Another book in my pile of recent acquisitions waiting for some critical attention. I have already written briefly about this book (https://markrobinsonocalandscape.photo.blog/2019/09/29/landscapes-with-present-figures/) but I wanted to come back to it again because it raises a question that I have not otherwise addressed before now.

Although Czech, locally at least, Markéta Luskačová is best known for her work on the coast, mostly at Whitley Bay in the 1970s. Indeed, I am afraid that I know nothing else of her work since that time, somethings that clearly I need to remedy. A number of her pictures were included in the Women by Women exhibition at the Baltic Gallery in Newcastle last summer about which I wrote a short piece (https://markrobinsonocablog2cn.wordpress.com/2018/06/28/women-by-women-exhibition/), which was the first time that I encountered her work.

At last the work that she did then has been published and naturally I had to buy the book. Rather than discussing the book itself though what I want to focus on for now is an interesting question that it raises in connection with this module on landscape photography: to what extent can a photograph be about, and tell us anything of, a particular place if it is not possible, or at least difficult without extrinsic knowledge, to identify that place?

In the absence of the list of photographs at the back of the book listing the places and dates of their making, and in the absence of any other knowledge about the making of this work, is it possible to identify a particular place? In a sense, is this work about, a representation of, the North East? Is this landscape or social documentary?

Clearly it is the latter in so far as it shows people at play in the late 1970s though while some of the hairstyles and fashions can be confidently placed in that particular time many of the images of older people would be much harder to date. If I did not know better I would have said that some of them could be from the 1950s or 1960s. But what about a sense of place? This is much harder. In a few of the pictures there are some clues, but resolving them does require some local knowledge. Some of the places I recognise as they have barely changed over the last forty years or so. Without that local knowledge though I would expect any viewer relying purely on the internal context of these pictures alone to identify where they were made.

There is the tricky question. If you cannot, or cannot easily, identify the place in question, can it be said that the pictures are “about” that particular place? Do they simply become emblematic of a time or type of place rather than a specific location? Does the actual location stand in for and represent any or all similar types of place? Does it actually matter?

I know this work is about the North East; I could confidently take you to a few of the specific places depicted. To that extent I very much see this as, amongst other things, a work of landscape photography. Without that local knowledge though I am not sure that I would. I suppose where this leads me is to the point that has been made any number of times before that without context photography is not reliable, that it does not necessarily tell a particular truth.

And does it matter if you can or cannot place this work? No, it stands on its own merits!

Luskačová, M, (2019).  By the Sea.  Bristol:  RRB Photobooks

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