Reader Francis E wrote an excellent and interesting comment about the "Scenic Photography" post:
"If you don't see 'information' in a landscape photo, the chances are you don't know enough about the landscape in question to recognise it. This is not unusual these days. Maybe you only see a pretty orange leaf, but someone with botanical knowledge is looking at the shape of the leaves and estimating the age of the tree from its bark and form. Maybe you just see rocks, but someone with some geological knowledge is admiring the glacial features. Adams's famous image of aspens is interesting to me because the tall straight trunks are like the mountain ash forests around here. I can infer something about the light and feel; I am there just by looking at it. And I think he assumed that level of knowledge in order to evoke that feeling.
"Landscape photography is a bit like classical music in that an untrained ear might just hear lots of instruments playing at once and not understand what's going on. Someone used to harmony from an early age who has learned about sonata form will simply get more out of it.
"Now, 'scenic' may mean something else, depending on how you define it. Is it landscape photography which does not demand any background knowledge (just as muzak appropriates classical music's form but is not classical music)? Or is it your own perjorative term for landscape photography you do not understand because you do not understand the landscape? If the former, your criticism is justified; it is like muzak or junk food. But if you classify all landscape photography as scenics then I think it is your problem and your loss."
My reply is that I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think it's as simple as you're making it. It's not entirely in the viewer. It's in how the photographer photographs. A photographer with knowledge of a terrain and natural features could take pictures that are "landscape and nature photography" without being "scenic." "Scenery" can be defined as "the natural features of land or landscape considered in terms of their appearance," "especially when picturesque, beautiful or intended to impress." (I put that together from several dictionary definitions.) That by definition makes an informed or analytical approach at best secondary, at worst completely subsumed. My problem with a lot of scenic photography is that the photographer is less aware of the meaning and information in the picture than I am, not more, and it's not his or her intention to investigate it or show it to me, or even inform me about what's clearly there in the picture. The example I used was the most basic: the location. A landscape photographer will usually tell you where the landscape is. The landscape photographer is respecting the specificity of the particular landscape. A scenic photographer doesn't care, and moreover doesn't care whether you care—he wants it to be generalized, generic, an idea of landscape rather than an actual place with distinctive aspects.
I think to really pursue this discussion—which I'd do if I were teaching a class—we'd have to start looking at specific examples, so we don't talk past each other because we base our terms on differing assumptions about the work we're talking about. No matter how you define things, we could not only pleasantly argue the definitions but dig up examples where the definitions overlapped or didn't seem to pertain.
I can tell you how my thinking on this subject first began to evolve, many, many years ago. I was looking through some scenic travel picture books in the discount section of a bookstore. I looked through books on India, Portugal, etc., and then I came across one on Vermont. Well, I lived in Vermont at the time, and I traveled around in it, and I looked around me. Which made it easy to realize how little the pictures in the book resembled the place and how little the place resembled the pictures in the book. By being super-selective, exclusionary, and seeking only to show the pretty and the picturesque in a prettified and pictorial way, the photographers of the picture book had presented what amounted to an imaginary Vermont.
Of course it's possible for viewers to look at pictures and not understand what they're looking at—that happens constantly. But what makes a photograph a "scenic," to my mind, is more a responsibility and an intention on the part of the photographer.
An example I use to illustrate this is the iconic Steamboat poster shot by Gerald Brimacombe and art directed by Mix Beauvais, who was Director of Sales for the Steamboat ski resort at the time, and the Wilson Griak ad agency:
Steamboat Ski and Resort Corp.
The More Barn picture (the barn is, or was, owned by a family named More) has earned the overused epithet "iconic." It was done by professionals as a publicity shot—the riders were models and the skis were a particular brand, Hart—but it's a perfect example of quintessential scenic photography and, further, demonstrates the way scenic photography differs from landscape or documentary phtography. In this case the location is revealed (and in fact is the point), but the representation of it is highly romanticized and carefully idealized. I didn't know the area in 1972 when the picture was made, but in 1993 when I was in Steamboat Springs the barn was hardly identifiable as the one in the poster—the hillside behind it is dotted with hulking luxury homes and condos, there was a busy road just down the hill from it—across which was a trailer park at the time—and quite close by were many developed buildings including a dry cleaner and a car wash (or maybe it was a muffler shop). This picture itself might have been "straight," but the report it gives of reality is highly...shall we say...editorialized. On purpose, of course. But still.
Tellingly, I'm told there are only a few circumscribed angles where scenic photographers can get their unsullied scenic shots of the barn, narrow angles where they're able to exclude all the reality that crowds in from every direction. Those spots are popular, I'm told. There are many shots of the More Barn online.
So you could photograph this particular "scene" many ways, with many ideas in mind. I'd love to make a shot of it showing what really surrounds it—I think that would be more interesting than making a sort of bucolic western fantasy out of it. But that's just me. (And maybe my shot would only be interesting because of its contrast to the famous poster.) I would say that "scenic" photography does to nature and landscape about what advertising photography does to the products it depicts. Documentary honesty, informational content, and accurate meaning are just not what are intended. There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach; it's just frustrating when you're looking for something else out of photographs is all.
I should qualify these comments by noting that this picture also makes a great example because it's a really great shot that works spectacularly well in the way it was intended to work. That helps get across the point that I'm not sitting in judgement of scenic photography necessarily, and not criticizing either those who practice it or those who enjoy it. It just doesn't particularly float my boat. No harm in that. I can't be expected to like everything.
I also think I could argue that, many times, art, documentary, and reportorial photography err in the opposite direction, purposely making everything look gritty, ugly, and exposed, as if to ratify a photographer's stance as a hard-bitten and hard-hitting realist. I admire photographers who let their work go both ways—who are not afraid to show the ugly, but not afraid to show the beautiful as well—sometimes both at once. There are many landscape photographers who walk that line successfully, I think.
Mike
(Thanks to Francis E)
ADDENDUM: Here's another post on more or less this same subject: Ranchos de Taos
And here's another (see the Addendum with Rondal Partridge's delightful picture of Half Dome): Impress Watch This
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Sal Santamaura: "Re: the More barn image. At least it reveals the ski trails on that background mountain. For 27 years, until I concluded that 7,700' elevation is probably not the best place to relocate when elderly and sold it, I owned an acre of land above and behind the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Although not a Steven King fan, I did waste some time watching when a mini-series remake of 'The Shining' that had been shot at that location aired. It was most entertaining to know that, if the cameras panned ninety degrees, a Safeway and its parking lot would be in their frames. :-) "
Michael Matthews: "Reality does intrude."
David Miller: "It's just as well I delayed my table-thumping response to the first chapter of this post—I am mollified by chapter two and a well-drawn distinction between 'scenic' photographs and 'landscape' photographs. (Admittedly, there is usually more value for me in the infrequent occasions when I find myself disagreeing with you, Mike, than the rest of the time when your posts provide a comfortable affirmation of my biases. It's good when you challenge me to think hard and clearly.)
"I fancy myself to be a landscape photographer—though sometimes the landscapes I photograph may be all of six inches wide. I am occasionally troubled when what I judge to be a successful 'artistic' image also turns out the be a pretty-pretty photograph suitable for inclusion in a commercial calendar."
David Paterson: "Re: 'but it's a perfect example of quintessential scenic photography.' Actually, no it's not. It's an advertising photograph—you say so yourself. It is staged, no doubt highly stage-managed, contrived. idealised, worked-on, and has no meaning or reality outside the context of the ad it was shot for. It is a million miles from either 'scenic' or 'landscape' photographs which are usually intended to celebrate, reveal and explain their subject in some way. This photograph is intended to get people to spend money. The difference between scenic and landscape photography is similar in degree and nuance to that between pretty and beautiful. The photographer's intent is important, too. If you're shooting illustrations for a travel guide, you are probably going to shoot, at best, pretty scenics; if you hike into remote countryside in the hours before dawn, you are going to try to shoot landscapes, perhaps beautiful ones."
Mike replies: Great comment, but I think I'd argue that you're mixing categories. What a picture is made for and how its makers want it to function is a very important constellation of issues, but it doesn't describe what the picture is categorically. In fact a lot of criticism involves recontextualizing photographs made for other purposes. I'd say the More Barn shot is a scenic originally shot for PR. If it were originally shot for a Hart ski ad or to decorate a hotel lobby, would that change what the picture is? A scenic is a scenic wherever you find it and for whatever reason it was made.
Lars S.: "live in the black forest in Germany. I really like living here, I like the woods, the hills, I feel at home here.
"But one or two years ago, I was so annoyed by the idealized, romantic image that is always painted of it, that I decided to go and photograph the ugly, boring and bleak side of it. Just to kind of balance it out again (at least for me). So I set out whenever the weather was bad and went to all the same touristy spots and tried to take all the pictures that would make no sane person want to come here. And what fun it was! I was off of photographing when the weather was good and had something to do in bad weather. And I could go out photographing late in the afternoon and at dusk, which goes along well with me being a night owl.
"Now that the project has about come to an end, I can sometimes even enjoy just taking a pretty picture of the scenery again.
""Here is a little selection of pictures from the project. (Also note the subtitles.) (Sorry it's on Google+, but I haven't gotten round to finish my website yet. But one can view the pictures without having to create an account or something.)"
Struan: "I see scenic photography as a social issue rather than an aesthetic one. It's the nice, easy-to-like stuff that everyone can hum along to and chat about (or retweet) without fear of contradiction or giving offense. It's also the nice, easy-to-like stuff that amateur photographers can make for themselves, safe in a self-referential bubble of 'good photography.'
"As a hobby, or a commercial activity, there is nothing wrong with this per se. It is when the standards and conventions harden into dogma, and become a stick to beat others with that I get hacked off. All those golden hour, no-hand of man restrictions begin to look less like a utilitarian, journeyman rule of thumb, and more like a way to stake a claim to absolute authority. That authority is real, and it has real effects.
"An example. The picture shows a lovely wee secluded glen in Sutherland, Scotland. It is highly suffused with the cult of wilderness, and is regularly photographed from a nearby easy-to-climb mountain as an example of the unspoilt, pristine wild.
"It doesn't take much botanical knowledge to see that there was once a settlement there, or much in the way of history or ecology to know that the Highland landscape is a cultural one, formed by consciously-formed policy and patterns of land use. Wilderness it ain't. In fact, the grandchildren of the people who were forcibly cleared from this particular settlement are still alive, as can be found out by a quick trip to the village hall. It doesn't take finely-honed political antennae to understand that land reform and ownership and economic control over places like this is a political hot-potato in Scotland today.
"The conventionalists of scenic photography deliberately ignore all that. The consequences go beyond a lack of individual self awareness, because the pleasing delusions labelled by the conventions as good and desirable then go on to influence—in some cases, dominate—decision making and policy setting in the real world of contemporary social issues.
"What you do with background information about the landscapes you photograph is up to you, but for me, ignoring it completely, and positively asserting something you could easily prove to be false, seems to go well beyond a simple lack of awareness. The photographers I admire, feed that information back into the soul of the project, informing and influencing its direction and scope. That doesn't mean I think that every photograph should be an explicit political slogan, but I find it harder and harder to accord any respect to the photographic equivalent of Marie Antoinette delighting in her shampooed sheep and their lovely silk halters."
and commemorates the gallery's 35th year.
. Granted, I'm a longtime stereophile and a sometimes bordering-on-obsessive reader of audio and music magazines, but this cultural and technical history of recorded sound is a real eye-opener. For instance, do you know why Thomas Edison qualifies as the first audiophile, or that Betamax vs. VHS was far from the first format war?
. In case she says in it how to write like she does, that's next on my list.
. —Mike as Ed.]
was well received, and the unauthorized 
is a great window on the man and the artist.
is available for free at Amazon for the rest of today and all day tomorrow. The hero is (what else?) a photographer.
by M. Minnaert. But this looks cool, too."
