North of Factory Butte - Part 1

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about photography lately as I work my way through last year’s fall trip images (hard to think that it’s been over a year).  This is the first of two posts, if things work out, thinking about what is landscape photography and whether am I a “landscape photographer.”

Now, given the fact that our (Ann’s and my) preference is to get out into nature when we photograph, you probably find it odd that I even raise the question of whether I consider myself a landscape photographer.  I certainly photograph in the landscape, but several related thoughts make me wonder whether I am.  

Primary among those come from thinking about the types of images Ann makes and the ones I do.  They’re generally very different, even when we’re together (as the side-by-side posts I’ve previously done have shown).  Perhaps it’s a topic for its own blog post. Anyway, I not so jokingly say that Ann photographs spaces or “being in a place” and I photograph “things.”  Her images draw you into a place (read: landscape) and make you want to enter the scene - physically - and explore it.  There is so often a flow into her images that its easy to imagine how you could walk into and through the image.  My images are often of things and compositions that are visually interesting (or so I think) but don’t always have that draw-you-in effect that Ann’s photographs seem to have. You could say that while often beautiful, mine are not as inviting.  While not always the case, it seems that Ann sees a wider view (generally through lens selection) of a location than I do.    Yeah, definitely something to explore further, but not for now.

Another reason for my query comes from the wealth of landscape photography images we’ve been looking at through the work of Joe Cornish and others, and through magazines like OnLandscape.  While they don’t quite define one or another style of image making as landscape photography (and certainly aren’t tied into tricks or checklists to create exciting landscape photographs), there appears to be an ethic to it.  That certainly seems the case for the British landscape photographers, who seem to innately tap into the great English landscape painting tradition.  And while it isn’t always the best to try and define things (“naming” is a very western approach to understanding things), it does sometimes help to narrow one’s focus when examining something you don’t quite understand.  Plus, I have no reservations at saying I’m a “straight photographer” in the photographic sense of the word and that I accept (and even work with) the parameters that term means and the historical baggage (good and bad) that comes with it.  And that’s probably the point of my inquiry.  It was through learning what straight photography was about that helped me see things differently and gave some structure to my visual exploration; so too am I hoping that really coming to understand this simple question - what is a landscape photograph? - will help me to see things differently and to make better photographs.  

So back to the landscape photography genre, style, ethic or whatever term one may wish to call it.  I ask myself really, what is it?  To be honest, I’m not sure.  Much like I don’t fully see what Ann does when she is making her images out in the field, I don’t fully understand the term as it’s practiced by many people’s works I’ve examined - much of it being excellent.  I don’t really have answers.  Like I said, this is at least a two part series . . . if I’m lucky. It’s probably the very beginning of a process. A very long process.

Let’s start with a couple of images that start to point at what I’m scratching my head over.  The image below is from the afternoon before our Factory Butte morning session.  Despite the incredible winds up on the plateau (at no time did I let go of my tripod due to the fear [read: certainty] that my camera and tripod would blow over and, given the buffeting nature of the wind that would nearly knock you over if you weren’t ready for it, I kept well away from the cliff face in front of me), I managed to make some decent images.

While limited in what I could do from such heights and distance (I would have had to walk a quarter to a half mile to change the relationship of the foreground lines to the mid-ground plateau), to me this first image comes closest to what, for me, is a landscape photograph.

It’s not just an image of a specific location, but it gives a broader context of the place and its location in a greater landscape.  Some landscape images do that, others don’t. However, this is an image that allows you to better understand that place and that calls you to come and explore what is there even if you can’t just walk into it.

Now compare the image below to the one above.  These are the types of images I tend to “see.”  At one level it is a photograph of the landscape, but it’s also abstracted to a degree, to the point where you can lose a sense of place and explore the visual, graphic nature of the subject.  Of course, the black and white rendering helps that.  But really, it’s a photograph “of” a landscape that doesn’t establish the sense of place that the one above does, nor does it really invite you into the image as a “place” that a landscape photograph does.

And, to complicate matters even further, these are, in fact, the exact same image, or using film analogy, images from the same negative.

Which begs the question whether this is simply a different expression of how one sees (or can see) a place, or whether it is even worth trying to understand this sense of a landscape photograph that I can’t quite put my finger on.  Your guess is as good as mine.