In response to Geoff's book reviews yesterday, there were several comments critical of David Noton's style of landscape photograph; one reader derided it as "...meaningless landscape porn done by the old British Velvia brigade now all turned digital" (and then admitted that it's what he wants to do himself), and another called it "the padding of a thousand amateur photography magazines...proficient but shallow empty images that tell us nothing new about the world." (I'm not at all agreeing that this is how such work should be seen, merely reporting their reactions.)
Separately, several people attested to a dissatisfaction with pictures of ruins. Sean Keane referred us to a 2009 interview at On the Media, which again uses the word "porn" to disparage pictures indulgent of a concept—the article is entitled "Ruin Porn." Several other readers, independently, also used the p-word.
Curiously, I think all these dissenting voices are objecting to the same thing, regardless of whether they're talking about landscapes or ruins: a lack or failure of documentary objectivity.
Early on in my exploration of photography, I found myself disenchanted with conventional travel photography. The problem was that I had been places (my father loved to travel, and I did a lot of traveling early in my life—which I enjoyed, but which seems to have cured me of the conventional ambition to do more of it later in life). The problem was simply that most glossy books about places that are so often found in the bargain sections of chain bookstores just don't look like what you see when you go to those places yourself.
This is what people object to about the common fib of "pristine" landscape photographs that show the land as we imagine it to be in its natural state. (Actually, of course, most "unspoiled" or "natural" landscape does show the hand of Mankind—you just have to know what to look for.) They simply don't show the place as you'd experience it if you went there yourself. Such projects edit too much, select only one point of view.
It's also what Thomas Morton, in the "Ruin Porn" interview, objects to when he notes that
...one of the pictures...really, really evokes this desolation, but if you tilt the camera even just like a little bit to the right or to the left on one side [LAUGHS] there’s this really well-kept food factory building with a nicely manicured lawn out front, and the other way there’s an office building that when we [were] there everybody was out like eating their lunch; it was bustling. There was all this activity.
Again, same thing—the pictures don't look like what you'd experience if you went to the place yourself. They don't report on a place, they select their point of view a priori and then exclude everything that doesn't contribute to the impression.
By showing only the famous ruins of Detroit, you can make Detroit look like an unredeemed post-industrial wasteland, with ruin stretching as far as the eye can see. (Detroit's population has fallen by half in recent decades, which is sure to leave some ruins behind.) By showing only what Geoff himself refers to (in a comment) as "little slices of paradise," you're not getting a clear picture of the reality of the land in a landscape—even, in some case, of the place where the picture was made.
(Regarding that last, here's an anecdote I can't resist retelling: a teacher of mine, Frank DiPerna, once did a color landscape project with an 8x10 Deardorff of the desert southwest. At the opening, an attendee was admiring one of Frank's "pure" landscapes on the gallery wall and asked, "Now where was this taken?" And Frank answered "Not more than a hundred steps from the trunk of the car." In other words, all those pristine landscapes had roads nearby.)
There are even little tricks that you can play to make the point-of-view seem more pervasive than it is. Relative to Detroit ruins, Morton notes that there are really only a few big famous ruins in Detroit: the old Packard plant (abandoned in 1957), the train station, and the Fisher Body plant.
There would be one picture that was an interior, and it would say Packard Auto Plant; you know, the caption would explain what the photo was. And then there would be another one that was taken right outside the Packard Auto Plant, but instead of referencing the plant, it would say "Bellevue Avenue," which is where the Packard Auto Plant is located. And then they repeated that at the Fisher Body Plant, went outside, and it was still—it's still a shot of the plant but it says "Hasting Avenue."
There's nothing wrong with slice-of-paradise landscapes, nor with photographs of ruins—it's just wise to bear in mind that the operative mode in play is "art," not "documentary."
And my parting shot—if you happen to be one of those who naturally feels a little suspicious of idealized landscapes, I have the perfect antidote for you, courtesy of Bill Poole. It's a short video by and about Guggenheim Award winner Michael Berman.
The video, called "Wilderness Photographer," is from High Country News. Short, and worthwhile. I like his landscapes, and I like his thoughts about landscape. It's the first I've heard of Michael Berman. Has anybody seen his book
?
Mike
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Featured Comment by Craig Lee: "It is an interesting point. As a matter of fact, today CNN has a web article along a similar vein. The article is about how hotels' marketing images don't tell the full story, are framed to look better/bigger than they are, and even staged so beaches look pristine. Different subject, but really a similar theme to this post."
Brochure photo on left, more typical scene on the right. (Click on the images to see larger version.) Photos courtesy Oyster.com.
Mike replies: One could argue that professional photography in general is the skill of the convincing fakeout photo. The best one I was ever asked to do: I was hired by an organization that was sponsoring a protest. My job was to bring back "documentary" pictures of the protest that emphasized its importance as an event. When I got there, I learned to my dismay that exactly six protesters had shown up. My task for the day: make pictures in which six people looked like an actual crowd. Takes some skill to do that! (I'm still rather proud of the job I did for the client—and don't forget that you can't put all six people in one shot unless you want to come back with only one picture! You can't have all the people recognizably showing up in shot after shot. If I ever run across those photos, I'll post them. They're around here somewhere.)
Featured Comment by Ed Hawco: "I think there's more to the 'pornification' of things than just a perceived 'a lack or failure of documentary objectivity.' In my experience, things are 'porned' when they are designed to push the easy buttons, to gain a reflexive knee-jerk reaction. The treatment of a subject becomes 'porned' when it becomes very popular and lots of people start doing it, effectively mimicking each other. The original Detroit photos were great when they stood alone, but now that people are 'flocking' to Detroit to essentially rephotograph the same things, each person trying to focus more and more on the thing that got the original reaction, then Detroit ruins photos are 'ruin porn.'
"The same can be said of 'food porn,' where lush close-up photos of plates of food—generally with a lot of background blur and gleaming white plates—got such a reaction that people went overboard getting closer, blurrier, and whiter each time. 'Porning' happens when appealing to that knee-jerk reaction is more important than anything else, such as original treatment, or recontextualizing, or even subverting the porn.
"...and let's not even talk about HDR porn!
"With landscape it's a more slippery slope. The idea of constantly rephotographing the same scenes—particularly if you go heavy on the color saturation or dramatic B&W effects—gets you into landscape porn territory.
"The question of what you include and exclude from a shot is a whole field of study in itself, which I think may have been one of the themes that the New Topographics photographers were playing with. The subject of what really constitutes the landscape—in terms of how much is prescribed and how much we see objectively—is addressed very well in the book The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez
by Alexander Wilson, a must-read for anyone who wants to engage in landscape photography that goes beyond 'pretty' and into the realms of ideas and critical analysis.
"Personally, I like to contextualize 'scape photographs (land-, sea-, city-, etc.) but there are times when it's nice to zoom in and decontextualize. The key for me is that when it is decontextualized, it's because either the context doesn't really matter (e.g., what you're really photographing is an effect of light or somesuch) or when the context is implicit (because everyone knows the place and what's around it)."
, by the way, is terrific too, a short, fast, tasty read. And the new movie is much truer to the book than the John Wayne version, which is a good movie in its own right but entirely different in tone and mode. The Coen brothers version matches the book better in detail, motivation, locale, even pacing. They make the story back into a real anti-Western, in the best spirit of the times in which the book was written (1968). Their True Grit is worthy of standing alongside any of the other great anti-westerns, even the best one ever made, Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Even the stilted dialogue is true to the book, and meshes nicely with the Coens' symbolist and surrealist impulses, which you can easily detect even though they're mostly held in check.
) have just announced a triumphal 29-city teaching tour called the Flash Bus Tour 2011. David and Joe will travel by bus around the country and conduct a series of inexpensive ($99) one-day small-flash seminars for photographers all over the U.S., in both flavors—David will teach manual in the mornings and Joe will teach TTL in the afternoons (both shoot Nikon, but the seminars are brand-agnostic).
backpack, a couple of 
by David Noton (David & Charles, October 2010) (
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(David & Charles, 2008) (
). It is another appealing mix of entertaining anecdotes, useful tips and beautiful photographs.
by Andrew Moore, Damiani/Akron Art Museum, April 2010)(
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by Stefan Gronert (Aperture [Thames & Hudson in the U.K.], February 2010) (
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