‘Impressions of the landscape’; Does photographing a landscape change our relationship with the landscape itself?

Through modern technology and the accessibility of cameras and smartphones, we live in the most photographed period in history; to the point where we have to ask ourselves what effect this imagery has on our expectations of places which we have never visited, but with which we feel an intimate connection.

Images and stories of a place invoke feelings about that place even before visiting it. These feelings create an aura around that place that can make a persons mind up about the suitability of the place as somewhere to visit. These feelings can create preconceived ideas about what it would be like to visit.

There is a debate regarding the validity of different people photographing the same place, again and again. Stuart Jefferies writes in the guardian “are camera phones destroying an artform?”(Jeffries, 2013).  Christian Holiberg writes in his blog “Is Social Media the End of Landscape Photography?”(Hoiberg, 2017). Misha Macaw asks in his blog “are cliché photographs good if they are technically good?” (Macaw, 2017), there are even jokes in the photography world that three holes can be found in Yosemite Vally to help locate the tripod for the perfect picture mimicking Ansel Adams. There are many landscape photographers, who find images they like on social imaging sites, such as Flickr, intending to recreate them. However, as opposed to just visiting the sites and exploring them, they perform a reconnaissance on Google Earth, then they load the GPS coordinates into applications like the ‘Photographers’ Ephemeris’ to calculate the ideal time.

This essay will examine the idea that taking images of a landscape can, in some way, change our relationship with that place and ultimately affect the “soul” of the landscape.

Firstly let us illuminate the idea that taking images can in some way harm the ‘Soul’ of a place. Maybe harm is not the right word instead to alter it makes more sense because we are discussing the ability of imagery to change our perceptions of a place and ultimately to affect the soul of a place for good or for ill, depending, on the context of the work.

In Paul Seawright series Sectarian Murder(Seawright, 1988), he offers images of places that were the site of sectarian murders. In this series are a pair of images of playgrounds, both of which are devoid of people and invoke a sinister atmosphere we should ask ourselves if this atmosphere comes from a natural tendency for images of playgrounds to be sinister or is it a conditioning that comes from all of the news stories in the ’70s and 80s when the Irish crisis was at its height and murders in playgrounds were a typical evening news story?

Then we have Chloe Dewe Mathews series Shot at Dawn (Dewe Mathews, 2014), Mathews researched the numerous locations of executions for cowardice and desertion of soldiers during the first world war. These images are a mixture of country scenes and some banal images of walls and woods that hint at the subject, where you could imagine an execution taking place. Again we are challenged to ask, do pictures of walls, and secluded woods innately carry a sinister undertone or are we still conditioned by a barrage of images and media persuading us that a place like that is in no way a safe or sensible place to be standing.

David Campany (Campany, 2003) in his essay Saftey in Numbness, refers to this as ‘Late Photography,  where he discusses the work of Joel Meyerowitz And his documentary work in the aftermath of the Trade Towers attack In all of the cases cited so far, the photographic work has been quite deliberate and taken after the event. They are not highly dramatic images with bullets flying and people dying; instead, they reflect the landscape that witnessed these atrocities and attempts to convey to us, the horror of the situation. In the case of Joel Meyerowitz (Meyerowitz, 2006) work Aftermath, the horror is quite evident as most of the images are of twisted buildings and emergency services, which serve to guide the viewer to an understanding of the terrible atrocity that happened in this space. They do not use the shock tactics that some of the video footage taken during the attack does. However, the disturbing images of twisted iron beams and broken concrete serve to leave a cold pit in the stomach of the viewer as they are forced to contemplate the meaning of the bizarre shapes that do not conform to standard New York street photography as commonly served up to us. We are only too aware of the death and heartbreak that twisted those beams and the worldwide mourning that accompanies them.

Can we say that these works are ‘bad’ for the landscape or are we looking at a necessary expression of sadness and grief over a situation in which we had no control? In the cases cited so far the Consider: the period between the event and the image varies from twelve days to approximately 100 years. With Mathews it is 100 years, Seawright’s murder sites were shot about fifteen years after and then with Meyerowitz, his images of the Trade Towers range from twelve days to nine months. If we compare Meyerowitz with the other two,  it is more evident what has happened because of the graphic nature of the damage, but we could argue that the images of Seawright and Mathews are in some way more daunting because the evidence of the tragic events is not visible.

In this way, we must consider that our experience colours our thoughts and emotions. The idea that we exist in a semiological bubble of experience and learned facts referred to as our semiosphere (Kull, 1998) and (Petkova, 2015). If correct, then the argument that a stream of images can change our perception of a place must be valid, as this is the basis by which a semiosphere develops.

The photographer can also make a positive impact on the soul of a landscape as was witnessed in the works of Carlton Watkins who photographed the Yosemite valley. The Smithsonian Magazine quotes that; "In part because of Watkins' Yosemite pictures, in 1864 Congress passed, and President Lincoln signed legislation preserving Yosemite Valley. The law was an important first step in the creation of the National Park Service in 1916” (Hathaway, 2008) It is clear that the images taken by Watkins influenced the US Congress and indeed Abraham Lincon to the extent that they changed the law to make the area a national park.

Similarly, the work of Ansel Adams helped to popularise the National Parks and in part contributed to expanding them.

“Adams worked throughout his life as a commercial photographer, taking assignments from the National Park Service and companies such as Kodak, Zeiss, IBM, AT&T, and Life and Fortune magazines. During the 1930s, the park's concessionaire, Yosemite Park and Curry Company hired Adams to photograph skiing, ice skating and sledging events for publication in its winter tourism promotions. And, before the U.S. Navy temporarily converted The Ahwahnee hotel into a hospital in 1943, the YP&C Co. paid Adams to complete an extensive photographic inventory of the structure” (Alinder, 1996)

All of the discussed works so far were quite deliberate and created with purpose and in many cases, to tell a story or highlight an issue. At the outset, this essay discussed the mass production of images that is now an integral part of our lives, with camera phones snapping every aspect of our lives with monotonous repetition. A quick search on Flickr for Vatican Staircase gave 2,385 results each one substantially the same and taken from the same spot. A search for Half Dome netted 103,695 images mostly copying Ansel Adams. We have to ask ourselves if this repetition can change our relationship with the place since each one is not saying anything different. Is it, in fact, possible that we might start to write a place off as unimportant because we see it over and over again and feel no need to visit ourselves. We may get the impression that there is nothing left to say about a place because each serving of the imagery adds nothing to the narrative and leaves us feeling that the conversation is complete.

Another side of this phenomenon is proposed by Christian Hoibergs (Hoiberg, 2017)  article about the effects social media is having on landscape photography. He suggests that when a social media influencer posts a picture of a particular place that all their followers want to photograph that same place which leads to hundreds of people flocking to these locations.

Horseshoe Bend is one of those locations that has gone viral and now become one of the most popular nature attractions in the world. A few years ago it barely had a thousand visitors a year but last year more than 1.5 million came to see this beautiful place for themselves. Trolltunga in Norway is another location that’s gone viral the past few years. It might not be facing numbers as large as Horseshoe Bend but the 22km hike now sees more than 85,000 visitors a year compared to 800 five years ago (keep in mind that it’s only accessible from June to September). Tourists literally stand in line for hours to capture a shot of themselves on the 700m high cliff. (Hoiberg, 2017)

There are clear repercussions to this effect, as the environment tries to cope with such large influxes of people. Hoiberg points out that there are issues with car parks, but more worrying is the effect of all those feet walking down the same path and needing a toilet when there are none. From my own experience, there are pictures in our family archive of us sitting on the stones in the middle of Stone Henge.  The traffic at the ancient monument became a problem over the last forty years to the point where English Heritage have cordoned off the site so that visitors can no longer get near the stones, having to view them from a considerable distance.

An anonymous Instagram account  (@insta_repeat, 2019) has collected together sets of Instagram posts in a collage of unrelated photographers whose images are remarkably similar, demonstrating the “Visual Sameness” of the images as Michael Zhang (Zhang, 2018) quotes on PetaPixel. Indeed there is a view held in the world of photography that repetitive images become somewhat cliched.

I used to hold the opinion that “good is good.” Specifically, I think there is a branch of criticism in the photography world (really, the art world in general) that cliched photographs of cliched subjects are per se bad, even if done very well. Think photographs of sunsets over beaches, the Milky Way at night, or iconic locations like the Grand Canyon, which all have been photographed over and over again to the point where even the best executions of such images mostly really do tend to fade into a sea of duplicate, derivative, and look-alike imagery. My counterpoint always used to be that good is good, so even a cliched photograph of a cliched subject can be good if done well. (Macaw, 2017)

Macaw continues to say that while he still stands by his original opinion, he now sees the merit behind the argument and finds it becoming a relevant consideration in his work (Macaw, 2017).

There are so many aspiring and would-be photographers now, who are struggling to decide what to capture, some merely emulate others, then some do push the boundaries and create new material. The photographers discussed in this text are prime examples of people who pushed these boundaries and created new works that have more profound meaning and substance. Mathews work highlights a group of people who were grossly abused and murdered for a mental condition induced by the very people who punished them. Seawright's work served to highlight the futility of sectarian killings in Northan Ireland, and Meyrowitz work became the focus for grief and resolution for many people who could not comprehend the attack that had happened in their very safe back yard. Conversely, the works of Watkins and Adams used the beauty of the landscape to promote the area to create and grow the National Parks. These are positive aspects of imagery. On the other side, there appear to be two very different effects caused by an overload of images; in the first case, the use of social media to show these images is driving the copy cat photographers to shoot places that are not geared up to deal with the mass of photo-tourists. The other impact of mass photography is the numbing of a place, where we become overloaded with images of a landscape that we become numb to its beauty and the special place it should hold in the world.

So, in conclusion, this essay set out to critically discuss whether photographing a landscape can change our relationship with the landscape itself. The discussion seems to show that there is a potential for our relationship with a particular landscape to change depending on the context and execution of the photography, this text demonstrated several works that affected our perception of the landscape. With works that were created to highlight an issue or an event in the style of ‘Late Photography, it is difficult to say if it had a positive or negative effect as they can do both and in some cases, the adverse effect is the desired one. I do not think Mathews or Seawright set out to make woods or stone walls seem dark and dangerous, but it is an inevitable consequence of this type of work. On the other hand, the effect of mass photography and its proliferation on social media leading to lots of copy cat photography and an overabundance of the same image seems to have some somewhat darker effects as we saw.

The one question this text did not answer conclusively is taking cliché images a bad thing or is a well-taken image a thing of merit in itself even if it has been done over and over again. In this text, there is a difference between the effect of work done for a purpose and work done to satisfy a photographer’s need to emulate a seen image. Is there a difference between the impact of work undertaken for social media and that of work whose outlet is through galleries and books. An example would be the work of Michael Kenna, who produces beautiful black and white images, His series of images of Japan are uncluttered and reminiscent of the Japanese style of flower arranging Ikebana

The purpose of making ikebana floral arrangements is not to create decorations. Rather, the purpose is to learn to appreciate certain things that people normally ignore. These 'things' tend to be associated with nature and the beauty of the shapes of the flowers. (Verdissimo, 2019)

Kenna’s work in its simplicity highlights the essential objects in his landscapes and removes everything else that is cluttering the image. These are beautiful images that would sit well on any coffee table. Compare this to the images that flood social media some of which are beautiful enough to sit on the same coffee table however the difference is in the context of how these images are used rather than their content. Does this answer our question on cliché vs technical skill? The answer will depend in some part on what they do with the images afterwards; most of these photographers will not move on

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