Waves

I guess that very few of us have not at some time or another stood on a headland, or at the edge of a beach, and simply watched waves going in and out. Their cyclic rhythm seem to hold a fascination that catches us at some sub-conscious level, even the noise is relaxing. So perhaps it’s not surprising that waves and by implication the sea and its tides have featured in art for almost as long as art has been used to tell stories or convey feelings.

Homer uses the familiar tidal metaphor to describe the “the tide of the battle” turning in the Iliad – a bit surprising as the Mediterranean is not really tidal – and Horace refers to tides regularly – although you have to be a bit careful with translations as the words tide and waves seem interchangeable in some cases. Closer to home Shakespeare has Brutus referring to a tide in the affairs of men, and a little earlier an R Green noted that “Tyde nor time tarrieth no man.” which may be the earliest reference to time and tide waiting for no man. And of course, at the turn of the 20th century, John Masefield declared:

“I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;”

On the far side of the world, and 250 years earlier, in Japan Basho was writing:

Autumn full moon,  
the tides slosh and foam  
coming in.

..which does as good a job as any photo of capturing the experience of watching waves breaking on a shoreline.

On the musical front my knowledge isn’t good enough to identify early examples although Smetana used music to represent the sound of the Vlatava, and more recently Einaudi’s minimalist composition “Le Onde” (Waves) is clearly inspired by the ebb and flow of waves and tides. Even more recently still a Styx song catches an idea that many of us will have felt when watching the sea in “Sailing Away”:

“I look to the sea, reflections in the waves spark my memory;
Some happy, some sad, I think of childhood friends
And the dreams we had,”

Moving on to the visual arts waves have been a prominent feature of paintings down the years, both in the western world and in the Far East, where Hokusai’s “Great Wave” has become perhaps the most famous example of a Japanese woodblock print. In photography Adams produced a series of waves coming in on a beach in San Mateo County which are considered by some to be highly influential. As with the Smetana and Einaudi music, the representation of the ebb and flow is significant in this work.

Bringing us right up to date, Sugimoto’s seascapes do not reference ebb and flow or continuous movement, but they do point to the idea of the seas as a constant presence in the life of the human race.

Since I first came across these Seascapes in Barth’s Vanishing Landscapes I have found myself re-visiting them time and again (like the waves going in and out perhaps). I particularly like the idea that they are effectively a direct link to our ancestors, who will have seen exactly the same views back at the dawn of time – and yet while this is true on the scale of Sugimoto’s seascapes, at the waters edge the picture is always different. Which brings me part way to Assignment 3.

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.

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.