make no real claims for that in my attempt.

There are a number of themes which I would like to explore which emerge from these initial thoughts, including:

• the use of panoramic photography to illustrate four seasons in a single image, which is something I’m already thinking about for my portfolio
• the use of multi point perspective to capture a narrative about a particular location
• other ways of capturing time by still photography.
• the impact of very wide angle panoramas on perceptions of space
• the use of multi-point perspective and collages to capture an idea of space or a space.

I may well come back to revise this post, but for the meantime I simply wanted to capture my early thoughts on these matters for later reference.