A journey through time

A final tick for exercise 15 which required me initially to shoot one shot per season from the same location and with the same composition. As explained in this post this morphed over time into my final portfolio submission – with the four shots/one location coming from elsewhere. This final group of three are a selection from the shots I took nearly weekly during the spring and summer months and represent June, July and August respectively. They are also the shots entered for portfolio so I’m not going to say too much about them.

The exercise asked me to think about how close I was able to keep the framing throughout the year and to reflect on the changes. The framing is easy – while they are not perfectly aligned – they are close enough that a good stitching programme could make them into a single image – but that’s not the purpose.

Clearly the seasonal variation across all these shots is very noticeable, but for me the most interesting non-photographic observation is the way that changes in the country side are non-linear – for a very large portion of the year very little changes in these fields without human intervention such as ploughing – but between early May and the end of August a crop appears, ripens and is harvested. I knew this intellectually but sometimes we need to discover these things experimentally.

I’m contemplating repeating the process for a second year – probably only monthly if I do – ultimately I could end up with a typology of years perhaps.

Anyway…the pictures:

Catching up

I’ve been neglecting my blog at a vital time – which i guess is one of the “joys” of part time study. Since my last real post I’ve had two weeks holiday without internet access, packed my youngest off to university, picked up my new role as OCASA rep for the Photography courses and tried to get my portfolio and assessment material in order.

Thankfully it’s coming together at last. I think the last big hurdle was getting everything printed. I’ve decided to go quite large – A2 – to ensure that my panoramas are actually tall enough to view. I’ve also decided that Assignment 1 will be digital only – it doesn’t fit with the rest of my prints and will simply distract from the impact of the others if I include it in hard copy. I feel justified in this approach because I think I made quite a leap forward in understanding what these courses are about between Assignments1 and 2.

So what I have now is:

• A single collage featuring all 12 images from Assignment 2;
• Assignments 3 and 5 are printed 8 and 12 up respectively on single A2 sheets – in the manner of a Becher typology as discussed previously;
• The four-shots-from-one-location part of the portfolio (Exercise 15) is covered by my 4 seasons image; and,
• For the twelve shots representing my response to the four seasons I am  providing 12 shots of the cereal field opposite my house, printed 3 to an A2 sheet in seasonal order. As the group is essentially about the cycle of the seasons this presentation means they can be ordered to start the year at any particular season you wish – I started the cycle at the beginning of autumn – but if someone prefers to view them spring first that’s their choice.

Presented in this way I hope a number of interlocking themes emerge and I’m capturing these thoughts here in the hope that it will help me with a unifying  “artists statement” for the whole collection:

• an interest in time and capturing or signifying its effects in an image – as in the collage and the portfolio submissions
• an interest in the sea shore and the boundaries between land, sea and sky as in Assignments 3 and 5. Man’s action at this interface is something I hope to work on in Documentary – subject to the Assignment specs being sufficiently broad.
• a preference for panoramic formats. I’ve pondered this one long and hard – it is clearly a preference I was developing during People and Place and in the final analysis I think it’s down to the idea that it feels closer to the way we actually see and, particularly in the extreme ratios used in my portfolio, it requires us to move through the picture as we would if it were a ‘real’ view.
• an idea of using the camera to explore rather than explain or expound. My tutor has regularly asked – “What am I trying to say?” – and sometimes I know, but sometimes I don’t. Sometimes all I can say is “Look at this – this is interesting. I’m not sure why yet, but give me time and a camera and I might be able to find out.” Triple Point (Assignment 5) fall into this category. I’m grasping at an idea about the impact of time and the elements on the little bit of the planet available for us to live on, and perhaps the variety of efforts we put in to tilt the equilibrium in our favour. The idea overlaps with some of the thoughts about permanence and change in the wave series and for the moment that’s all I can say. It has to come of it's own accord.

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.

Yellow – it’s the colour of spring

Or at least it is in our neck of the woods where we have rape-fields a plenty and hedgerows full of gorse. There's an argument that says rape-seed looks most stunning under brilliant blue skies, but I think that the colour in softer light and the blue grey of storm clouds is a worthwhile mix as well.

Gorse can give it a run for its money in the colour stakes though – and they make for a nice contrasty spring scene when taken together with a stormy sky to add some drama..

Planning my portfolio (spring)

So spring has arrived – allegedly. March showed little sign of that – the cereal field is still as bleak and brown as ever, no sign of life in the trees or the grassy banks – this is pretty much the same as the February photo, taken after the field had been ploughed.

Early April saw the field being harrowed and planted for the year – this shot is marred by some flare issues on the right hand side, but the general change in the field is very clear.

By late April signs of new life have well and truly appeared – the field is starting to green – and we get the occasional sunny day as well.

Given the likely pace of change over the next few months I may increase the frequency of these images. I’m also contemplating merging some of them to produce another full year in a single image.
So here we are in the first week of May – and the field is greening nicely.

Into the 2nd week of May and the hedges behind the fence are starting to green – even if the trees remain stubbornly bare. If you look closely you will see a rainbow has sneaked itself in between the trees on the left.

The final throes of winter

Winter is on it’s way out. A bit of a confident claim – but in spite of the rather wicked cold snap we can’t avoid tha fact that the days are getting longer and the sun is getting higher in the sky. So – just this last chance really to snaffle a few more winter images for the portfolio.

One shot I really wanted was arriving geese. I managed departing geese last time I went but this time there were no geese at all – they were all off in the fields somewhere. Quite a few hooper swans though – which I associate with winter as much as any  geese. No matter how white they seem when seen in isolation they always look slightly grubby against the snow. These will be stocking up for their northerly migration to Iceland – 500 miles+ over open ocean. Interestingly they occur in Japan as well in the winter, but as far as I can tell they appear much less often than geese as seasonal words in haiku.

   

Walking to Iceland is not really an option!!

Elsewhere the weather has been cold enough to find some interesting ice shots – the first couple on the local fells the second on my garden pond. Both pairs were inspired by some of the winter shots in Maeda’s “A Tree, A Blade of Grass”. The second two in particular talk of transition to me – the first from winter to spring with green leaves trapped by thinning ice, the second from autumn to winter

  

On the subject of transition – from winter to spring – I caught these on an early morning walk at the weekend. The sun was just melting the frost on one side of these tufts of grass to make a rather striking image of seasonal change.

 

And that’s it really – I suspect that my chances of icy cold shots are done for another year. I’m also beginning to work out a portfolio theme in my head which is rather more defined than simply seasonal symbols from haiku. That has served a a very useful starting point and  - to be honest – as a useful tool to help me , but I suspect what I’m really interested in is seasonal change and pictures with a sense of transition or time in them. More on this I another post – I had a bit of a light-bulb moment a few days back. My thoughts are jotted down in my paper log and I need to work them up a bit before bringing them here.

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.

Snow – or at least an attempt at it

We may be the only bit of the UK that has had no significant snow – which makes this exercise somewhat tricky without dragging myself up into the hills. Here are the few shots I’ve managed, although in fairness to me I’ve taken plenty of snow shots in the past – see here for example.
The first up is the cereal field I’ve been taking for my portfolio – had already done one shot this month, but nothing says winter quite like snow so here it is for a second time with rather more snow. For once us northern residents had the best of the weather methinks.

Sort of wish I had had the foresight when starting this series to remember that facing south-ish for part of the shot would result in the sun being in the picture during the winter months!
And the second…this one taken further south – Daresbury to be exact. I like it because it feels wintry without being to snow bound. It was actually snowing quite heavily at the time but there doesn’t seem to be much indication of that.

Planning My Portfolio (Winter)

Here is Decembers shot:


And January’s – not quite as much snow as some!!

Edit for a snowier scene a week later. Yet again we seem to have escaped the worst of the snow – this was gone 2 hours later.

And finally February … and the last shot of the winter season. I will have to rework this one if I chose to use it in the final portfolio as I’ve had to lift the shadows and the result is a rather uneven stripy effect. It’s not easy to see at this scale but this one actually includes the moon – which makes me think I might try a night time shot.

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.

Assignment 2 – Tutor Feedback

Yet again I’ve left it a number of weeks before writing this up to allow myself time to reflect on it, among other things.
Not going to concentrate on the detail as the key issue is “too many ideas”. I did wonder if submitting a two-part assignment, one looking at space, the other at memory was such a good idea, and I think I should have listened to the warning voices, as my tutor feels – and I agree – that it is not clear how they relate to each other – if at all.
Having had a good discussion with Simon about this I have decided to concentrate on the collage idea and memory for this assignment, and continue my McAlinden inspired space experiment in this blog. This means I will need a few more photos for the collage, perhaps introducing a more obvious reflection of differing times. Simon also suggested I consider making the collage less regular, to reflect the idea that memories are somewhat disjointed. I can see merit in this – and I have perhaps fallen foul of my “multiple ideas” issue in the final collage by trying to build an actual physical picture of the site with images in approximately the right place. Before going all the way down this path I do need to think about how I believe my memory builds an image of place – is it just about regularity or should I be considering image size in the final collage?
In short, that’s it. I need to concentrate more carefully on developing a single idea for the assignment. I was clear in my own mind what I wanted to say in both parts of my submission, but I simply need to develop one of them.
I did discuss a couple of other issues with Simon, including the possibility that I could use a different photographer from the ones suggested in Assignment 4. This appears to be a “goer” provided I can make a decent argument for the change within this blog, which I shall be trying to do in the near future.

Planning my Portfolio (Autumn)

Seems a little odd that this chapter comes almost halfway through the course, and shows the value of a good read of the notes at an early stage. I have already identified a location for the ‘4 photos from the same location in different seasons’ leg of the portfolio – conveniently outside my front gate. I thought it would be sensible to take one shot a month – and to make life easier  (for my ailing memory) I’ve chosen to shoot them on roughly the same day each month – around the 23rd/24th or the nearest available weekend. The key benefits of this location – to my mind - are the presence of a very solid gate post that I can use as a stand for the camera, wild vegetation at either end of the image and an opportunity to show the development of a fairly ordinary field throughout the year.
Here it is in September. The cereal has just been harvested and the field is covered in leftover straw.
 
And a month later, in October – the straw has been baled, the trees are losing their leaves and the hedgerow on the right is starting to brown

For the other dozen photos I’ll be using my 4-seasons shot from earlier in this blog and a series of seasonal shots reflecting my interest in Japanese seasonal symbolism.
Quick edit to add a November photo. That's autumn done & dusted.

Leave it to the leaves

Once again a subtlety of observation imbues natural objects with cultural meaning. When I was a child the local beech tree used to shed their leaves in piles a foot deep and I used to scuff through them on the way to the local shop. They were a sign of autumn. Except that in haiku fallen leaves are a sign of winter – coloured leaves on trees are a sign of autumn.

The first of these is autumn – and for the record I’ve not enhanced the colours (although I did tweak the contrast). The second – taken only a couple of days later – albeit in a different location – is winter.

 

        

The point of all this, of course, is that this course requires me to produce a portfolio of seasonal images, and while it would be easy to collect any number of such images I have an interest in Japanese culture that this course is helping – perhaps even encouraging – me to explore more deeply.

Geese – it matters if they’re coming or going

Or at least it does to some people. I took the following shot just a couple of weeks ago at Caerlaverock, near Dumfries. It shows a flock of Barnacle Geese coming into land after a day out on the marshes.

To me, and to those of us observant enough to notice such things in the UK I think geese are about autumn. They’ve spent the summer breeding up in the Arctic somewhere and now they’ve flown south for winter – so their arrival is a sign of autumn. I don’t think I’ve ever considered them a sign of spring – unlike the first house martin – now that’s a sign of spring. But for the scholar of Japanese haiku it does matter which way they’re flying – and departing geese like these would be taken as a sign of spring. Arriving geese would be a sign of autumn and seem, as far as my limited experience goes, to be a slightly less common as an allegory.  If I wanted these to be autumn geese they would need to be flying into the camera – clearly arriving.

Unlike this duck – a wigeon to be precise. Now he’s definitely late autumn or winter.

So what’s my point? To be honest it’s fairly simple. In this course we have a series of exercises that ask us in one way or another to photograph seasonal landscapes – to show how the landscape changes with time. Which is fine – but our western sense of seasonal change is a relatively blunt instrument compared with at least the traditional Japanese sense of the same. By exploring these associations I can provide myself with a toolkit for seasonal comment and in doing so perhaps use photographs to convey time (and perhaps even more) in a single image.

Are these images landscapes though? A short discussion I prompted on Flickr suggests they might well be. The first qualifies unequivocally in my books – it illustrates land and sky and has a clear seasonal reference in both our, and Japanese culture – so it’s difficult to argue it’s not a seasonal landscape. By implication then the wigeon must also be a landscape, since it features one of the three primary landscape elements and a seasonal reference, and so must this:

For me this prompts a whole range of possibilities within landscape photography that I’d not really thought about too deeply until the last couple of weeks. I shall just need to be very careful how I present them.

Rice fire and mushrooms

The Japanese word for autumn is 秋 – aki – which, according to this website, relates roughly to the idea of a rice fire – i.e. the burning of stubble – which was a practise associated with autumn. Pictorially this would be rather nice for the portfolio section of this course, but stubble burning is no longer common (it may even be illegal) in the UK.

However, haiku are full of such seasonal allusions – and are obviously finely tuned to a culture that understood (understands?) the nuances of such seasonal allusions such that the poem can be placed in early or late parts of the various seasons if you can understand the code.

fog rising – mushrooms push aside a bed of pine needles               Haiku courtesy of: Curtis Dunlap, The Tobacco Road Poet

This is a photograph which neatly fits with a haiku I particularly like. It was taken in late October on a rather misty, moisty afternoon, and at first sight that’s it. However – like the haiku (which is contemporary and not Japanese) it contains some elements of seasonal reference that add an extra dimension. Fog and, perhaps a little less obviously, mushrooms are a symbol of autumn, as are the fallen leaves – but falling pine needles can be taken as a spring/early summer reference and so by use of cultural symbolism we have a photo/haiku which bridges time as well as describing a simple picture. Once we have this concept there is a world for us to explore – is it about rebirth, with the spirit of the pine needles (the dead) re-emerging as new life? Japanese seasonal paintings sometimes allude to stages in life so perhaps it could be read as the experiences of our youth, which are fading rapidly, providing support and food for our middle/later years?

Perhaps I’m just being fanciful – but without that understanding of the passage of time in the image this is just a representation of a natural object caught at a single moment in time.

Finally - my thanks to Curtis Dunlap for allowing me to reproduce his delightful and thought-provoking poem.

Four Seasons Photography

In my initial explorations of perspective, and the Chinese/Japanese approach to it, I noted that I wanted to explore their (particularly the Japanese) approach to seasonal paintings. The seasons and a whole raft of symbols associated with them (referred to collectively as kigo in Japanese) feature regularly in Japanese literature and art. The importance of  seasonal themes in Japanese art, and their place in the Japanese psyche, is explored in some detail in this article in the Japan Echo (Takashina S.; Japan Echo; Vol 34, No.6; Dec 2007 – accessed 13 Oct 20120) which analyses the role of seasonal themes in poetry and paintings.
It notes:

Such paintings of the four seasons were quite common in premodern times, particularly during the Edo period (1603–1868). In some instances they depicted not only the natural environment but related human activity as well. A good example of this genre, also in the Suntory Museum, is the pair of six-panel screens by Kanô Osanobu titled Scenes of Farming in the Four Seasons, dated 1825.

The painting can be found here – Scenes of Farming in the Four Seasons – and I have lodged a paper copy in my written log. For me a couple of issues leap out:

• It is very obviously panoramic (in reality across a pair of screens)
• Because it portrays all four seasons in a single panorama (the two screens were probably intended to be seen together) it provides a temporal narrative in one image, unlike western paintings and photos which are typically fixed in both viewpoint and time.
• Clear reference to the cycling of the seasons can be incorporated in a single image.

As an approach this seems to have real merit. I live in the country (have almost always lived in the country) and am reasonably observant so I have a good idea of the animals, plants and activities that mark the passing of the season. Photographing them is a different matter – yes, foxgloves and swallows and snow and ploughing are symbols of seasonal activity, but photographed in isolation they seem to risk degenerating into cliché very rapidly. It would be very easy to submit a dozen chocolate box photos for this portfolio and have achieved very little. A four seasons panorama – or perhaps several – seems like a way to bring this particular target to life.
At first thoughts there are two or three ways this might be achieved:

• By combining several thematically related images into a single panorama – as with my ‘After Tsunenobu’ picture. This is potentially challenging from a Photoshop viewpoint, but has the merit of offering several viewpoints.
• By producing a continuous, single viewpoint panorama which varies across it’s width in accordance with the seasons. The challenge here is to find a suitable, and easily reproducible viewpoint that allows for the introduction of several seasonal symbols – my garden seems a reasonable first choice.
• If the technical challenges of these continuous panoramas are too hard to easily overcome it might be possible to offer the same idea as a diptych or tetraptych.

As the weather was reasonably good today I took the chance to do some of Fox and Caruana’s research through practise and tried the second option in my garden with the following result.

As I appeared in the shot four times I obviously had to shoot the panorama four times. I took two approaches to building the final result. In the first I produced four individual panoramas – one for each of my activities and then combined them in photoshop. In the second I took photos from each of the sets making up the panos and combined them into a single image (the result of the first technique is above). There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. The first required a fair bit of cloning and post-processing to make sure the details were not ghosting, but by the same token it offered rather more flexibility in blending the various exposures. The second was simpler, and more effective than I expected, but offered slightly more harsh transitions, and the placement of the individual elements and the image overlap seems quite critical.
Whatever, I feel with practice that I can produce a reasonable quality outcome from this approach. What I need to do now is work out how to marry this with the need to produce a dozen seasonal shots for the portfolio. There seem to be a couple of options – find twelve locations perhaps, or use these as the centrepiece of a portfolio support by other seasonal symbolism, or claim/produce the four individual components that go to make up each of these and so reduce the number of locations needed to three. Time for a chat with my tutor.