I am a bit out of sequence with this exercise, starting with the second part first, before even I have reflected more generally on “The tourist perspective”.
To put the quotation from Clarke (1997) into perspective I have re-read the whole chapter on Landscape in Photography (pages 55 to 73). This is in my view a well written and thoughtful historical summary of the development of landscape photographing, clearly identifying the different trends as they developed in, specifically, English and American practice. Indeed, it is one of the best that I have read. I was though a bit surprised that the penultimate paragraph that is quoted in the brief resorts to such broad generalisations. Why do some theorists do this, make sleeping assertions that are ill-supported by actual evidence (I am thinking here in particular of Sontag)? I think Clarke’s assertion does hold good from an historical perspective. Photographers were largely literally in a privileged position, in so far as they could afford the cost of the equipment which was beyond the reach of most until the advent of mass market cameras such as the Box Brownie. Or they had, as for example, Timothy O’Sullivan, some official status or backing. They were also frequently tourists or outsiders and the camera was often used for the purposes of appropriation, colonisation and imperialism, for commercial gain. However, can it truly be said that the “photographer of landscapes is always the tourist, and invariably the outsider” (my emphasis)?
I would argue this broad generalisation is not supportable. “Always” and “invariably” are simply not true today for all landscape photographers. What if the photographer is showing his or her own ‘territory’, is depicting places that are known, indeed inhabited by the photographer? Does the act of getting behind the camera automatically make the photographer an outsider? No, I do not agree that this is the case. Let us consider some examples of photographers who have focused on their own patch (all examples who appear in my own library), working from the point of view of insiders with particular knowledge of and familiarity with the places they have photographed: Daido Moriyama in his home parish of Shinjuku in Tokyo; Guido Guidi on his home turf around Cesena; William Eggleston in Memphis; Michael Schmidt in Kreuzberg, Berlin. What about the people of Ashington in the Ashington District Star project photographing their home town, surely the epitome of the insider?
Most of my own landscape work, for this course and also personal projects, is made in and around the village where I live. I very much regard myself as an insider here. The things and places that I photograph have been chosen because I know them, many are places I see almost every day. I have come to know much of the local landscape intimately, watching it in all weathers and through all the seasons. This is after all what I am doing for Assignment 6. This is not something that I would have been able to do if I was an outsider. I simply would not know what to look for or the significance of what I am looking at, the places deeper histories and meanings. In that sense my landscape photography does not insist “on the land as spectacle” or “involve an element of pleasure”. I accept that much landscape photography, which I tend to deride to some extent or to dismiss, does indeed do both. But neither necessarily follow from the simple act of placing a camera between your eye and the landscape before you.
Clarke, G, (1997). The Photograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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