This is a bit of a random post, the result of a chance encounter with a Chinese photographer, of whom I had not previously heard. One of my wife’s friends posted something about him on Facebook (I have no idea why, perhaps just a chance discovery on her part), Lang Jinshan, whose Wikipedia entry is cited below.
I have to confess I know little about Chinese photography and am familiar with only a handful of contemporary practitioners. Nor do I know much about traditional Chinese painting (I know a bit more about Japanese conventions) but what I found immediately striking about this work is the way it mimics in film traditional Chinese brush and ink landscape painting. By juxtaposing and layering multiple negatives, and adding some of his own brush work, Lang contrived to produce images that look more like paintings than photographs: there is that, what I take to be traditional, flattening of perspective, and the paring away of detail so that certain elements of the composition seem to float on the picture plane.
I suppose this should not be at all surprising. European and American landscape photographers had their roots deeply embedded in the conventions of Western landscape painting, as we explored in the early sections of this course. It should come as no surprise that Chinese photographers (or at least Lang as I do not really know any other landscape photographers who were contemporary with him) should have relied upon and explored the conventions of their own artistic traditions. Above all else what this really brings home to me is how our artistic outlook here in the West is rooted in, and perhaps to an extent limited by, the Western artistic canons, and consequently how Western-centric this course is. This is by no means a criticism but is just a reflection on what seems to me inevitable within the confines of the course.
I do know a bit more about Japanese photography, as I have written elsewhere, but it is only now, reflecting on Lang’s work, that I can see how an argument could be made for Japanese photographers having taken a different approach to landscape, one much more “Western”, and less tied to the conventions of Japanese painting (which I assume in fact share much in common with Chinese art). Their approaches have been much more naturalistic, less idealised. Many though have been, and continue to be, influenced by a sort of negative aesthetic (think Provoke, Moriyama, Fukase’s Ravens, for example) which is not at all naturalistic, carefully contrived, and in its way every bit as stylised as Lang’s recreation of Chinese landscape painting. Early Western landscape photography (and some contemporary work of course) is in its own way equally stylised and contrived.
So far as the Japanese work is concerned, I wonder how much this style has to do with the concept of wabi-sabi – beauty in imperfection and impermanence – which would serve to place this particular aesthetic still more squarely within Japanese artistic and philosophical conventions, so that even some of the apparently most radical work is still tied to the past. This though is a bigger question for further thought at another time and place but for now it is interesting to think that it might be said that however one approaches landscape photography, specifically, today, the past is inescapable.
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 