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Landscape photography is no longer limited to sunsets, mountains, and scenic vistas. Once largely the domain of nature photographers such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, the craft now includes urban and industrial settings along with other scenes that reflect humans' interaction with the natural world.
Ferdinand Protzman presents a broader interpretation of one of photography's most popular genres in Landscape: Photographs of Time and Place. In this new book by National Geographic, the award-winning cultural writer and critic describes landscape photography as the intersection of time, place, and people.
Landscape documents landscape photography from its earliest days to its contemporary form. Protzman considers the changing perceptions of what landscapes are and how humans relate to them as well as changes in technology and techniques.
National Geographic News recently spoke with Protzman about his book.
What do you hope people take away from this book?
I think if people look at the pictures and read the essays and come away thinking about landscape in a different way, thinking about it not in the narrow, classical, modernist, sterile, Ansel Adams, black-and-white postcard sense, but in a far broader and much more dynamic sense, I would be happy. My idea was to try to stimulate and provoke discussion about what is a landscape photograph … and our relationship to landscape and how these things, these notions of the place we find ourselves in, have changed over time and continue to change.
How has landscape photography changed over the years?
There have been a number of changes. The physical landscape that we photograph has changed pretty dramatically. The notion of pristine wilderness is gone. What wilderness remains in the world is preserved and carefully managed by governments and even there there are issues such as, do we clear the brush to prevent forest fires because this might affect civilization that is now bordering on our little patch of pristine wilderness.
The great change in landscape photography is that it's become steadily more personal, more conceptual, and in many instances, more minimal. I think these were all elements that were present in early photography. This personal sense has stayed with it, but the conceptual and minimal elements faded out for a while.
Starting in the 1960s I think there was a bit of a liberation movement in landscape photography—an expansion of the parameters of what could be a landscape, how we can view it, and how we can photograph it.
Fine artists working with photography began looking at the external world and began saying, "I'm not interested in sunsets or mountain ranges or beautiful vistas. I'm interested in the way the sea and the sky meet out on the open ocean." An example of that would be the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, who has an entire body of photographs that are really nothing more than sea and sky, heaven meeting earth with a horizontal line going through it. In one sense, these are minimal tonal fields because his photographs are black and white. In another sense, they're exactly what meets our eye.
Photographic technology has just been exploding. Cameras have gotten steadily better, lenses have gotten steadily better. Film—just one improvement after another. Digital has come along. Video. Grabbing stills off of video and then working on them in the computer with the various forms of software that let you manipulate an image has just opened up a whole range of possibilities for landscape photographers that simply weren't there even 10 or 15 years ago.
To what degree is landscape photography journalism?
The notion of bodies of work with a narrative thread—the photo essay, the classical photo essay—is something that I think is more the province of photojournalists. I think artists are more concerned with pursuing a specific idea that doesn't necessarily, at least in their minds, have an inherent narrative element. They make the picture for their own reasons. Once the picture is made and on the wall, it leaves their control and the interaction that viewers have with it is something they can affect in many ways, but they can't possibly control.
Is there ever a time when a photo becomes more art than landscape photography?
Right, where the artist has intervened in the picture. To me, it still amounts to a landscape photograph because after all human beings and animals and plants are all part of the landscape. We can't separate it out and say, "No, a true landscape is unsullied in any sense." Even when you see the early pictures of the West, it looks echoingly empty, yet from our perspective today we realize there were indigenous peoples living there and for millions of years before this was the playground and habitat of dinosaurs. The planet is these accretions built up over time. To say, "This is the pure one and this is the fitting subject for art and nothing else can be," I think is really a Sisyphean effort. You can't stop time. It's far better to embrace it and use it as an element in art.
Do you think these ordinary landscapes and vernacular landscapes that are becoming more popular in landscape photography will ever be embraced as much as the more charismatic photos of wild landscapes?
Oh, I think they are. People are buying them in the galleries. In the autumn of 2003, the New York galleries have had one landscape photography show after another.
Almost everyone who travels nowadays takes a camera with them and takes some pictures. If you shoot three rolls of film on your vacation, even if you're a relatively incompetent photographer, as I am, you still get a couple pictures that border on art.
I think it's the artists who do it at a different level, through a creative idea and a creative mind, which simply isn't present when I jump out of a rental car and say, "the Grand Tetons, great," and click it.
Reality interpreted through a creative mind and skilled hands and a creative idea is what separates the vernacular from the fine art photography but also is what gives fine art photography this immense appeal.
What's the future of landscape photography?
I think the future is probably digital to begin with. It's already part of the process of film-based photographers. They look at it first digitally and use that as a log book to collect the images in case they need to go back and recreate the shot. Then they set up the 4x5 view camera on the tripod after they've framed it in a digital camera. Then they say, "Okay, that's going to work. That's the shot I want."
I think film-based photography won't disappear, but the number of people practicing it will shrink. It will become a niche art form within photography. The analogy I use is it will become to photography as opera is to classical music.
The other things I see happening are landscape on a micro-level and a macro-level. I think there's still the notion of photographing the planet from outer space, photographing the cosmos as we proceed into it. On a micro-level, the flexibility of new photographic technology is already allowing photographers to hand-build cameras that can do extraordinary things, such as approximating the vision of an animal, so that you can take a landscape photograph that is taken from the perspective, and in a way that approximates from what we know from science, the vision of an insect or a fox trotting through the forest.
It goes back in part to the technology. The technology is creating more and more flexibility. Artists are seizing on that and beginning as they have throughout time to say, "If I can think it, I can realize it," in a photographic sense. |
