What is a Landscape?
we started to think about the conventions of landscapes…
-Nature
-Somewhere we haven’t been before
-Not a lot going on, something to contemplate
-Can be nature or urban or both in harmony or conflict.
-Can be portrait or landscape
-Often intended to represent places we’ve never seen. To make us think differently of places we pass everyday.
-Can be populated or un populated.
-Doesn’t have to be Landscape orientation, could be portrait, square.
-A view
Human Presence
We spoke about human’s presence in landscape photographs, this is a way we could represent our ideas without being too straight forward or literal in our images.
Elinor Carucci’s image below shows a man with creases across his chest, this tells us a lot of information without being too straightforward. We know he has been sleeping and a image that shows these marks is a lot more interesting and relatable than a image of someone asleep.
With this idea in mind, we could apply this to a landscape;
Edward Burtynsky photographed a series called “Oil”.
Above is a image of a landscape that portrays human presence and human’s effect on nature and land.
The rolling hills of tyres are reminiscent of actual hills, this makes us contemplate what will we do when there is no more room for more tyres? theres only a small bare corner left.
This is a landscape of human presence, you do not see humans dumping tyres here but it’s obvious that this has been happening. The hill effect makes us think of our impact on our world, we now have hills of rubber rather than grass.
Fred Ritchin
This photographer recently commented on documentary photography’s ability to make people react but not to prevent the problem its documenting.
This was something that I could relate to my idea with the homeless, I didn’t want to add to the catalogue of disturbing images of the homeless that shocked viewers, I wanted to prevent and help. This proved to be difficult, my images aren’t shocking like some you see of people living in boxes etc, my images aim was mainly to represent the individual.
Simon Norfolk
Norfolk uses beauty as a tool, we watched a video where he explains that he uses beauty to trick people into looking at his images. He is documenting the war in the middle east, he creates beautiful aesthetic pieces that draw people in with complementary colours and beautiful sunsets but instead depict the brutality of the Afghan War.
Above is a image of a watch tower, the colours of the image are truly beautiful so you are intrigued but on closer inspection you see the sharp barbwire, the security camera and the military setting.
I really liked this idea and is something that influenced my work, Norfolk uses beauty to get the viewers attention to then make them look at something we would rather forget about or not think about. This is something I thought could be relevant to the issue of homelessness, by using defects in my images (not beautiful but different to ordinary prints) this gets the attention of the viewer and then they are looking at something they wouldn’t have normally picked up or would want to look at.
Alice Riddy 