My first reaction on reading the brief for this exercise was where on earth am I going to find what they are looking for? A moment’s further thought though led me to ask the question, in fact there is so much of this stuff out there how am I going to narrow it down to just a few images?

This exercise is such an oddly abrupt change of pace and direction, though not necessarily a bad thing at this stage, an opportunity introduce a different concept of landscape photography and break up what might otherwise start to become an habitual line of thought about how to approach the topic. It is though one that I feel deserves a much wider and deeper exploration than just this exercise. Let us see if ti comes up again later in the module.

To try to narrow things down a bit and make it more manageable for present purposes I have decided to rely solely on the resources within my own library. This means I can concentrate on work that I already know reasonably well and which, by virtue of the very fact it is in my library, has some resonance and importance for me. It also helps to show up some important differences in the approaches of the artists involved that is not questioned by the exercise but is I feel worth referring to.

Starting with that difference, what I note is that where we are looking at work that is explicitly socially concerned within a specific place or area, socially-concerned landscape, (another case of ‘landscape’ being much more than just a pretty view) the social comment side of things tends to be quite one sided, focused mostly on just one social class or milieu, rather than directed to highlighting social contrasts. A few examples:

Oscar Marzaroli in Glasgow. Tish Murtha in Newcastle. Jim Mortram in Dereham. Paul Trevor in Liverpool. Matthew Genitempo in the Ozarks. Alec Soth on the Mississippi. Ute & Werner Mahler in the German Kleinstadt. Marketa Luskacova in Whitley Bay. Ragnar Axelsson’s work in Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroes.

For the illustration of social contrasts I find the most fertile ground is provided a number of mostly American (I do have one Japanese example) “street photographers”, that is photography grounded in a particular place, not always a city. Here I am thinking of works by the likes of Robert Frank, William Klein, Joel Meyerowitz, and Daido Moriyama. (I could have chosen any number of other examples, as indeed I could with the list in the paragraph above, but these will do for now.)

The work in New York City in particular of Frank, Klein, and Meyerowitz, and to a lesser extent Walker Evans, whom I will otherwise leave out of the frame for now, should provide more than enough material to illustrate the differing social views and make up of the city, and indeed probably of some of the same streets and particular vantage points. All of them show affluence, poverty, “just-getting-by”, order, disorder, mixed and diverse social, not to mention ethnic, groups.

Meyerowitz’s street work in Paris shows similar contrasts there, something that is writ large across the page of any of his books that you might light upon made by Daido Moriyama in Tokyo.

There is so much material available here that it is difficult to do it justice. What I think though does help is to concentrate an a few examples, more than the two required by the brief, of the work of this particular constellation of artists that contain social contrasts within single or closely related images.

Another point that is worth making now is that on looking back over my choices I note that they all focus on people more than they do on particular places (with the possible exception of the last one). However, a sense of a particular place was clearly important to each of the artists. In the cases of Frank and Klein each picture is captioned by reference to a particular place. The subjects of Frank’s pictures in a way go to define, or at least contribute to, the “landscapes”, the environments within which they lived, not only physically but also socially. Klein’s work in this particular collection are all set in New York so as well as being pictures of various, socially diverse people, they are also still photos of the wider physical and social environment of the city itself.

Meyerowitz’s work, set in Paris, shows something of the character and nature of the city by portraying the varieties and mix of people living within it, who in turn give character to what one might regard as a typical Parisian street scene. Throughout his work Moriyama is showing us Tokyo, as a very specific, sui generis, place, or collection of heterogenous places, and again the people are integral to this process

As I hope I have made it clear elsewhere I do not view the concept of landscape in purely topographical or geographical terms but also in much wider documentary and social terms. I therefore make no apology for my choices.

My starting point is one of Robert Frank’s images from The Americans (2016), Elevator – Miami Beach:

The lowly elevator attendant at the service of affluent society – check out the fur stole!

Another from the same book would be Charleston, South Carolina (I am going to come back to the issue of race later):

This image shows little of the physicality of the location but says a huge amount about it socially. This is the segregated south so the only real contact between races is through the relationship of master and servant, in some ways a continuation of the owner/slave relationship but on less extreme terms. The woman is clearly a maid or nanny, a servant of some sort, in the service of a white family, and presumably it is only the nature of that relationship and arrangement that allows her to be in that part of town with some degree of autonomy, if not authority.

Two double page spreads from Klein (2016):

From Meyerowitz (2018), Paris, France, 1967:

The affluent Parisians, the well-dressed man presumably of African descent evidently at ease within the ‘boulevardier’ environment though perhaps a little wary of what I assume is the fun being made by the men on the cafe terrace of the more louche character playing the harmonica – presumably a drunk judging from the bottle in his jacket pocket. A certain irony, possibly even a hint of hypocrisy if that is not pushing the point too far, here with those in the cafe, presumably having a drink, finding amusement in someone who seems to have had a drink.

For Daido Moriyama there are any number of examples that I could have chosen. What I wanted to do was compare two double page spreads from Record No. 29 that show on the one hand a couple dressed in traditional kimonos on a busy Tokyo street (presumably in Shinjuku) and on the other hand what I take to be a homeless man, asleep on a sheet of cardboard. Unfortunately I cannot find examples of them on-line and as double pages they do not fit on my scanner. Instead I have therefore settled on this image from Record No.37. It is only half of a similar two page spread but this half catches one of the things I find in Moriyama’s work, the contrast , and indeed collision, between traditional and Western cultures in contemporary Japanese society, the elegance of traditional culture and the grittiness of much of modern Tokyo, and the contradictions between what might be perceived as an inherent quality of coyness and propriety in Japanese society and, as here, an open and obvious eroticisation of those traditional values:

My last example is a picture by William Eggleston, included in the catalogue of the fairly recent National Portrait Gallery exhibition (2016):

Much as I admire much of Eggleston’s work, some of it, not least this example, disturbs me. As with my Meyerowitz choice there is more of a sense of a landscape, in literal terms, here again specifically identified in the caption. Because of the social elements of the image though this location could stand in as a generic one for many places throughout the southern states. Indeed, if it was not for the caption it would be difficult to identify just where the place depicted is, so that it could be pretty much anywhere.

It is though the social contrasts that are most striking. What I cannot quite tell is whether Eggleston was being ironic in his composition and highlighting the social tensions at play in the south, or whether is was actually being non-judgmental, more accepting, given his background as an offspring of a wealthy plantation owning family, who presumably made their money from slavery. (This is one of the issues or difficulties that I have with warming to Eggleston as an individual.) What I find most striking is the composition and posing of the figures, the assistant matching the posture of the boss, but at a respectful distance behind him, itself signally social hierarchies. The racial element is, it seems to me, highlighted by the way the figures are made negatives of each other: the boss, a white man in a black suit, the assistant, a black man in a white jacket. This again emphasises the sense of difference, literally of social contrast: black is not white, and white is not black.

Frank, R (2016).  The Americans.  Göttingen: Steidl

Klein, W, (2016).  Life is Good & Good for You in New York.  New York:Errata Editions

Meyerowitz, J, (2018). Where I find myself. London: Lawrence King Publishing.

Moriyama, D, (2017). Daido Moriyama: Record. London: Thames & Hudson

Moriyama, D, (2018). Record No. 37. Tokyo: Akia Nagasawa Publishing

Prodger, P, (ed) (2016). William Eggleston Portraits. London:National Portrait Gallery

As is often the case with the present course material, any discussion of a given subject seems to set off a number of different connections, resonances, and issues that are ostensibly unconnected. The subject of the city here does precisely that for me.

I have not lived in a city for the last fifteen years or so and I find them increasingly to be alien and sometimes uncomfortable environments; I see that in the next section on psychogeography is going to look at the city as a means of making work and I anticipate that I am going to find that challenging. Living in the country I find myself increasingly distanced, not just physically but also mentally and emotionally from the city. I go into Newcastle only once a month or so. Very few other cities are now graced by my presence: Edinburgh once or twice a year at most (incidentally, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me Edinburgh is the one city in which I feel more comfortable and at home despite never having lived there apart from occasional visits, in the past more frequent than now); Birmingham once every other year or so, though that is now likely to become much rarer; Glasgow and Belfast (which, like Edinburgh, I both enjoy) once in a while. London I have not visited for years (I did live there for a couple of years a long time ago and could not wait to get out!).

In photographic terms I do not find cities fertile places for making work. I have made some pictures in Newcastle for EYV and I&P but all too often, if I do not have a specific project or task in mind, taking a camera with me into the Toon is a waste of time (though it still does not stop me, just in case). I know that many people find the views along the Tyne of it bridges, for example, appealingly picturesque, but I am afraid this does nothing for me and they are not what I want to photograph. Part of the issue here might be, I suppose, that living and working in Newcastle over a period of thirty-odd years, this is what I saw very working day so it all became rather mundane and just part of the background.

Most of what I do make is local; if not within walking distance then no more than a short car ride away. In this regard it was interesting to note the comments in the material on Fox Talbot staying close to home for his better work. I certainly feel a lot more engaged and focused locally.

The other thing that caught my attention is the reference to Paul Seawright. I thought the name was familiar and of course he cropped up in C&N (https://markrobinsonocablog2cn.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/project-4-the-gallery-wall-documentary-as-art/). There are a couple of points that flow from this.

In that earlier post I wrote about the illusory distinction between documentary and art photography and argued that the one does not necessarily exclude the other. The same can be said here about, for example, landscape and documentary. His Invisible Cities work is both. I feel that any attempt to distinguish between the two in work such as this would be forced and unsustainable. That is very much how I feel and have argued right from the start of this course. As should be clear by now I find the more straightforward ‘picturesque’ approach to landscape photography uninteresting, unappealing, indeed quite sterile. For me the more interesting work is that which operates at other different levels as well. Invisible Cities certainly does that for me, as does, to take just one example that I have been looking at recently, the work of Mitch Epstein that I have already mentioned in connection with this module, and at the end of I&P.

I am also intrigued that apparently the title of this body of Seawright’s work is “appropriated” from the eponymous novel by Italo Calvino, a fabulous book that I am shocked to discover, on looking at my copy of it, I first read nearly thirty years ago! What is intriguing to me is the choice of this title. Although the novel is, at face value, a series of descriptions of cities visited by Marco Polo on his travels, it is of course a description of just one, real, city, Venice. The locations of Seawright’s pictures are not recorded in their captions. Is he, as Calvino, depicting the same city, while giving the impression that the work covers and derives from many? Is a single city being used to stand as a model for many? Or are a number of places being used to depict a sort of idea of a Pan-African city, not really an ideal but a sort of visual synecdoche? Is he, in line with his thinking behind his other work, simply leaving open an interpretative space for the viewer to occupy and inhabit? This sort of complexity, indeterminacy, gives an even richer, denser, more interesting flavour to what might otherwise be seen as rather deadpan work, which makes it all the more appealing to me.

Calvino, I, (1974). Invisible Cities. London: Picador

http://www.paulseawright.com

As I mentioned in my previous post on the Zone System I was not at all sure quite how to approach this exercise with a digital camera and without a spot meter. I have though now worked out how to approach this and have come up with a trio of shots.

With its exposure compensation and bracketing functions it is of course quite a simple matter to get the camera itself too take a series of shots at different exposures, the equivalent of moving the mid-tone from one zone to another, and then processing them together to produce a final image that is properly balanced across the light range. The object of this exercise is though of course to have a go manually, at least as an exercise to demonstrate an understanding of the principle.

The trio of shots that I have produced are not the greatest, not least because I have not devoted as much time to them as I might otherwise – I have had other things that needed to be done today. They are at least nevertheless illustrative.

What I have chosen is a view across my study towards its window, and the dark corner next to it, to get the widely different light conditions. I used my old Canon rather than the newer Leica as I have not yet got my head round the light-metering options on the latter whereas I am reasonably familiar with those on the former. I set autofocus and metering to spot mode to at least approach what I might get if I had a separate spot meter.

As a first step I put a sheet of grey card in what felt like the middle of the light range in the study, catching a reasonable amount of light but not in direct sunlight (not that there has been much of that today!). Using a wide angle lens set at 10mm (this was the only way I could get in both the window and the darker corner) and putting the camera in Programme mode I metered the light on the card and got a reading of 1/15s at f/5.6 (at ISO 400). I used this as my baseline, Zone V. I then took my first shot, this time in Manual mode using these settings, effectively placing the wall between the window and the corner in that Zone:

I then repeated at f/4.5, going up a stop (I wanted to go up two stops but this is the largest aperture available on this particular lens), effectively moving that area into Zone VI and consequently lightening the bookcases on the right, bringing out more detail. The downside is that it has also lightened the view through the window but at least it has not all burned out.

Going the other way I then stopped down two stops to f/7.6:

This moved the mid-tone to Zone III, making the right side considerably darker and difficult to see, but makes the window view more natural.

None are really ideal but shifting the mid-tone to Zone VI at least makes for a more balanced image in terms of the extremes of light and dark, and it striking how much of a difference it has made between the first two shots. I have to confess I was a bit sceptical at the outset about how this would work out in practice but I can now see that the system is in fact quite simple in practice and really can be useful even with a digital camera, not something that is confined just to negative printing.

This is an interesting topic to introduce at this point in the course and it is one that I suspect many of my fellow students will have little prior knowledge of, unless in the past they have worked predominantly in film. Today we are working mostly, and in many cases I imagine exclusively, with digital cameras. I am though aware that there are a number of us – Badger’s Luddites, ha! – who are at least dabbling in film, both as an artistic choice, and as a means of learning, or relearning, some of the technical basics that are still relevant but somewhat subsumed by and potentially lost in the digital world. I therefore find it intriguing to see how a technique – which I confess until now has seemed to me, wrongly, somewhat esoteric and overcomplicated – that was worked out to help with development and printing of analog film photos can still be relevant in a digital realm.

With this in mind it is perhaps telling that none of the few books that deal with technique in my own modest library have much if anything to say about this Zone system. Ingledew (2005), for example, (at page 245) has only a very brief glossary entry: “An aid for determining the correct exposure and developing times to achieve the maximum gradation of grey values in a negative print.”

Even an older book, Hedgecoe (1976), which is pre-digital, does not mention it at all whilst nevertheless going through the basics of negative printing.

Adams’s book (1983), of course, refers to the Zone system a lot, picture by picture, but does not go much further in explaining how it actually works in practice.

Paradoxically, one of the best explanations I have come across has been published just very recently on the website of the Intrepid Camera Company, who are the makers of my 4×5 film camera. There is a link to the article below, which is a useful step by step, guide to the use of the system in practice. I have to confess though that I have not tried following it yet, not least because I am still trying to sort out a darkroom so that I can try my own printing. (It is amazing how much extra kit is needed in order to do your own printing. In comparison film developing is really easy as the chemicals are simple and the only critical equipment are a light-safe changing bag and developing tank. To print there are all sorts of extra things needed, not to mention a dark room itself. Fortunately I have a wine cellar that can be made fully light proof without too much work and will function adequately at least on a temporary basis.)

From a practical point of view I will explore the system further by having a go at the next exercise, though at the moment I am not at all sure what the subjects are going to be, nor exactly how I am going to go about it, in the absence of any guidance on how the system works with a digital camera. I think for the purposes of this I am going to have to concentrate just on using a digital camera, which is probably the only way I can get fully accurate light-readings. I do have a light meter, which I use in particular with my film cameras, but it is an incident meter rather than a spot meter, so although it is a very good one it does have some limitations. (Spot meters seem to be really expensive and for what I currently need for my analog photography it is not an indulgence I really want.)

Adams, A, (1983).  Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.  Boston:  Little, Brown & Co

Hedgecoe, J, (1976). The Book of Photography. London: Ebury Press

Ingledew, J, (2005). Photography. London: Lawrence King Publishing

https://intrepidcamera.co.uk/blog/learning-the-zone-system

When I first read the brief for this exercise I did not really know where to turn. As ever though something has, by chance, or coincidence, (or my trusty unconscious working overtime) cropped up that I think will serve. Fortunately it relates to photography and contemporary work at that. It also fits with certain aspects of Buddhism that I have been thinking about, if not directly meditating upon, recently.

From the reading that I have been doing of late on the Sublime the particular ideas that appeal to me most strongly are those relating to personal transcendence and the representation of the unrepresentable. On a second reading of Morley’s article (which incidentally I vaguely recollect seeing for the first time when it was published in the magazine Tate Etc back in 2010, at which time I was a Friend of the Tate and so received the physical magazine each quarter) two things caught my eye.

One was the following:

“But often contemporary perspectives on the sublime reject traditional conceptions of a self, or a soul or spirit, seen as moving upwards towards some ineffable and essential thing or power. Instead, the contemporary sublime is mostly about immanent transcendence: that is, it is about a transformative experience understood as occurring within the here and now.”

He then refers to the work of, in particular, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and a sense of void – “of being on a borderline or edge where we can no longer codify experience”. These ideas link to the Buddhist ideas of mindfulness and nothingness or emptiness, ‘sunyatta’, often represented in Zen as a calligraphic circle. A useful definition, or explanation, of the concept of emptiness can be taken from Baas & Jacob (2004) (at page 266):

EMPTINESS: The teaching unique to Buddhism, namely, that which we ordinarily perceive as inherently solid, permanent, lasting, and disconnected from and independent of everything else, is actually ’empty of inherent self-existence’, empty of anything separate and independent, fixed, permanent and self-maintaining. The Buddhist view is that phenomena are impermanent, interconnected, and in continuous flux. …

(This is a book I am going to come back to later as there is an interesting chapter in it on photography as Buddhist practice which, even stripped away of its specifically Buddhist context, has some interesting things to say about how to look and see as a photographer. More anon.)

I am quite pleased that Morley has included Sugimoto in this context as he is someone whose work I admire, and have been looking at more seriously again, and on whose Seascapes book I have already written a brief note (https://markrobinsonocalandscape.photo.blog/2019/09/14/hiroshi-sugimoto-seascapes-book/). So it is with him that I am going to stay for the purposes of this exercise.

The example illustrated in Morley’s article is one of Sugimoto’s movie theatre pictures, in this case a drive-in, in which the exposure lasts as long as the film that was playing. What this inevitably produces a lit, but apparently blank, screen. That illuminated space is a sort of void, in the sense that nothing is visible within it, so that we can “no longer codify experience”, in this case in the sense that we cannot experience the film that is “depicted”. In a way this is also representing the unrepresentable: we have a still picture that captures and encapsulates a movie. A span of time has been reduced, in the form of the final photographic image, to a single instant. In Zen terms the photo is similar to the calligraphic zero. At a literal level the dark foreground and background sky, framing the “blank” lit screen, is a calligraphic ‘circle’ in its own right.

I feel the same argument can be made for the Seascape works that I have been looking at recently, and that I have previously in my own modest way sought to emulate.

I had not realised until I read the introduction to Sugimoto (2019) by Munesuke Mita (at page 7) that the work of Mark Rothko, particularly the later monochrome compositions, specifically Untitled (Black on Gray), 1969/70 below, which share a similar form to Sugimoto’s photographs (although, as he argues, a different sense of vitality) might similarly sit within this conception of the Sublime in so far as he had “eliminated reality, meaning, form, and color (sic) from his work”.

What Sugimoto has done with his seascapes is take the viewer outside of both space – the only clue to the “reality” of the scene, in the sense of where the picture was taken, which is by no means discernible from the internal context of the images themselves, is offered by the caption – and time, as he did with the movie theatres. As Munesuke Mita puts it (at page 9): “It is a fertile tranquility of eternally recurring time.”

That in itself might stand as a not at all bad further possible definition of the Sublime.

As an aside, it is interesting that Morley also mentions James Turrell in the same breath as Sugimoto. One of his Skyspace pieces is at Kielder (Cat Cairn), not too far from where I live. This is a circular space and so has at least superficial similarities with an enso and is doing something similar to Sugimoto in taking the viewer outside time and space.

I am going to think more about his work as a possible source or influence for Assignment 1, and also another possible approach to Exercise 1.5 (on which I am still having ideas!).

Baas, J, & Jacob, M.J. (eds) (2004).  Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art.  Berkeley:  University of California Press

Sugimoto, H, (2019).  Seascapes.  Bologna:  Damiani Editore

www.sugimotohiroshi.com

https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-20-autumn-2010/staring-contemporary-abyss