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"Each individual project made by Fukase has a totally different matrix and subject. He did not use the same printing styles nor photography techniques for each project. This is most unusual and it is one of the elements that makes him so very special"

Masahisa Fukase (1934-2012) is renowned for his obsessive, intense and deeply introspective photography through which he articulated his passionate and occasionally violent life. Fukase's body of work is remarkable for the extraordinary range of visual perspectives that it encompasses. A truly conceptual artist, Fukase altered the language of his work to suit the different narratives he created throughout his career. His photographs appear as instinctively assured in regional slaughterhouses or Shinjuku street orgies as in his own home.

The most widely recognised of his projects, The Solitude of Ravens (1986), was created over a period of ten years following the breakdown of his second marriage to Yohko Wanibe. Stark and monochrome, the ravens become a symbol of lost love and unendurable heartbreak, taking on such autobiographical resonance that Fukase is presented as the real subtext of his own work. Fukase's abstracted grief for Yohko appears in particularly bleak relief when set against his insouciant, intimate pictures of his young bride and their early domestic happiness from the 1970s. In another example of Fukase's sophisticated personal iconography, the artist's cats, who made such frequent appearances in his account of marital life, reappear in his final series, Bukubuku (Bubbling, 2004). Completed shortly before Fukase's debilitating fall in 1992, the series has been described as 'a whimsical if somewhat morbid game of solitaire that charts new territory for the photographic self-portrait.'

Masahisa Fukase was born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1934, the son of a successful local studio photographer. He graduated from Nihon University College of Art's Photography Department in 1956, and became a freelance photographer in 1968 following brief stints at the Nippon Design Center and Kawade Shobo Shinsha Publishers. His work has been exhibited widely at institutions such as MoMA, New York, the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, the Foundation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. His work is held in major collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Getty Museum. He is also the winner of prizes including the 2nd Ina Nobuo Award, as well as the Special Award at the 8th Higashikawa Photography Awards.
All the Masahisa Fukase works shown at our gallery and on our website are all authenticated vintage works that come directly from the Masahisa Fukase Archives. Each print was printed by Masahisa Fukase himself, and are all accompanied by a signed certificate of authenticity.

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"Each individual project made by Fukase has a totally different matrix and subject. He did not use the same printing styles nor photography techniques for each project. This is most unusual and it is one of the elements that makes him so very special" Masahisa Fukase (1934-2012) is renowned for his obsessive, intense and deeply introspective photography through which he articulated his passionate and occasionally violent life.

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Colour Photography: styles and creativity

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Colour Photography: styles and creativity

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Reality/surreality/hyperreality. Mechanical vs art. Looking back from digital colour and high levels of control. Capturing images is now so easy. And possibilities of control at shooting and processing stages so broad. Often lose the aesthetics and meaning.

Early Colour BBC 1974 overview of early colour photographers and techniques: tinting, gum bichromate, oil process, 3-colour process and autochrome.

George Eastman Museum 2014. Pigment processes: carbon prints and gum bichromate prints were developed in the 1850s and offer superior permanence and control of the appearance of the final print and are still used today.

George Eastman Museum 2014. History of development of colour processes from tinting to chromogenic film processes of 1970s.

Early colour photography processes produce a feeling of nostalgia for a by-gone leisurely time. As in monochrome photography this 'elite impressionist aesthetic' can be enhanced through for example use of chiaroscuro and light, smearing vaseline on the lens, adding brushstrokes or scratches to the film in development process. In colour photography particularly the aesthetic is also partly because of inherent technical limitations of early equipment and processes:

Lens aberrations and distortions in perspective

Chemicals were unstable, inconsistent and less sensitive leading to colour shifts, grain, limited tonality and dynamic range and requiring long exposure times and hence shallow depth of field and blurring. Effect of long exposures while model tries to be still so get selective movement blur? Giving the reflective feel?

Fragile plates and scratches that add to the feeling of human frailty and inevitable passage of time.

Edges of the plates? burning and fade?

Processes like hand-colouring and tinting, coupled with the blurriness of the original black and white image give a de-saturated dreamy look. The leisurely feel is enhanced by the very long exposures needed to produce multiple plates in different colours that are then combined. Photographing any action was not possible, and requires shallow depth of field with much of the image dreamily blurred. Grain, scratches and other imperfections are further exaggerated with fragility of glass plates and the nature of pigments and chemicals used.

Colour photography techniques

hand colouring of black and white prints

monochrome tinting through use of dyes and pigments at the development stage: cyanotypes, carbon prints and gum bichromate prints. They use pigments and bichromated colloids (viscous substances like gelatin or albumen made light-sensitive by adding a bichromate) that harden when exposed to light and become insoluble in water. The resulting prints are characterized by broad tones and soft detail, sometimes resembling paintings or drawings.

oil process

3-colour process

Autochrome 1907-1935: 3 colour process using potato starch. Soft focus, pointillist grain. Slow process if you want to keep exposures under control.

Colour photographs from 1907: Autochrome and Pictorialism. Ted Forbes 2015 as part as part of his You Tube Art of Photography series. Discusses autochrome process in the context of other early processes, debates on colour photography as art and how we interpret early colour photographs from our current digital perspective. Book Impressionist Photography.

2018 John Thornton and Don Camera: Is pictorialism dead? Looks at the artistic inspira

Debbi Richard 2009 Two short clips from a PBS documentary titled: "American Photography: A Century of Images." Paul Strand's straight photography started to re-establish the primacy of black and white as 'serious' photography with an emphasis on minimum artifice and attention to tonal abstraction and shapes.

Alfred Steiglitz

Heinrich Kuhn pictorialism

Overview of Kuhn's life and work. Ted Forbes 2014 as part of You Tube The Art of Photography Interesting discussion of early colour techniques in the context of camera clubs and their debates about colour photography. Detailed discussion of technical challenges of lenses and unstable chemicals and how Kuhn addressed these through scientific experiment and composition to make very evocative images.
Based on book Heinrich Kuhn: The Perfect Photograph

Edward Steichen

Overview of Steichen's colour and black and white work, including early landscapes. Ted Forbes 2011 as part of You Tube The Art of Photography series. Based on book 'Steichen's Legacy'. use of moody low key landscapes. In figure studies takes out facial information to create intensity, drama and mystery. And use of abstraction with harsh lighting to produce patterns. Reduction of the image to just the information needed. Humour in shadows.

Heinrich Kuhn autochrome technique

Neue Galerie New York 2012. Gives a very detailed overview of the autochrome process. Priority of lighting and backlighting to give luminosity coupled with the fragility of the plates. He experimented with colour patches, aiming at being able to apply colour patches like a painter.

Kuhn, Steiglitz and Steichen

Neue Galerie New York 2012. Dr Monika Faber discusses exhibition and book: "Heinrich Kuehn and His American Circle: Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen". Shows more of his tinted photographs and landscape.

Paul Strand modernism

The Art of Photography 2014 modernist photography using the power of the image to create social awareness. Book: Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs (Aperture) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0912...

Overview focusing on era 1970s onwards by Ted Forbes 2013 as part of his You Tube Art of Photography series.
Discusses use of autochrome process in travel photographs by National Geographic.
William Eggleston in 1970s was the person who brought colour photography as respectable fine art.
Saul Leider work was rediscovered in 1990s uses abstraction and faded quality.
Fernando Schiana not high contrast
Auri Gerscht uses splashes of colour in desaturated background.
Dan Winters contemporary muted portraits.
Colours are still not accurate, but that gives a retro- nostalgic feel. Use of colour as part of the composition at time of shooting. White balance is not accurate.

Saul Leiter

Joel Meyerowitz

see also: Stephen Shore

Luigi Ghirri

Martin Parr

Lomography is a genre of photography, involving taking spontaneous photographs with minimal attention to technical details. Lomographic images often exploit unpredictable non-standard optical traits of cheap toy camera (such as light leaks and irregular lens alignment), and non-standard film processing techniques, for aesthetic effect.

Lomography is named after the Soviet-era 35 mm LOMO LC-A Compact Automat camera cameras produced by the state-run optics manufacturer Leningradskoye Optiko- Mekhanicheskoye O byedinenie (LOMO) PLC of Saint Petersburg. This camera was loosely based upon the Cosina CX-1 and introduced in the early 1980s. In 1992 the Lomographic Society International was founded as an art movement by a group of Viennese students interested in the LC-A camera and who put on exhibitions of photos. The art movement then developed into the Austrian company Lomographische AG, a commercial enterprise who claimed "Lomography" as a commercial trademark.

See their website: https://www.lomography.com

But lomography is now a genericized trademark referring to the general style that can be produced with any cheap plastic toy camera using film. Similar-looking techniques can be achieved with digital photography. Many camera phone photo editor apps include a "lomo" filter. It is also possible to achieve the effect on any digital photograph through processing in software like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom or Analog FX Pro. The lomography trend peaked in 2011.

Because of its ease of use, it has been used in participatory photographic activism because it is easy to use eg by children in slums of Nairobi.

Excellent overview. Introduces different cinema looks. Covers curve adjustment layers on channels, pros and cons of LUTs and how to use the phototoning gradient maps.

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Colour Photography: styles and creativity

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Reality/surreality/hyperreality. Mechanical vs art. Looking back from digital colour and high levels of control. Capturing images is now so easy. And possibilities of control at shooting and processing stages so broad. Often lose the aesthetics and meaning. Early colour photography processes produce a feeling of nostalgia for a by-gone leisurely time.

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Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

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Brassaï (1899-1984) was a Hungarian-born French photographer who created countless iconic images of 1920s Parisian life.

He moved to Paris in 1924, working as a journalist and joined a circle of Hungarian artists and writers. His seminal book Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night 1933) documented the nightlife of prostitutes, street cleaners, and other scenes in his neighborhood of Montparnasse.

He also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals-among them his friends and contemporaries, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, and Henri Matisse. He was also interested in graffiti, seeing it as a form of Outsider Art that could open the door for new artistic expression.

His black and white images are very dark and moody with large areas of clipped black with rim lighting have influenced my work in Assignment 2.1 Bridge.

Showcases some of his most iconic photos

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Brassaï (1899-1984) was a Hungarian-born French photographer who created countless iconic images of 1920s Parisian life. He moved to Paris in 1924, working as a journalist and joined a circle of Hungarian artists and writers. His seminal book Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night 1933) documented the nightlife of prostitutes, street cleaners, and other scenes in his neighborhood of Montparnasse.

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Beauty in Decay: On-line slideshows to music Short documentary video I do not find this as powerful as the still shot slideshows. Read on-line

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Nowhere in Particular
google images
Jonathan Miller writing about the book in the Independent

the capacity to resolve fine detail is confined to a surprisingly small area of the retina, the fovea, around which visual acuity falls off so steeply that it's impossible to take in the details of a whole scene at a single glance. Try fixing your eyes on the last word of this sentence and see how difficult it is to read the surrounding text. The result of this restricted acuity is that our perception of the visual world has to be assembled in discrete installments. Although we are not explicitly aware of doing so we are constantly flicking our gaze from one part of the visual field to the next, and by bringing the specialised centre of the retina to bear on one sector of the scene after another we collect an anthology of sporadic snapshots from which we build up an apparently detailed picture of the world around us.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-scavengers-hoard-1116630.html
On Reflection

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google images Jonathan Miller writing about the book in the Independent the capacity to resolve fine detail is confined to a surprisingly small area of the retina, the fovea, around which visual acuity falls off so steeply that it's impossible to take in the details of a whole scene at a single glance.

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Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and photobook collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.

Martin Parr (born 1952) trained in photography at Manchester Polytechnic. Described in the past as Margaret Thatcher's favourite photographer, Parr caused a stir when he tried to join Magnum Photos because many Magnum photographers felt that Parr's work was voyeuristic, titillating and meaningless. Parr was eventually accepted at Magnum in 1994 and went on to become one of the leading authorities on photography in the UK.

He has a characteristic photography style and approach. Parr works mainly in colour, using fill-in flash to over-light the scene, causing a frozen moment in time to be even more false yet far more 'real'. His approach is direct and opportunistic. He doesn't ask permission and if someone sees that he is photographing them he will continue on the basis that it's his job to photograph them, record their reaction, etc. His work is quirky and opportunistic. He makes no bones about the latter; invited to an event, he takes the opportunity to produce images that will lead to further projects.

See Tate Modern overview and links to Parr's work.
Tate video overview of his approach to British documentary photography
Listen to Martin Parr talking about his images and practice:

!! Insert sketchlog pages of analysis of his images and annotated flatpans of his photobooks.

Use your camera flash or a flash gun to balance the daylight. You need to take light readings from the ambient light and then set the flash gun to produce a small amount of flash - not enough to turn the scene into night - running the camera at a slower speed than the flash would normally synch at.

Getting the flash /ambient light balance right is the key to the technical side of the whole look.

This is the camera's reaction under normal circumstances. A slower shutter speed than the recommended flash setting may help a lot.

This will work very differently for a range of cameras and you may need individual support and advice for this relative to your personal camera equipment.

Ensure that the colour is bright and reflects the nature of Martin Parr's work. How does this lighting effect change the nature of your images?

Parr has had around 40 solo photobooks published including:

Other projects:

Rural communities (1975-1982)A recent project in the suburbs of Paris depicts ordinary life within a diverse, mainly immigrant, community.

St Moritz series shows the rich at play in a way that only people who work there would normally get to see.

Luxury - a recent Martin Parr project where he looks at the rich and their pastimes.

Parr has edited three volumes of his collections of postcards:

Boring Postcards (1999)

Boring Postcards USA (2000)

Langweilige Postkarten (2001).

The subjects within Boring Postcards are what we judge to be mundane or prosaic, such as motorways, service stations, tower blocks, school and other modernist municipal buildings - structures that we take for granted and might even consider to be 'eyesores'. They weren't necessarily photographed for their beauty in any traditional sense, but because of their novelty value as photographic subjects. [Many of the images in the UK edition are attributed to the Frith photographic company.] They are in fact often quite unusual and remarkably intriguing.

The Parrworld (2008) show exhibited some of Parr's extensive collection of kitsch souvenirs and other disparate paraphernalia: a watches with pictures of Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, bubblegum pop pin-up wallpaper. He compares photography to collecting: the world is out there for the having.

!! Photobook collections and his discussions of these.

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Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and photobook collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.

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!! to update with my own detailed thoughts on Land, The Edge of the Land and Our Forbidden Land as I critique my own work in Assignment 5.
Publications

Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 - 27 May 2005) was a British photographer known for her black-and-white landscapes of the British countryside and coast. Her approach was very intuitive and felt that images where she had thought too deeply about composition and meaning had less 'visceral' power as a response to what she was seeing.

She was self-taught and her obsession with photography started with family photos and producing photo albums for neighbours. produced portraits and documentary work of factory workers. Much of the emotional charge of her images she attributes to difficulties in her personal life: traumatic marriage break-up, cancer and struggles to support her children that led her to throw herself into her work. She produced portraits of writers and also documentary work on factory workers. But it is for her landscape photography that she is best known.

Justin Jones overview of her work in the context of her life and politics . Discusses many of her iconic photographs. And what he sees as some of the gender dimensions of her work - though I feel some of these distinctions may be a bit exaggerated and not sure how far Fay herself would see her work in this way.

Landscape photography and activism

She was a very vocal critic of the 'picturesque' and her photographs aim to capture landscapes as they really are with all their historical, social and political complexity.

"I am wary of picturesque pictures. I get satiated with looking at postcards in local newsagents and at the picture books that are on sale, many of which don't bear any relation to my own experience of the place... The problem for me about these picturesque pictures, which proliferate all over the place, is that they are a very soft warm blanket of sentiment, which covers everybody's idea about the countryside... It idealises the country in a very unreal way."
(Fay Godwin 1986 South Bank Show Produced and directed by Hilary Chadwick, London Weekend Television quoted Alexander 2013 p84.)

Comprehensive Melvin Bragg overview of her life and work from old TV programme. Discusses Godwin's landscape photography in the context of conventions and innovation in landscape art and critique of 'picturesque'. Includes many interviews with Fay herself on her responses to landscape and approaches to photography.

She combined her landscape photography with environmental activism against the ravages of 1980s Thatcherism and as President of the Ramblers' Association.

Mavis Nicholson interviews Fay Godwin on the 'In with Mavis' program from 1991. She talks a lot about her photography in the context of her environmental activism, particularly destruction of landscapes because of building of the Channel Tunnel.

Selection of prints from the 25th anniversary of Fay Godwin's seminal exhibition and book Land from the original exhibition. https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org...

Peter Cattrell worked as Fay Godwin's printer. Interesting discussion of printing choices he made. And discussion of her last experiments placing objects on photographic plates as experiments. Also some interesting insights into her personality -as well as poignancy of her fragility, illnesses and death.

Rebecca the Lurcher. 1973

The Oldest Road: An Exploration of the Ridgeway. 1975. With J.R.L. Anderson.

Remains of Elmet. Rainbow Press, 1979. With poems by Ted Hughes.

Remains of Elmet. Faber and Faber, 1979. ISBN 9780571278763.

Elmet. Faber and Faber, 1994. With new additional poems and photographs.

Remains of Elmet. Faber and Faber, 2011. ISBN 9780571278763.

The Saxon Shore Way. Hutchinson (publisher), 1983. With Alan Sillitoe. ISBN 0091514606.

Land. Heinemann, 1985. With John Fowles. ISBN 0434303054.

!!Edge of the Land

Glassworks & Secret Lives. 1999. ISBN 0953454517.

Landmarks. Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 2002. ISBN 1-899235-73-6. With an introduced by Simon Armitage and an essay by Roger Taylor.

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to update with my own detailed thoughts on Land, The Edge of the Land and Our Forbidden Land as I critique my own work in Assignment 5. Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 - 27 May 2005) was a British photographer known for her black-and-white landscapes of the British countryside and coast.

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About the MOMA exhibition 'How to See'. A retrospective looking at different ways in which Shore's photography reflects different conscious ways of seeing.

In some photographs he wanted to show what the experience of seeing looks like, taking 'screenshots' of his field of vision, seeing things the way he sees them - subject in the centre, converging verticals etc. Other photographs are creating a view for the viewer to explore, portraying how we see our environment when consciousness is heightened . These are have high structural density as an examination of interrelationships between the different elements .

In some of his landscapes he also reproduces the way the eye sees - the way it seems like the eye changes focal distance on a 2D landscape surface is an illusion produced by different sharpness through the image.

Review of iBooks produced as print on demand. He did a book a day of what everyday life was like on days when significant events were being reported in the news.

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A sensitive and comprehensive portrait made with Sugimoto that discusses his life, vision and focuses particularly on his recent works on 'Lightning Fields' and electricity, sculpted and photographed forms from mathematical formulae, reviving ancient Japanese traditions from Shinto and theatre and a gallery to communicate his vision to next generations.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a contemporary Japanese photographer, born in 1948 and dividing his time between Japan and New York. His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures have given Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He has spoken of his work as an expression of 'time exposed', or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death. A lot of his work also relates to scientific concepts - electricity and origins of life and visual forms from mathematical formulae. His work has been a key inspiration for by black and white photography in:

2.2.1 Bridge where in my treatment of the bridge shapes I am inspired by the dramatic black white contrasts of his Conceptual Forms and Joe, and his work on the branching forms of electricity has influenced my working of the algae and other textures.

2.2.2 Shutterscapes: Lake District my series on cloudscapes and mountains has been influenced by Seascapes.

Sugimoto's vision
Sugimoto's website [Photography is] a kind of contrivance to externalize my internal vision. The world exists and so do I. But does the world exist as I see it? It may be that each individual is seeing the world differently. And all share the same fantasy of how this world should look like.
Thousands of years of history are in me.
We see what must be seen. Then disappear into the sea. 'Capitalism won't stop until we have depleted all resources....my work hopefully gives us an opportunity to think before destroying ourselves'
He works in series projects. The images that have been most influential on my own work are those that are highly abstract, dealing with light, dark and time as a way of making us think about life and our place in a fragile world in an immediate and haunting way.

Discussion by Sugimoto of the evolution of his photographic approach and concept, particularly towards his seascapes and more minimalist works. The underpinnings are not just meditative awe at the beauty of minimalist landscapes and a wish to reflect on what is timeless - we have been changing the land, but seascapes are what our earliest ancestors saw. He links this to our responsibility for our future 'Capitalism won't stop until we have depleted all resources....my work hopefully gives us an opportunity to think before destroying ourselves'

A catalogue of some of Sugimoto's best known work by Ted Forbes, explaining his aims and techniques: Movie Theatres, Seascapes, Chamber of Horrors, Architecture, In Praise of Shadows - a series of abstract images of candles burning down and picures of wax works.

The series that have been most influential on my own work are those that are highly abstract, dealing with light and time as a way of making us think about life and our place in a fragile world.

Seascapes

The seascapes are a series of very large black and white prints all have the same middle horizon line. These images have inspired my reworking of:
So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention―and yet they vouchsafe our very existence...Let's just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.

This beautiful series of very large black and white prints all have the same middle horizon line. When presented here as an on-line presentation the different light and weather conditions around the same horizon line merge into each other in a really haunting way.

Their minimalist abstraction and meditative impact has been compared to that of Rothko's paintings - but strangely the painting appear more 'realistic' than the photographs.

A discussion of a Pace exhibition in London and catalogue comparing the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto and Mark Rothko in terms of compositions.

Revolution

In this series he is at his most minimalist: 'horizontality', verticality and diagonals of Angst. With dramatic, eerie splashes of light.
For a long time it was my job to stand on cliffs and gaze at the sea, the horizon where it touches the sky. The horizon is not a straight line, but a segment of a great arc. One day, standing atop a lone island peak in a remote sea, the horizon encompassing my entire field of vision, for a moment I was floating in the centre of a vast basin. But then, as I viewed the horizon encircle me, I had a distinct sensation of the earth as a watery globe, a clear vision of the horizon not as an endless expanse but the edge of an oceanic sphere...There remains... a great divide between comprehending (i.e. explaining) the world and being able to explain what we ourselves are. And even then, what we can explain of the world is far less than what we cannot ― though people tend be more attracted by the unexplained. In all this, I somehow feel we are nearing an era when religion and art will once again cast doubts upon science, or else an era when things better seen through to a scientific conclusion will bow to religious judgement.

This French video discusses Sugimoto's approach to time and abstraction. In this series he is at his most minimalist: 'horizontality', verticality and diagonals of Angst. With splashes of light.

Joe and Conceptual Forms

Like a work of architecture, this sculpture has to be experienced by walking around and through it... Joe is different according to the time of the day, the season, and the viewer's position. It is in the visitor's memory that the sculpture "takes shape" in the most complete way...Using a photographic technique involving areas of extremely soft light and blurred darkness, he sculpted views that seem like aspects of visual memory: the arts of photography and sculpture overlap and memories of the two-and the three-dimensional mix.

See: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/joe-1 and https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-24

Drive-in Theatre

Its eerie light and blank picture on nothingness.
https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/drivein-theatre
Lightning Fields

The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes. His process is discussed in detail in

See: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-28

Further ideas I want to explore
Architecture I decided to trace the beginnings of our age via architecture. Pushing my old large-format camera's focal length out to twice-infinity―with no stops on the bellows rail, the view through the lens was an utter blur―I discovered that superlative architecture survives, however dissolved, the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, completely melting away many of the buildings in the process. See: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/new-page-5 Chamber of Horrors People in olden times were apparently less fearful and grievous of death than we are today. To some it was even an honour to be chosen by the gods as a sacrificial victim, a liberation from the sufferings and strife of this life...Must we moderns be so sheltered from death?

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Hiroshi Sugimoto is a contemporary Japanese photographer, born in 1948 and dividing his time between Japan and New York. His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures have given Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability.

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Edward Burtynsky, (born February 22, 1955) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large-format photographs of industrial landscapes. Burtynsky's most famous photographs are sweeping views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. The grand, awe-inspiring beauty of his images is often in tension with the compromised environments they depict.

Exploring the Residual Landscape

Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Ed Burtynsky website
Oil 2009

His series Oil (2009) resolves an epiphany he had in 1997, when he realised just how tightly connected all of our global activity was to petrol and its raw material - oil.

The monograph is divided into three sections:

images of extraction and refinement;

the consumption of oil and motor culture;

abandoned 'oilfields run dry' and motor vehicles of all descriptions resigned to huge scrap heaps.

The images within Oil evoke a terrifying sense of the sublime. It is within the third section that the images have their most potent effect, for instance seemingly endless rows of impotent, rusting fighter jets in Arizona, or a channel cutting through a canyon of stacked worn car tyres in California. Some of the most striking images are those made at the Chittagong ship breakers in Bangladesh. The proportions of the structures that the workers pick apart, almost by hand, are awesome, and just as affecting are the horrendous conditions in which they work. Although not overtly critical in any explicitly rhetorical sense (i.e. like Kennard's montages), it is impossible to read Burtynsky's position as anything but one of grave concern for our consumption of this valuable substance.

Some images in Burtynsky's Oil can be interpreted from different perspectives: great stacks of compressed oil drums or bits of car parts might speak of excess and consumption but, whilst they refer to manufacturing in a past tense, these are also the raw materials for current industries, ready to be melted down and turned into new things.

China

He has made several excursions to China to photograph that country's industrial emergence, and construction of one of the world's largest engineering projects, the Three Gorges Dam.
Burtynsky discussing his work made in China
Other work

Wikipedia

Burtynsky was born in St. Catharines, Ontario. His parents had immigrated to Canada in 1951 from Ukraine and his father found work on the production line at the local General Motors plant. Burtynsky recalls playing by theWelland Canal and watching ships pass through the locks. When he was 11, his father purchased a darkroom, including cameras and instruction manuals, from a widow whose late husband practiced amateur photography.With his father, Burtynsky learned how to make black-and-white photographic prints and together with his older sister established a small business taking portraits at the local Ukrainian center. In the early '70s, Burtynsky found work in printing and he started night classes in photography, later enrolling at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

From the mid-1970s to early 1980s, Burtynsky formally studied graphic arts and photography. He obtained a diploma in graphic arts from Niagara College in Welland, Ontario, in 1976, and a BAA in Photographic Arts (Media Studies Program) from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, Ontario, in 1982.

His early influences include Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eadweard Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins, whose prints he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early 1980s. Another group whose body of work shares similar themes and photographic approaches to Burtynsky's work are the photographers who were involved in the exhibition New Topographics.

Photographic series

1983 - 1985 Breaking Ground: Mines, Railcuts and Homesteads, Canada, USA

1991 - 1992 Vermont Quarries, USA

1997 - 1999 Urban Mines: Metal Recycling, Canada Tire Piles, USA

1993 - Carrara Quarries, Italy

1995 - 1996 Tailings, Canada

1999 - 2010 Oil Canada, China, Azerbaijan, USA

2000 - Makrana Quarries, India

2000 - 2001 Shipbreaking, Bangladesh

2004 - 2006 China

2006 - Iberia Quarries, Portugal

2007 - Australian Mines, Western Australia

2009 - 2013 Water Canada, USA, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Iceland, India

Video: Manufactured Landscapes

In 2006, Burtynsky was the subject of the documentary film, Manufactured Landscapes, that was shown at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Video: Watermark

Burtynsky and Jennifer Baichwal, who was his director on the 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes, are co-directors of the 2013 documentary film, Watermark. The film is part of his five-year project Water focusing on the way water is used and managed.

Most of Burtynsky's exhibited photography (pre 2007) was taken with a large format field camera on large 4×5-inch sheet film and developed into high-resolution, large-dimension prints of various sizes and editions ranging from 18 x 22 inches to 60 x 80 inches. He often positions himself at high-vantage points over the landscape using elevated platforms, the natural topography, and more currently helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. Burtynsky describes the act of taking a photograph in terms of "The Contemplated Moment", evoking and in contrast to, "The Decisive Moment" of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 2007 he began using a high-resolution digital camera.

The Long Now Foundation

In July 2008 Burtynsky delivered a seminar for the Long Now Foundation entitled "The 10,000 year Gallery". The foundation promotes very long-term thinking and is managing various projects including the Clock of the Long Now, which is a clock designed to run for 10,000 years. Burtynsky was invited by clock designer Danny Hillis to contribute to the Long Now project, and Burtynsky proposed a gallery to accompany the clock. In his seminar, he suggested that a gallery of photographs which captured the essence of their time, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, could be curated annually and then taken down and stored. He outlined his research into a carbon-transfer process for printing photographs that would use inert stone pigments suspended in a hardened gelatine colloid and printed onto thick watercolour paper. He believes that these photographs would persist over the 10,000 year time-frame when stored away from moisture.

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Edward Burtynsky, (born February 22, 1955) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large-format photographs of industrial landscapes. Burtynsky's most famous photographs are sweeping views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. The grand, awe-inspiring beauty of his images is often in tension with the compromised environments they depict.

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"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York) in January 1975. In his introduction to the catalogue, Jenkins defined the common denominator of the show as "a problem of style:" "stylistic anonymity", an alleged absence of style.

The exhibition was a reaction to the idealised landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and was influenced by Ed Ruscha who, in the 60s, had made a series of artist's books with self-explanatory titles such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Walker Evans, who had photographed the vernacular iconography of America in road signs, billboards, motels and shop.
"The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,." "[...] rigorous purity, deadpan humor and a casual disregard for the importance of the images." Technically, half the photographers were working with 8″×10″; (20 cm × 25 cm) large format view cameras; those who were not were using either square medium format (Deal, Gohlke), or in the case of Baltz, 35 mm Technical Pan, a slow and high-definition Kodak film that the photographer printed on 8″x10″ paper. Only Baltz and Wessel were using regular 35 mm cameras and film. A notable element of the show was that the artists were, or would be, linked with higher education as students, professors, or both-a change from the preceding generations.The shift from craft or self-teaching to academia had somewhat been started by photographers such as Ansel Adams and Minor White, but the new generation was turning away from the approach of these forebears. This was illustrated by the subject matter that the New Topographics chose as well as their commitment to casting a somewhat ironic or critical eye on what American society had become. They all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach. In most cases, they gradually revealed themselves as coming from rather critical vantage points, especially Robert Adams, Baltz, and Deal.
Photographers
Sean O'Hagan The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal. ...Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.
The prints were in a 20 cm × 25 cm (8″×10″) format except for Joe Deal (32 cm × 32 cm), Gohlke (24 cm × 24 cm - close enough to 8"×10"), and the Bechers with typical European (for the time) 30 cm × 40 cm prints.

However despite their similarities, there were significant differences between the photographers in their reactions to, and portrayal of, the suburban environment and their political conclusions on responses to it.

See Greg Foster-Price and John Rohrbach 'Re-framing the New Topographics' 2013 University of Chicago Press

Robert Adams: disappearing wildernesses, pointed his camera at eerily empty streets, pristine trailer parks, rows of standardised tract houses, the steady creep of suburban development in all its regulated uniformity.

Lewis Baltz: stark photographs of the walls of office buildings and warehouses on industrial sites in Orange County.
Frank Gohlke
Nicholas Nixon: innercity development: skyscrapers that dwarfed period buildings, freeways, gridded streets and the palpable unreality of certain American cities in which pedestrians seem like interlopers.
John Schott
Stephen Shore : shot in colour. It seemed to heighten the sense of detachment in his photographs of anonymous intersections and streets.
Henry Wessel, Jr
Bernd and Hilla Becher: stark images of Pennsylvania salt mines and giant coal breakers were as coolly architectural as their images of German cooling towers and industrial plants. The suggestion was that there was something determinedly European about this new American gaze.

Ecological citizenship and automobility

The works in different ways question our responsibility in relation to the natural environment. Taken at a time of rapid environmental change, commercialisation and often homogenised destruction of the natural wilderness romanticised by Ansel Adams, they aim to promote a sense of responsibility for what Robert Adams calls the 'half wilderness'.

There is a general concern with the homogenisation and also isolation of much of modern construction and urban sprawl. Roads that cut of and surround dwellings that can only be accessed by cars.

They differ in their approaches to technological advances like the reliance on the motor car. For Shore and Schott however there is more of a celebration of the accessibility and democratisation of life. Shore in particular celebrates the colour and vibrancy of cities and parking lots.

'Shore's images may be seen as ignoring environmental degradation...Yet his photographs encourage a sense of wonder and appreciation, even in the most familiar, most mundane spaces'.

There is thus a core message of the exhibition as a whole: we need to notice and appreciate what is around us in the 'semi-wilderness' and make sure we preserve and protect what is valuable in it. In terms of human colour and nature. Not relegate 'conservation' to an ever-shrinking small protected area of idealised wilderness. It is all important.

Legacy

The exhibition was recreated in various locations: in 1981, six years after its original presentation, it was shown in reduced form at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK, under the auspices of Paul Graham and Jem Southam. A large scale presentation of the exhibition was organized in 2009 at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. "New Topographics" began an international tour in 2009, with stagings at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2011 the exhibition was on view at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and later at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in Spain.

Baltz, Gohlke, and Shore were later commissioned by the French government for the Mission de la DATAR.

The exhibition was very influential in the subsequent developments in both US and European landscape photography, including the work of Andreas Gursky, Paul Graham, Candida Höfe and Donovan Wylie. See the following interviews with LA photographers discussing how they have been influenced by the photographers at the exhibition:

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"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York) in January 1975. In his introduction to the catalogue, Jenkins defined the common denominator of the show as "a problem of style:" "stylistic anonymity", an alleged absence of style.

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Description

Martha Rosler is an American artist. She works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Wikipedia

Website: http://www.martharosler.net

Rosler's work is quite diverse, but can be seen as underwriiten by four main themes around the question 'What is subjectivity in the context of late capitalism?'

Biopolitical: the way that power orchestrates the body, particularly for women. Draws on de Beauvoir, Lefevre and later Foucault.

Everyday/ordinary/banale and commodification

Vernacular projects referencing Pop Art, snapshot photography and citizen journalism

Urbanism an political economy of place

Her work is directly linked to her activism: feminist, anti-power, anti-militarist and in support of human subjectivity. She draws on the theory and practice of 'estrangement' of Brecht and Godard where the work invites the viewer to recognise/misrecognise and then deny the content of what they are seeing - leading to critical thinking - leading to taking a position that things should be different.

She has used image and text in different ways. Some of her work is very effective in exploiting gaps and contradictions between the two 'descriptive systems'.

This work is a large gallery frieze of a series of photographs of buildings and store fronts with bottles in various positions as traces of events, as a dyptych with 'poems to alcohol' - lists of words and phrases referring to drunkenness. They were produced as a counter to what Rosler sees as the voyeuristic and parasitic photography of homeless people and people with alcohol issues with quotations from them that are often taken by students, journalists or NGOs.

I find the unusual juxtaposition of two ' descriptive systems' of image and text that are 'inadequate' in themselves to communicate collisions of power very poignant.

Semiotics of the Kitchen

Short video intended for easy showing and distribution shot in single frontal framing. Contrasts single spoken words for everyday kitchen objects with video of possible ways in which they can be used, generally with explicit or implicit violence and a dark feminist humour.

House beautiful: bringing the war home

House Beautiful: Bringing the War Back Home is an activist series of collage images that integrate comforting domestic images of American life (mostly from Life Magazine) life with images of the Vietnam war that were shown on TV each evening. She is concerned with the ways in which viewer distancing from identification with people in the photographs is achieved as a means of raising their political awareness. Some of these images are very striking in their juxtaposition and captioning eg 'Cleaning the Drapes'. These images were photocopied and handed out to protesters on marches, and reprinted later as part of protest against other US comflicts eg Middle East.

Other works are much more direct and - I think to a modern audience used to very polished and well-constructed video on what are nowadays common themes - rather cliche. Though the same issues remain.

This 1977 video uses archive footage from US government eugenic experiments and links this with the explicit racism and violence underlying it (data on black and Southern Europeans was destroyed as 'abnormal', and the internalisation of ideal body types linked to anorexia and suicide. By modern standards the work is rather over-long, repetitive and direct.

Martha Rosler reads Vogue 1982 is a much more explicit critique of the fashion industry in terms of manipulation of women's self-image and exploitation of workers. Although the narrative often contradicts the images, this is rather too obvious and (for a modern viewer) cliche. It is over long and unnecessarily repetitive in conveying what is actually a simple message. If the repetition itself is the point, then that needs to be made clear somehow.

Rather rambling unfortunately.

Look up

secrets from the Street

Middle East photomontages

Garage

Passionate Signals

rites of passage

airports

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Martha Rosler is an American artist. She works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience.

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Ed Ruscha works in a very open-ended way exploiting tension between images and text that often seem rather arbitrary in their juxtaposition, making the viewer make their own connections and interpretations.

His approach is mainly aesthetic - interested in abstract potential of words against abstract design underlying his photographs and paintings. Some commentators on the You Tube videos below have seen this as rather vacuous. What concerns me is the way a focus on 'cool' leads to a sort of 'apathy of the sublime'.

Catalogue Raisonnee of his photography and signage work.

MoMA Painting Words

Ed Ruscha discusses his exhibition 'Course of Empire' at National gallery of large paintings of sections of buildings in LA at two points in time. The first 1990s in black and white and the second 2004 showing changes. References the paintings of rise and fall of civilisation by Thomas Cole on exhibition at National Gallery at the same time.
He discusses how coincidences happen in the making of a work. He does not think too much about meaning and has a compulsion to make things as an 'involuntary reflex' as he gets up in the morning. The words come from movies, things he hears on the radio, overheard conversations, things he reads. 'Things just come out of the air'. Then viewers make up all sorts of meanings and connections.

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Ed Ruscha works in a very open-ended way exploiting tension between images and text that often seem rather arbitrary in their juxtaposition, making the viewer make their own connections and interpretations. His approach is mainly aesthetic - interested in abstract potential of words against abstract design underlying his photographs and paintings.

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David Carson (born September 8, 1954) is an American graphic designer, art director and surfer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography.
He worked as a sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 1970s. From 1982 to 1987, Carson worked as a teacher in Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, California. In 1983, Carson started to experiment with graphic design and found himself immersed in the artistic and bohemian culture of Southern California. He art directed various music, skateboarding, and surfing magazines through the 1980/90s, including twSkateboarding, twSnowboarding, Surfer, Beach Culture and the music magazine Ray Gun. By the late 1980s he had developed his signature style, using "dirty" type and non-mainstream photographic techniques.
As art director of Ray Gun (1992-5) he employed much of the typographic and layout style for which he is known. In particular, his widely imitated aesthetic defined the so-called "grunge typography" era. In one issue he used Dingbat as the font for what he considered a rather dull interview with Bryan Ferry. In a feature story, NEWSWEEK magazine said he "changed the public face of graphic design".
He takes photography and type and manipulates and twists them together and on some level confusing the message but in reality he was drawing the eyes of the viewer deeper within the composition itself. His layouts feature distortions or mixes of 'vernacular' typefaces and fractured imagery, rendering them almost illegible. Indeed, his maxim of the 'end of print' questioned the role of type in the emergent age of digital design, following on from California New Wave and coinciding with experiments at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
In the later 1990s he added corporate clients to his list of clients, including Microsoft, Armani, Nike, Levi's, British Airways, Quiksilver, Sony, Pepsi, Citibank, Yale University, Toyota and many others. When Graphic Design USA Magazine (NYC) listed the "most influential graphic designers of the era" David was listed as one of the all time 5 most influential designers, with Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Saul Bass and Massimo Vignelli.
He named and designed the first issue of the adventure lifestyle magazine Blue, in 1997. David designed the first issue and the first three covers, after which his assistant Christa Smith art directed and designed the magazine until its demise. Carson's cover design for the first issue was selected as one of the "top 40 magazine covers of all time" by the American Society of Magazine Editors.
In 2000, Carson closed his New York City studio and followed his children, Luke and Luci, to Charleston, South Carolina where their mother had relocated them. In 2004, Carson became the Creative Director of Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, designed the special "Exploration" edition of Surfing Magazine, and directed a television commercial for UMPQUA Bank in Seattle, Washington.
Carson claims that his work is "subjective, personal and very self indulgent".

Bibliography

Carson, David (1995). The End of Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson. Chronicle Books. ISBN 0-8118-1199-9.
Carson, David (1997). David Carson: 2nd Sight: Grafik Design After the End of Print. Universe Publishing. ISBN 0-7893-0128-8.
Meggs, Phillip B.; David Carson (1999). Fotografiks: An Equilibrium Between Photography and Design Through Graphic Expression That Evolves from Content. Laurence King. ISBN 1-85669-171-3.
Stecyk, Craig; David Carson (2002). Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing. Laguna Art Museum in association with Gingko Press. ISBN 1-58423-113-0.
Mcluhan, Marshall; David Carson, Eric McLuhan, Terrance Gordon (2003). The Book of Probes. Gingko Press. ISBN 1-58423-056-8.
Carson, David (2004). Trek: David Carson, Recent Werk. Gingko Press. ISBN 1-58423-046-0.
Mayne, Thom; David Carson (2005). Ortlos: Architecture of the Networks. Hatje Cantz Publishers. ISBN 3-7757-1652-1.

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David Carson (born September 8, 1954) is an American graphic designer, art director and surfer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography. He worked as a sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 1970s.

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google images
Aaron Siskind (1903 - 1991) was an American photographer. Siskind's work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement.
https://www.britannica.com/video/164452/Aaron-Siskind-influences-documentary-photography

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google images Aaron Siskind (1903 - 1991) was an American photographer. Siskind's work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement. https://www.britannica.com/video/164452/Aaron-Siskind-influences-documentary-photography

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!! to update and annotate as relevant to Kyrgyztsan.

edited from Wikipedia article
Google images
John Thomson (14 June 1837 - 29 September 1921) was a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer and traveller. He was an accomplished photographer in many areas: landscapes, portraiture, street-photography, architectural photography. He was one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East, documenting the people, landscapes and artifacts of eastern cultures for his Victorian audience. He was however more concerned with the socio-economic situation of the people whose land he visited than landscape as a subject in itself (Jeffrey, 1981, p. 64).

On his return home, his pioneering work documenting the social conditions of the street is regarded as a classic instance of social documentary which laid the foundations for photojournalism. He went on to become a portrait photographer of High Society in Mayfair, gaining the Royal Warrant in 1881. His publishing activities mark him out as an innovator in combining photography with the printed word.

The son of William Thomson, a tobacco spinner and retail trader, and his wife Isabella, Thomson was born the eighth of nine children in Edinburgh. After his schooling in the early 1850s, he was apprenticed to a local optical and scientific instrument manufacturer, thought to be James Mackay Bryson. During this time, Thomson learned the principles of photography and completed his apprenticeship around 1858. In 1861 he became a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts.

South East Asia 1862-1872: Singapore, Malaya, Sumatra, Siam, Cambodia and China

Singapore

In April 1862, Thomson left Edinburgh for Singapore to join his older brother William, a watchmaker and photographer, beginning a ten-year period spent travelling around the Far East. Initially, he established a joint business with William to manufacture marine chronometers and optical and nautical instruments. He also established a photographic studio in Singapore, taking portraits of European merchants, and he developed an interest in local peoples and places. He travelled extensively throughout the mainland territories of Malaya and the island of Sumatra, exploring the villages and photographing the native peoples and their activities.

Siam and Cambodia

https://youtube.com/watch?v=N1dC5fy4Phw%3Fautoplay%3D0%26theme%3Ddark%26loop%3D0%26fs%3D1%26showinfo%3D1%26modestbranding%3D0%26iv_load_policy%3D3%26color%3Dred%26autohide%3D1%26disablekb%3D0%26enablejsapi%3D1%26version%3D3

After visiting Ceylon and India from October to November 1864 to document the destruction caused by a recent cyclone, Thomson sold his Singapore studio and moved to Siam. After arrival in Bangkok in September 1865, Thomson undertook a series of photographs of the King of Siam and other senior members of the royal court and government.

Prea Sat Ling Poun, Angkor Wat, 1865.

Inspired by Henri Mouhot's account of the rediscovery of the ancient cities of Angkor in the Cambodian jungle, Thomson embarked on what would become the first of his major photographic expeditions. He set off in January 1866 with his translator H. G. Kennedy, a British Consular official in Bangkok, who saved Thomson's life when he contracted jungle fever en route. The pair spent two weeks at Angkor, where Thomson extensively documented the vast site, producing some of the earliest photographs of what is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Thomson then moved on to Phnom Penh and took photographs of the King of Cambodia and other members of the Cambodian Royal Family, before travelling on to Saigon. From there he stayed in Bangkok briefly, before returning to Britain in May or June in 1866.

While back home, Thomson lectured extensively to the British Association and published his photographs of Siam and Cambodia. He became a member of the Royal Ethnological Society of London and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1866, and published his first book, The Antiquities of Cambodia, in early 1867.

There have however been accusations of plagiarism. In 2001 Phiphat Phongraphiphon, a Thai independent researcher in historical photography, published claims that Thomson plagiarised works by Thai court photographer Khun Sunthornsathitsalak (Christian name: Francis Chit) and published them as his own. Evidence to Phiphat's claims include an analysis of a photograph in which the temple Wat Rajapradit, which was built before Thomson arrived in Bangkok, is missing.

Travels in China 1868-1872

Island Pagoda, about 1871, from the album, Foochow and the River Min

Images from Travels in Chinahttps://www.youtube.com/embed/RXPC31yH1pQ?autoplay=0&theme=dark&loop=0&fs=1&showinfo=1&modestbranding=0&iv_load_policy=3&color=red&autohide=1&disablekb=0&enablejsapi=1&version=3
https://www.youtube.com/embed/FV-13nn1aAE?autoplay=0&theme=dark&loop=0&fs=1&showinfo=1&modestbranding=0&iv_load_policy=3&color=red&autohide=1&disablekb=0&enablejsapi=1&version=3
https://www.youtube.com/embed/v=zGgrQ6QKaGo?autoplay=0&theme=dark&loop=0&fs=1&showinfo=1&modestbranding=0&iv_load_policy=3&color=red&autohide=1&disablekb=0&enablejsapi=1&version=3

After a year in Britain, Thomson again felt the desire to return to the Far East. He returned to Singapore in July 1867, before moving to Saigon for three months and finally settling in Hong Kong in 1868. He established a studio in the Commercial Bank building, and spent the next four years photographing the people of China and recording the diversity of Chinese culture.

Thomson travelled extensively throughout China, from the southern trading ports of Hong Kong and Canton to the cities of Peking and Shanghai, to the Great Wall in the north, and deep into central China. From 1870 to 1871 he visited the Fukien region, travelling up the Min River by boat with the American Protestant missionary Reverend Justus Doolittle, and then visited Amoy and Swatow.

He went on to visit the island of Formosa with the missionary Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell, landing first in Takao in early April 1871. The pair visited the capital, Taiwanfu, before travelling on to the aboriginal villages on the west plains of the island. After leaving Formosa, Thomson spent the next three months travelling 3,000 miles up the Yangtze River, reaching Hupeh and Szechuan.

Thomson's travels in China were often perilous, as he visited remote, almost unpopulated regions far inland. Most of the people he encountered had never seen a Westerner or camera before. His expeditions were also especially challenging because he had to transport his bulky wooden camera, many large, fragile glass plates, and potentially explosive chemicals. He photographed in a wide variety of conditions and often had to improvise because chemicals were difficult to acquire. His subject matter varied enormously: from humble beggars and street people to Mandarins, Princes and senior government officials; from remote monasteries to Imperial Palaces; from simple rural villages to magnificent landscapes.

Street Life in London

Images from Street Life in LondonThomson returned to England in 1872, settling in Brixton, London and, apart from a final photographic journey to Cyprus in 1878, Thomson never left again. Over the coming years he proceeded to lecture and publish, presenting the results of his travels in the Far East. His publications started initially in monthly magazines and were followed by a series of large, lavishly illustrated photographic books. He wrote extensively on photography, contributing many articles to photographic journals such as the British Journal of Photography. He also translated and edited Gaston Tissandier's 1876 History and Handbook of Photography, which became a standard reference work.

In London, Thomson renewed his acquaintance with Adolphe Smith, a radical journalist whom he had met at the Royal Geographical Society in 1866. Together they collaborated in producing the monthly magazine, Street Life in London, from 1876 to 1877. The project documented in photographs and text the lives of the street people of London, establishing social documentary photography as an early type of photojournalism. The series of photographs was later published in book form in 1878.

The Crawlers, London, 1876-1877

He was elected a member of the Photographic Society, later the Royal Photographic Society, on 11 November 1879. With his reputation as an important photographer well established, Thomson opened a portrait studio in Buckingham Palace Road in 1879, later moving it to Mayfair. In 1881 he was appointed photographer to the British Royal Family by Queen Victoria, and his later work concentrated on studio portraiture of the rich and famous of High Society, giving him a comfortable living. From January 1886 he began instructing explorers at the Royal Geographical Society in the use of photography to document their travels.

After retiring from his commercial studio in 1910, Thomson spent most of his time back in Edinburgh, although he continued to write papers for the Royal Geographical Society on the uses of photography. He died of a heart attack in 1921 at the age of 84. In recognition of his work, one of the peaks of Mount Kenya was named "Point Thomson".

A large collection of his glass negatives was donated to the Wellcome Library. Some of Thomson's work may be seen at the Royal Geographical Society's headquarters in London.https://www.youtube.com/embed/1iHxiVW3wjA?autoplay=0&theme=dark&loop=0&fs=1&showinfo=1&modestbranding=0&iv_load_policy=3&color=red&autohide=1&disablekb=0&enablejsapi=1&version=3

Selected publications

China Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868 -1872, River Books 2010.

The antiquities of Cambodia, 1867

Views on the North River, 1870.

Foochow and the River Min, 1873.

Illustrations of China and its people, 1873-1874 [1]

Street life in London, 1878

Through Cyprus with a camera in the autumn of 1878, 1879

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to update and annotate as relevant to Kyrgyztsan. edited from Wikipedia article Google images John Thomson (14 June 1837 - 29 September 1921) was a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer and traveller. He was an accomplished photographer in many areas: landscapes, portraiture, street-photography, architectural photography.

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Jo Spence (1934-92) had a highly politicised approach to photography, creating photographs that run counter to the idealised imagery offered by advertising. Spence often worked collaboratively and sought alternative distribution models, laminating work for durability and renting out her photography to conferences, libraries, universities and public spaces to broaden its audience. She also documented her own struggles with cancer.

Website: http://www.jospence.org

'Putting Myself in the Picture' (Camden Press 1986) brought together her raw and confessional works to inspire a younger generation of photographers.
Remodelling Photo History (1982) a series of self-portraits in collaboration with Terry Dennett. The work consists of a series of diptychs where two photographs of Spence are juxtaposed. In some pairs, the first is a parody of a more traditional pictorial image; the second shot is less conventionally framed and the irony is articulated with less subtlety.

'Victimisation' "Here we see that the estate will not admit trespass, and that it stands in for the heroic (male) defender of the ground, repelling weak opposition at its border. Jo Spence failed to cross the barrier, allowing the absent landowner (through his gate and sign) to become hero, male, the creator of difference... her mockery diminishes the victory won by the landowner." (John Taylor 1994, p.282 quoted Alexander p133)

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Jo Spence (1934-92) had a highly politicised approach to photography, creating photographs that run counter to the idealised imagery offered by advertising. Spence often worked collaboratively and sought alternative distribution models, laminating work for durability and renting out her photography to conferences, libraries, universities and public spaces to broaden its audience.

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Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazzmusicians for record covers. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.

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1960s and 70s: black and white social landscape

His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.

Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs.

He also experimented with use of his own shadow as an extra element in the image - giving many of them a more haunted eerie feel of an obvious onlooker to the scene.
1960s social landscape images 1970s images
In 1963, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander's first solo museum show. Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski 's 1967 "New Documents" exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1973, his work was honored in Rencontres d'Arles festival (France) with the screening "Soirée américaine : Judy Dater, Jack Welpott, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander" présentée par Jean-Claude Lemagny.

1980s - present

Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras (e.g. Hasselblad Superwide). While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book, Stems, reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his "limbs" reminded him of plant stems. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.
Stems Images
Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set. In 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie's Art House auction.

In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship.

He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Friedlander's career, including nearly 400 photographs from the 1950s to the present. In the same year he received a Hasselblad International Award. The retrospective exhibition was presented again in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Lee Friedlander monograph America by Car (2010)

All the images in the series are taken from the driver's point of view, incorporating into the viewfinder all of the familiar architecture of the cockpit (dashboard, rear-view mirror, views from side windows and wing mirrors and so on). This claustrophobia presents an American landscape at odds with the car and its driver; the windscreen forms a barrier between the individual and the landscape beyond. The car can only take you so far into the wilderness. The vast majority of the images in Friedlander's book were made after 2001, and several images hint towards the international concerns of the past decade and beyond. The road - or, rather, whatever passing motorists will notice - is where political voices are articulated in loud, upper case letters: "WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS", declares Little Millers diner in Alaska (p. 89). A campaign vehicle covered with pro-Obama stickers (p.104) is a prime example of using a vehicle as a legitimate extension of ideology and identity. [See Martin Parr's From A to B (1994)].

Endless gas stations, a ubiquitous motif of the road trip narrative, inevitably contribute to the collection.

Concurrent to this retrospective, a more contemporary body of his work, America By Car, was displayed at the Fraenkel Gallery not far from SFMOMA. "America By Car" was on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in late 2010.

Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazzmusicians for record covers. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.

1960s and 70s: black and white social landscape

His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.

Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs.
1960s social landscape images 1970s images
He also experimented with use of his own shadow as an extra element in the image - giving many of them a more haunted eerie feel of an obvious onlooker to the scene.

In 1963, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander's first solo museum show. Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski 's 1967 "New Documents" exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1973, his work was honored in Rencontres d'Arles festival (France) with the screening "Soirée américaine : Judy Dater, Jack Welpott, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander" présentée par Jean-Claude Lemagny.

1980s - present
Stems Images
Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras (e.g. Hasselblad Superwide). While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book, Stems, reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his "limbs" reminded him of plant stems. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.

Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set. In 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie's Art House auction.

In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship.

He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Friedlander's career, including nearly 400 photographs from the 1950s to the present. In the same year he received a Hasselblad International Award. The retrospective exhibition was presented again in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Lee Friedlander monograph America by Car (2010)

All the images in the series are taken from the driver's point of view, incorporating into the viewfinder all of the familiar architecture of the cockpit (dashboard, rear-view mirror, views from side windows and wing mirrors and so on). This claustrophobia presents an American landscape at odds with the car and its driver; the windscreen forms a barrier between the individual and the landscape beyond. The car can only take you so far into the wilderness. The vast majority of the images in Friedlander's book were made after 2001, and several images hint towards the international concerns of the past decade and beyond. The road - or, rather, whatever passing motorists will notice - is where political voices are articulated in loud, upper case letters: "WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS", declares Little Millers diner in Alaska (p. 89). A campaign vehicle covered with pro-Obama stickers (p.104) is a prime example of using a vehicle as a legitimate extension of ideology and identity. [See Martin Parr's From A to B (1994)].

Endless gas stations, a ubiquitous motif of the road trip narrative, inevitably contribute to the collection.

Concurrent to this retrospective, a more contemporary body of his work, America By Car, was displayed at the Fraenkel Gallery not far from SFMOMA. "America By Car" was on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in late 2010.

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Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazzmusicians for record covers.

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!! Sketchbook analysis of page design and layout of key sources of inspiration. bearing in mind copyright issues.

PhotographicNarratives_draft1

Early photobooks

Many of these were topographic images for travel and tourism.

Francis Frith photographs from travels to Middle and Far East

John Thomson photographs from travels to Middle and Far East

Maxime Du Camp (1822-94)

Auguste Salzmann (1824-72)

Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819-96) published The Yosemite Book in 1868.

Some developed more innovative design

Soviet and Fascist propaganda books with novel design features, such as fold-out pages that extend the dimensions of an image

Japanese Photobooks

Colour

Martin Parr: documentary photographer. Some of his works have been mass produced and re-printed (e.g. The Last Resort, 1986 and 1998); others have been limited editions or even more exclusive artist's books such as Cherry Blossom Time in Tokyo, 2001. See: www.martinparr.com/books/. Layout in Last Resort has one, or very occasionally two, large images per spread, with white margin around and no border. This focuses attention on the content of the socially complex saturated colour images. There is a short introductory text at the beginning.

Paul Seawright : Invisible Cities a very large hardback book of colour images. Some images are full bleed crossing the whole spread, sometimes with some space to one side or top/bottom. Other spreads have only one half page image generally placed full bleed to one corner with the rest of the spread as white space. There is a text introduction to African cities at the beginning.

Urbex 'Beauty in Decay' this has beautiful limited palette images . The book is divided into chapters with some introductory text. But the book is mostly large images with whitespace. Some images and spreads are on black background. A few text passages are on beige background. Some have black or white boders and vignettes to increase contrast.

Black and white

Daido Moriyama Tales of Tono - small portrait format book of very high contrast black and white images. Full bleed in landscape across a double spread on black background. This makes the abstract flashes of white shapes in the often barely readable images standout. Text is reserved for a narrative section at the end. I like the moodiness of this book and all the images demand close attention in themselves, as well as producing an overall edgy impression as a apparently random narrative.

Algirdas Seskus 'Love Lyrics' Lithuanian 149 contrasty documentary Black and White images in landscape format. No text except the number of each photo and date. One or two large images per spread. No border with generous white margin.

Arunas Baltenas Vilnius 2007 images from 1987. Small misty sepia images one per spread with no border and lots of white space. Delicate handwritten titles and date. One page introduction in English and Lithuanian at the beginning. No other text. I find the delicate nostalgia of this book really beautiful.

Henri Cartier Bresson in India Thames and Hudson. 1987 with forward by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. One large black and white photo per page with short caption. Black border on white paper. Occasionally one large and one small. The images themselves are quite low contrast. The black border makes the eye focus inwards.

!! Insert annotated sketchbook pages of Flatpans of these and other selected photobooks.

Contemporary Photobooks

At the Brighton Photography Biennial 2016 I saw a lot of interesting innovative designs:

David Galjaard Concresco. A book about Albania. Has a brown opening cover with short explanatory text. Then double page spreads with small white text insert pages. For this and other work see his website: http://www.davidgaljaard.nl

Dara McGrath 'Deconstructing the Maze' This has two coloured photographs on one side and page of text on the other. The strength here is in the photos. For this and other work see his website http://www.daramcgrath.com/index.html

Xavier Ribas 'Concrete Geographies'. Photos of concrete blocks in Barcelona. See his website: http://www.xavierribas.com. This has inside views and links to vimeos of other books like Sanctuary - no text, one photo per spread. Sometimes a cross-over image. But the onscreen resolution is not good enough to really see the images.

Alessandro Rota A Neocolonialist's diary. Small paisley pattern cover. Coloured photos of sheets in Lusaka. Dark night streets. Lights. See his website . And vimeo of the book. https://vimeo.com/28099164

Irene Siragusa 'Six weeks in Dublin'. Lots of photos of spattered blood. Small juxtaposed rectangular images. website

Unknown author/title glimpsed over other peoples' shoulders:

Book with glued images folded.

Aids (author???). Small and simple brown cover. Photos of slits one on a page opposite a blank page.

!! Insert annotated sketchbook pages of Flatpans of these and other selected photobooks.

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Sketchbook analysis of page design and layout of key sources of inspiration. bearing in mind copyright issues. PhotographicNarratives_draft1 Early photobooks Many of these were topographic images for travel and tourism. Francis Frith photographs from travels to Middle and Far East John Thomson photographs from travels to Middle and Far East Maxime Du Camp (1822-94) Auguste Salzmann (1824-72) Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819-96) published The Yosemite Book in 1868.

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Landscape photography and printmaking draws on a long tradition of landscape art that can inform different styles and approaches for my own work. I want to work more on the underlying theory of landscape composition and bridging elements, perspective etc. Abstraction. To make my landscape photography and printmaking more conscious of the influences on my work and thereby able to subvert and question to create something new.

!!Post needs a lot of sorting out and re-reading of books most relevant to my actual photographic and printmaking work for Assignment 2 'Landscaping England'. See discussion on my Landscape Photography blog: http://photography.zemniimages.info/portfolio/1-3-establishing-conventions/ Notes to be updated from visits to exhibitions at:
VandA: Constable
Tate Britain: Late Turner and Turner galleries
National Gallery : Pedar Balke
National gallery and elsewhere Maggie Hambling
Tate Britain: John Martin

Definition and overview
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction of landscapes, natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects.
The word "landscape" entered the modern English language as landskip (variously spelt), an anglicization of the Dutch landschap, around the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art, with its first use as a word for a painting in 1598. Within a few decades it was used to describe vistas in poetry, and eventually as a term for real views. However the cognate term landscaef or landskipe for a cleared patch of land had existed in Old English, though it is not recorded from Middle English. Landscape views in art may be entirely imaginary, or copied from reality with varying degrees of accuracy. If the primary purpose of a picture is to depict an actual, specific place, especially including buildings prominently, it is called a topographical view. Such views, extremely common as prints in the West, are often seen as inferior to fine art landscapes, although the distinction is not always meaningful; similar prejudices existed in Chinese art, where literati painting usually depicted imaginary views, while professional court artists painted real views, often including palaces and cities.

The earliest forms of human art depict little that could really be called landscape, although ground-lines and sometimes indications of mountains, trees or other natural features are included. The earliest "pure landscapes" with no human figures are frescos from Minoan Greece of around 1500 BCE. Hunting scenes, especially those set in the enclosed vista of the reed beds of the Nile Delta from Ancient Egypt, can give a strong sense of place, but the emphasis is on individual plant forms and human and animal figures rather than the overall landscape setting.

The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present form its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism.

Chinese and Japanese traditions

!!Possibly I will do a separate post on this as Japanese ink landscapes and monochrome styles have been important influences on my Black and White photography and printmaking.

Zhan Ziqian, Strolling About in Spring, a very early Chinese landscape, c. 600. Landscape as a subject in itself

In East Asia famous practitioners of imaginary landscapes were highly respected, including several Emperors of both China and Japan. They were often also poets whose lines and images illustrated each other.

The Chinese ink painting tradition of shan shui ("mountain-water"), or "pure" landscape, in which the only sign of human life is usually a sage, or a glimpse of his hut, uses sophisticated landscape backgrounds to figure subjects, and landscape art of this period retains a classic and much-imitated status within the Chinese tradition.
As in Roman traditions these typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, backed with a range of spectacular mountains. Sometimes they showed only a distant view, sometimes waterfalls, mist or dead ground bridged the gap between a foreground scene with figures and the distant panoramic vista.

Western tradition

It seems from literary evidence that some rough system of perspective, or scaling for distance was first been developed in Ancient Greece in the Hellenistic period, although no large-scale examples survive. Roman landscapes from the 1st century BCE onwards, especially frescos of landscapes decorating rooms, have been preserved at archaeological sites of Pompeii, Herculaneum and elsewhere, and mosaics. These typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, generally backed with a range of spectacular mountains, often including sea, lakes or rivers to bridge the gap between a foreground scene with figures and a distant panoramic vista.

History painting came to require an extensive landscape background where appropriate and for several centuries landscapes were regularly promoted to the status of history painting by the addition of small figures to make a narrative scene, typically religious or mythological. In Kenneth Clark's analysis, underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches:

the acceptance of descriptive symbols

curiosity about the facts of nature

creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature

belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved.

In early Western medieval art interest in landscape disappears almost entirely, kept alive only in copies of Late Antique works such as the Utrecht Psalter; the last reworking of this source, in an early Gothic version, reduces the previously extensive landscapes to a few trees filling gaps in the composition, with no sense of overall space.A revival in interest in nature initially mainly manifested itself in depictions of small gardens such as the Hortus Conclusus or those in millefleur tapestries. The frescos of figures at work or play in front of a background of dense trees in the Palace of the Popes, Avignon are probably a unique survival of what was a common subject.Several frescos of gardens have survived from Roman houses like the Villa of Livia.

During the 14th century Giotto di Bondone and his followers began to acknowledge nature in their work, increasingly introducing elements of the landscape as the background setting for the action of the figures in their paintings. Early in the 15th century, landscape painting was established as a genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often expressed in a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert. Luxury illuminated manuscripts were very important in the early development of landscape, especially series of the Labours of the Months such as those in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which conventionally showed small genre figures in increasingly large landscape settings. A particular advance is shown in the less well-known Turin-Milan Hours, now largely destroyed by fire, whose developments were reflected in Early Netherlandish painting for the rest of the century. The artist known as "Hand G", probably one of the Van Eyck brothers, was especially successful in reproducing effects of light and in a natural-seeming progression from the foreground to the distant view.This was something other artists were to find difficult for a century or more, often solving the problem by showing a landscape background from over the top of a parapet or window-sill, as if from a considerable height.

Italian Renaissance

Landscape backgrounds for various types of painting became increasingly prominent and skilful during the century. The period around the end of the 15th century saw pure landscape drawings and watercolours from Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Fra Bartolomeo and others, but pure landscape subjects in painting and printmaking, still small, were first produced by Albrecht Altdorfer and others of the German Danube School in the early 16th century.

Landscapes were idealized, mostly reflecting a pastoral ideal drawn from classical poetry which was first fully expressed by Giorgione and the young Titian, and remained associated above all with hilly wooded Italian landscape, which was depicted by artists from Northern Europe who had never visited Italy, just as plain-dwelling literati in China and Japan painted vertiginous mountains. Though often young artists were encouraged to visit Italy to experience Italian light, many Northern European artists could make their living selling Italianate landscapes without ever bothering to make the trip. Indeed, certain styles were so popular that they became formulas that could be copied again and again. Salvator Rosa gave picturesque excitement to his landscapes by showing wilder Southern Italian country, often populated by banditi.

Dutch Landscape

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565: Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors

Joachim Patinir in the Netherlands developed the " world landscape" a style of panoramic landscape with small figures and using a high aerial viewpoint, that remained influential for a century, being used and perfected by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The Italian development of a thorough system of graphical perspective was now known all over Europe, which allowed large and complex views to be painted very effectively.

The publication in Antwerp in 1559 and 1561 of two series of a total of 48 prints (the Small Landscapes) after drawings by an anonymous artist referred to as the Master of the Small Landscapes signalled a shift away from the imaginary, distant landscapes with religious content of the world landscape towards close-up renderings at eye-level of identifiable country estates and villages populated with figures engaged in daily activities. By abandoning the panoramic viewpoint of the world landscape and focusing on the humble, rural and even topographical, the Small Landscapes set the stage for Netherlandish landscape painting in the 17th century. After the publication of the Small Landscapes, landscape artists in the Low Countries either continued with the world landscape or followed the new mode presented by the Small Landscapes.

Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw the dramatic growth of landscape painting, in which many artists specialized, and the development of extremely subtle realist techniques for depicting light and weather. There are different styles and periods, and sub-genres of marine and animal painting, as well as a distinct style of Italianate landscape. Most Dutch landscapes were relatively small, but landscapes in Flemish Baroque painting, still usually peopled, were often very large, above all in the series of works that Peter Paul Rubens painted for his own houses. Landscape prints were also popular, with those of Rembrandt and the experimental works of Hercules Seghers usually considered the finest.

The Dutch tended to make smaller paintings for smaller houses. Some Dutch landscape specialties named in period inventories include the Batalje, or battle-scene; the Maneschijntje, or moonlight scene; the Bosjes, or woodland scene; the Boederijtje, or farm scene,and the Dorpje or village scene.Though not named at the time as a specific genre, the popularity of Roman ruins inspired many Dutch landscape painters of the period to paint the ruins of their own region, such as monasteries and churches ruined after the Beeldenstorm.The popularity of landscapes in the Netherlands was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious painting in a Calvinist society, and the decline of religious painting in the 18th and 19th centuries all over Europe combined with Romanticism to give landscapes a much greater and more prestigious place in 19th-century art than they had assumed before.

Jan van Goyen, Dune landscape, c. 1630-1635, an example of the "tonal" style in Dutch Golden Age painting

French 17th and 18th Century

Compositional formulae using elements like the repoussoir were evolved which remain influential in modern photography and painting, notably by Poussin and Claude Lorrain, both French artists living in 17th century Rome and painting largely classical subject-matter, or Biblical scenes set in the same landscapes.

French landscape artists still most often wanted to keep their classification within the hierarchy of genres as history painting by including small figures to represent a scene from classical mythology or the Bible.

French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830sJean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other painters in the Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that would become the most influential in Europe for a century, with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for the first time making landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting.

English landscape: 19th Century

In England, landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits, typically suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner, though mostly painted in London by an artist who had never visited his sitter's rolling acres; the English tradition was founded by Anthony van Dyck and other mostly Flemish artists working in England. In the 18th century, watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality, with both a buoyant market for professional works, and a large number of amateur painters, many following the popular systems found in the books of Alexander Cozens and others. By the beginning of the 19th century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscapists, showing the wide range of Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer. However all these had difficulty establishing themselves in the contemporary art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits.

The 18th century saw the rise of the topographical print, often intended to be framed and hung on a wall. These depicted more or less accurately a real view in a way that landscape painting rarely did. Initially these were mostly centred on a building, but over the course of the century, with the growth of the Romantic movement pure landscapes became more common. Landscapes in watercolour became a distinct specialism, above all in England.

Constable:

frequent use of the Golden ratio to position horizons at one or two thirds levels in paintings

uses a lanes, roads and other devices to lead the eye into the picture

interest in plays of light and naturalistic colour

linear as well as aerial perspective

use of triangles and implied triangles on foreground objects like carts, boats etc.

later starts to experiment with dynamic and impasto brushstrokes, as precursor to Impressionists

Turner tends to have his horizons lower, or non-existent. And makes lots of use of dramatic swirls for storms, and brilliant sunsets. But still positions vertical elements and objects around the thirds line.
See http://www.caspardavidfriedrich.org
Romantic movement

The Romantic movement intensified the existing interest in landscape art, and remote and wild landscapes, which had been one recurring element in earlier landscape art, now became more prominent. Caspar David Friedrich had a distinctive style, influenced by his Danish training, where a distinct national style, drawing on the Dutch 17th-century example, had developed. To this he added a quasi-mystical Romanticism.

The Trees in the Moonlight Use of diagonals and muted colours.

Two Men by the Sea at Moonrise Use of strong horizontals with central horizon line. Silhouettes against an oval pool of light. 'High Dynamic Range'.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog/Mists, 1818. A classic image of German Romanticism. Strong contrast in colours and between foreground and background with dramatic silhouette. Quasi symmetrical balance between right and left side of the image. Diagonals leading to the centre figure.

Monet

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

20th Century

Although certainly less dominant in the period after World War I, many significant artists still painted landscapes in the wide variety of styles exemplified by Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Milton Avery, Peter Doig, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney and Sidney Nolan.

Contemporary

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Landscape Photography and Art (draft notes)

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Landscape photography and printmaking draws on a long tradition of landscape art that can inform different styles and approaches for my own work. I want to work more on the underlying theory of landscape composition and bridging elements, perspective etc. Abstraction.

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!!To be updated from Landscape Photography

In his 2003 essay, David Campany comments that:

"One might easily surmise that photography has of late inherited a major role as undertaker, summariser or accountant. It turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened totting up the effects of the world's activity." ('Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problem of "Late Photography"' (in Campany (ed.), 2007)
This 'aftermath' approach dates back to the war photographers of the American Civil War and the Crimean War (1853-56), because of technological limitations of the time. Because of the large plate cameras and slow emulsions, it was not possible to photograph actual combat. Their images focused instead on portraits of soldiers, camp scenes and the aftermath of battles and skirmishes. Their images could not yet be reproduced en masse in the illustrated press, but some of these photographs were used as the basis for woodcut engravings for publications such as The Illustrated London News and Harper's Weekly.

Although technology today makes it possible - though still difficult - to capture the heat of war and atrocities, this is not necessarily the most effective way of portraying the horrors of violence.
Examples of photographers using the 'late' approach in contemporary landscape include:

Joel Meyerowitz's Aftermath images ofGround Zero in New York

Richard Misrach 's images of the American Desert show the aftermath of human activity but in a beautified distilled large format.

Sophie Ristelhueber 's aerial images of the Afghan conflict show the scars left on the landscape

Paul Seawright Hidden cold 'objective' images of battle sites and minefields in Afghanistan

Willie Doherty made very evocative images of the left detritus from conflicts during the Troubles and in the present day.

Other photographers have focused on the precursors - the tension in anticipation of violence. "not the 'theatre of war' but its rehearsal studio" (Campany, 2008, p.46). :

An-My Lê's (to do) series 29 Palms (2004) documents US marine training manoeuvres at a range used to prepare soldiers ahead of deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in Chicago (2005) (to do) examine an Israeli military training ground

Paul Shambroom's project Security (2003−07) studied the simulated training sites that are used by the US emergency services and Department of Homeland Security, nicknamed 'Disaster City' and 'Terror Town'.

Sarah Pickering in UK has photographed training grounds for the fire and police service. Her images contain no people, aiming to seem like a film set ready for the action.

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To be updated from Landscape Photography In his 2003 essay, David Campany comments that: "One might easily surmise that photography has of late inherited a major role as undertaker, summariser or accountant. It turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened totting up the effects of the world's activity."

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Ernst Haas

high contrast and use of motion blur through slow shutter speeds leads to abstraction of movement.

Uta Barth

Glenys Garnett

Abstract Photography presentation at Cambridge Camera Club 2021.

Look at You Tube

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Ernst Haas high contrast and use of motion blur through slow shutter speeds leads to abstraction of movement. Uta Barth Abstract Photography presentation at Cambridge Camera Club 2021. Look at You Tube