Mountain Photography: Philosophy Wednesday December 27, 2006
In American Photography (2003) Miles Orvell suggests there are three ways of considering landscape. The first is the view landscape representing the wondrous sublimity of nature, where Ansel Adams is the notable/iconic example:
Orvell suggests that “Photography, by promoting the spiritually uplifting value of nature, contributed crucially to….cultural changes, creating symbols that crystallised and made tangible these feelings” (2003: 45). Modern ecological sensibilities could to some extent be traced back to the achievements of Ansel Adams and others, using the power of photography to portray nature as a source of healing and beauty, as a contrast to urban life. This is perhaps the core significance of landscape photography: a reminder of the ecological ground from which we come and, in the case of mountain photography, of the wilderness from which civilisation was historically wrought.
Orvell’s second category is the aesthetic landscape where an artist’s vision animates the image, and he uses Steiglitz to exemplify that approach. Unlike Adams, Steiglitz sought and found “a more allegorical treatment that transcended the particulars of a given place to achieve a more universal image of beauty, constructed under the inebriating influence of the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements in Europe” (2003: 48). The aesthetic landscape moves towards abstraction, and thereby demonstrates an imposition of creative intent onto the inert forms of nature. And lastly, we have the topographic landscape where the image is part of a political or scientific discourse, for example in the geological surveys of the railroads. This embodies the outlook whereby nature is subordinate to the active, classifying, utilitarian objectives of the scientific mind, where nature is amenable to human intervention and control and is useful in so far as that is possible.
Despite the limitations of this or any other model – never definitive or comprehensive – it is nonetheless a useful basis for analysing mountain photography. These three categories could also be traced forward into the contemporary world as a methodology for understanding more recent photography in terms of either active or receptive intent: a decisive moment approach compares to the view landscape, and the contrivances of commercial and advertising photography compare to the aesthetic/topographic landscape. At one end of the spectrum we capture an implicit or self-revealing form, and at the other end we build a photographic picture with lighting, posing, and careful construction. Each of the landscape modes represents a different kind of narrative, i.e. alternative constructions of response and intent, predicated on different relationships to the environment. The view landscape suggests a humility whereby you endeavour to capture and compose what already exists, for subsequent pleasure and reflection similar to what Wordsworth described as “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The idea is: nature has already done the work, it’s beautiful and suggestive and meaningful, and if I am sensitive and skilled I can translate its features into a 2D representation. The aesthetic landscape presupposes a photographic creativity whereby arrangements of shape, tone, colour and theme can be crafted in relation to an initially less interesting outlook. Nature, for the aesthetician, is an arena in which to express personal creativity, which is a slightly more contrived or artificial approach; for example, you incorporate the careful posing of human figures as seen in the work of Wynne Bullock:
Philosophically and photographically, I am interested in the first of the three categories defined by Orvell. I believe there is something we might for convenience call the Sublime, as proposed by Burke and developed by Kant. In the former’s Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin Of our Ideas On The Sublime And Beautiful (1756), Burke advised that component parts of the Sublime were apprehensions of the grand, the noble, and overwhelming qualities of a scene which, in the case of mountains, should also have an element of fear. It seems obvious this sense of the Sublime is what inspired people to imagine that the Himalayas were the abode of Hindu deities, Olympus was the abode of Zeus, the Welsh mountains were animated with mythological meaning, and the Lake District inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge for some of their Romanticism. I suspect the relationship operates in both directions, that landscape has inspired mythology and mythology has been overlaid on landscape but the important point in my analysis is that in both cases the Sublime is integrally involved, in which a sense of humility is fundamental. As Kant noted in A Critique of Human Understanding we have to recognise the limits of human cognition and not transpose the knowledge of one domain onto another – an act of hubris – or as Wittgenstein famously said in his Treatise On Logic And Philosophy, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”. It is a mistake to think we have an intellectual control over mountains, when we walk upon them. Mountains are a quintessential reminder of our geological-temporal insignificance, a fact which is not changed by the impositions of the intellect.
Landscape is not the most fashionable photographic subject, and I suspect much of this derives from its apparent lack of narrative content. The more active/aggressive approaches whereby meaning is contrived/imposed, such as Martin Parr uses, are relatively popular, I suspect, because they offer a recognisable postmodern narrative.
My own approach is different. Mountain photographer Colin Prior, in one of his magazine columns (The Great Outdoors April 2005: 42) says this: “essentially, editorial photographers are finders of pictures whereas advertising photographers are makers; by nature, you’re either one or the other”. This a spectrum, reminiscent of Orvell’s, whereby you either impose your ideas on the world or have a more receptive attitude seeking to ‘find’ a great picture up in the mountains. Indeed, mountain photography is predisposed to the latter; only people like Martin Parr have questioned it. It seems to me, the receptive attitude not only has an aesthetic value, it further relates to our contemporary concerns about ecology. Mountains are wild, challenging, and beautiful; they deserve appreciation and respect and when undertaken in that spirit, mountain photography is a rewarding endeavour with an implicit and interesting philosophical dimension.
Comment
Hi, James-
Even ‘finders’ of pictures are, to a degree, ‘makers’. Witness the difference between our two takes on the Wasdale farm. I’ve always taught my students that photography, especially outdoor photography, is the art of elimination, and I tend to emphasize design and composition by careful cropping in the camera frame, and, if necessary, under the enlarger or on the computer screen.
Yours, Bob
— Bob Pliskin · Dec 28, 11:20 AM · §
Hi Bob yes I agree; it’s rather naive to think that the ‘found’ picture is not similarly artificial as compared to the ‘made’ picture. And I agree that the process of elimination, less is more, lies at the heart of mountain photography.
I do think though, there’s a subtle but important distinction possible between ‘finding’ and ‘making’ a picture, which rests on an aesthetic sensitivity and underlying intent. So yes, you still ‘make’ a picture when you witness a moment of light, shape and composition that pleases you, because it is not self-evidently or obviously ‘there’, but it’s a moment of capture based on a recognition, maybe, something like Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment which implies a latent or implicit possiblity that reveals itself as an opportune harmonious instant. Thus, it’s out there, some time, if you are lucky, and if you are prepared for it. That’s different to an approach that seeks to impose and control the situation; something you can’t do anyway, hence the old anecdote about ‘respecting’ the mountains if you walk in them, ie. recognising the limits within which your safety is relatively ensured.
This is a subject I mentioned recently pertaining to the work of Martin Parr, exemplifying as he does an attitude of ‘making’ a photo as an act which is oblivious to, indeed rejects, the more inherent properties of his subject – albeit, that you still edit them.
Someone recently told me that photographer Nan Goldin can’t stand Martin Parr, because he fails to “respect” his subjects. That’s close to my own position; he’s more interested in representing himself, in a way, and his thinking process which he thereby imposes. Sure, you also ‘impose’ yourself when you edit and select, but I think it’s possible to do so while seeking to reveal something you enjoy and find beautiful, which is a different thought process evident in my photos of the Alps compared to Parr’s
http://www.jameslomax.com/words/721/postmodernism-and-martin-parr
— James · Dec 28, 01:42 PM · §
All I would say is AMAZING
— Foxylady · Jun 8, 03:21 PM · §
Thanks.
That last black and white photo is the Eiger. The famous North Face is on the left.
— James Lomax · Jun 12, 06:07 PM · §