Oooh! Lovely! The sounds you hear when images like Charlie Waite’s briliiant image above are shown to an audience.
People love this kind of picture and landscape photography is probably the most popular genre for amateur photographers. Professional landscape photography is also widely read and bought; practioners like Waite and Joe Cornish attract large audiences when they speak and their books are among the most successful commercial photography books available.
But I find most landscape photographs unengaging - and some of it very boring. So I probably upset many members of a camera club recently when I said that I couldn’t see why anyone would willingly want take landscapes. I’ve been thinking more about the subject since.
I start by accepting that there is some brilliant landscape photography around. A particularly creative photographer like Eddie Soloway (see examples below) can bring a radical new perspective to the subject.
By searching all the time for a different and engaging perspective, photographers like this will always find something new to say about the landscape, however familiar it may be. But most amateur and much professional landscape photography is not like this: it is nearly always representational, trying to capture the beauty of the scene as it appears to the eye, generally enhancing the image with attractive lighting and composition. I do not deny the amazing skill of many photographers in this field nor the quality of their output, I just find it unengaging. But why?
In part, it’s because the landscape is essentially static. Still photography of an unchanging subject seems pointless. If you enjoy a view, you can go back and see it tomorrow, or the day after. Its never going to go away, so why do you need to record it? Of course, lighting conditions can and do change, and some are more attractive than others. But so what? There’s a sunset everyday.
You could object that such images are record shots for people who cannot go back tomorrow, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the value of landscape record shots is now much less than it was when few people travelled. We've all pretty well seen everything now - or so it seems at times. In fact, photographers now complain that they are running out of places in the world that haven’t already been photographed extensively!
This leads to the next part of the answer: beauty without depth is superficial. Much of the landscape is indeed beautiful, and you can understand why so many people are impelled to photograph it. But in most images I can find no story, no message, no moral. It is beauty for its own sake. A speaker I heard recently said that most photographers and purchasers of photographic images can’t see beyond something to put up on the wall. It’s a rather snooty way of putting it, but its probably true.
The roots of this go back a long way. Early nineteenth century romanticism - particularly in England and Germany - valued the meaning of the natural world as a thing in itself. But in the twenty first century meaning has been stripped out of the world, which is why it is so important that all forms of art - including photography - seek to imbue meaning into their subject.
But there is probably a more important process at work here. In his book The Art of Travel Alan de Botton explores why tourists are driven to photograph ceaselessly popular sights en masse and asks why - particularly in connection with natural beauty - this should be. If one million shots of the same image have probably already been taken, the next one doesn’t stand much chance of being particularly original. His answer is that the viewer, exposed to something attractive for the first and possibly last time, wants to own it. Photography becomes a way of possessing the beauty of the scene and the simple act of taking the photograph - rather than necessarily viewing it afterwards - is the driving force. And, of course, we know how few travel images are actually viewed after the event.
There’s much in this argument. When I ask landscape photographers why they took a particular image, the answer is that is was so beautiful. It probably was. But do they share my view that - to misquote Proudhon - landscape photography is theft? I suspect not.
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