Landscape, Geography, and Topographic Photography Liz Wells

THE RURAL CITIZEN: GOVERNANCE , CULTURE AND WELLBEING IN THE 21ST CENTURY Compilation © 2006 University of Plymouth, UK

Landscape, Geography, and Topographic Photography

Liz Wells, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth

Abstract

If geography is a discipline that examines relations between modes of human occupance and the

natural and constructed spaces that humans appropriate and construct, then landscape serves to

focus attention on the visual and visible aspects of those relations. (Cosgrove, 2003)

Photographs record our environment and, since the mid-nineteenth century, have been used to

chart places as reconstructed through human occupation and transportation systems. In other

words, photography has a role within cultural geography. This role is founded on realist principles,

on the credibility of the image, Utilising topographic photo-methodologies, many contemporary

photographers investigate the inter-relation of humankind and nature as expressed through

environmental artefacts and practices.

With reference to the work of the Bechers, and of the North American New Topographics of the

1970s, this paper considers contemporary topographic photography. It is suggested that the

credibility of the investigative landscape image is founded in methodology and systematic work

processes on the part of the photographer as researcher.

Examples include work by British photographers, Jem Southam (Rockfalls, Rivermouths, Ponds,

2002), Kate Mellor (Island, 1997) and Mark Power (A System of Edges, exhibition Autumn 2005),

Ingrid Pollard (Hidden Histories, Heritage Stories, 1994). Other examples discussed are by Mark

Klett (Third View, Second Sights, 2004) and Olafur Eliasson (Reykjavik, 2003).

Keywords

Photography, Topography,

Introduction

Recently I reviewed an exhibition of work by artist, Alex Hartley, which included his response to

participation in the Cape Farewell project.i Cape Farewe ll is an initiative in which artists and

writers visit and make work about the Arctic. Hartley made a set of photographs, in documentary

idiom, detailing a group of dwellings built for a party of scientists in 1957, and still standing,

preserved by ice and zero humidity. My initial response was disbelief. Surely this is a digital

construct? I took it as a figure of the artist’s imagination, a metaphor for isolation experienced in


remote places? But as far as I can ascertain this group of cabins does exist, although I wonder how

Hartley happened across them. My review was titled ‘Uncertainties of the Topographic’. I still feel

that I might have been spoofed!

I start with this example, not because of issues of verification, but to point to critical scepticism.

The idea that photographs straightforwardly trace, stencil or re-present reality – whatever that

might mean - has long since been challenged. Awareness of digital processes has further enhanced

criticality. We are even less likely nowadays to believe what we see! It is clear that photographs

reflect particular intentions of the photographer as much as that which is shown. In this respect,

perhaps we should view photographers as researchers and storytellers, contributing within many

competing histories related to particular places. Part of the pleasure of viewing images is the

noting of rhetorical devices and strategies deployed by photographers as visual narrators. Such

stories remind us of environmental issues and ways in which these relate to culture and well-being.

Photography documents environment and, since its inception, has been used to chart sites and note

changes consequent upon human access and habitation. Photography thus has a role within cultural

geography, one, which is founded in realist principles, in the credibility of the photographic. This

paper investigates contemporary topographic practices.ii I want to argue that credibility rests not

on photo-technologies (chemical or digital), nor on the expressive abilities of photographers as

artists, but on the integrity of photographers as artist-researchers. As viewers we are reassured by

systematic approach to image making as a form of research and by careful consideration evident in

the presentation of results. I shall pursue this through brief reference to the work of Bernd and

Hilla Becher and also to the so-called ‘new topographic’ group of post-war United States

photographers. I shall then consider work by contemporary practitioners, namely, Olafur Eliasson,

Mark Klett, Kate Mellor, Ingrid Pollard, Mark Power, and Jem Southam.

1. Nineteenth Century Landscape Photography as Topography

The term, landscape, is widely used. In some fields it has been suggested that it has become too

imprecise to be of value.iii There are issues about the extent of use in the visual arts, but not so

acute. Besides, we cannot ignore the influence of landscape painting as a genre. The Oxford

English Dictionary defines topography as ‘detailed description, delineation, or representation on a

map of the features of a place’ or ‘the surface features of a place or region collectively’.iv The

emphasis on ‘surface features…collectively’ is significant as it implies an overview. W.J.T.Mitchell

suggests that the term ‘landscape’ is best used as a verb.v

Photography was greeted in the nineteenth century as the visual medium most able to re-present

phenomena in accurate detail. That governments, the military, and commercial organisations

commissioned photographers to chart the land testifies to belief in the fidelity of the photograph.

Photographers, through accepting such commissions, implicitly concurred with and therefore

reinforced ontological notions of the accuracy of the image. Photography was a product of modern

scientific and technological development, and became a tool in the service of modern aspirations; it

played an extensive role within the sciences and social sciences, particularly anthropology,

sociology and geography. These fields all have histories founded in the empirical - exploration,

fieldwork, case studies - and are concerned with description and analysis. As Denis Cosgrove has

commented,


If geography is a discipline that examines relations between modes of human occupance and the

natural and constructed spaces that humans appropriate and construct, then landscape serves to

focus attention on the visual and visible aspects of those relations.vi

Photography fitted itself as an instrument of topographic documentation, contributing to

travelogues, visual ethnography and geographic surveys.vii Photographers, such as CarletonWatkins,

Eadweard Muybridge and Tim O’Sullivan, were commissioned to chart the American West and to

document socio-geographic change wrought by railroads, mining stations, and other nineteenth

century entrepreneurial developments.

The Art Museum later took up their work. In the mid-twentieth century, curators, most notably,

John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, extolled photographic seeing as a

particular mode of artistic vision. Briefly, it was argued that photographic seeing is ‘pure’ or

special because it is unmediated, that the photographer responds directly to that which is observed,

having limited latitude for interpretation. Emphasis on the unique perception of the artist might

seem to contradict the notion of unmediated photographic seeing, but the argument was presented

in terms of individual aesthetic sensibilities and of technical excellence. Whilst there are many

apocryphal stories of photographers carrying axes and saws in order to cut down branches or bushes

that might interrupt vistas, unlike painters, in principle they cannot just add a river or tree at whim

– or couldn’t do so easily until the advent of the digital. The notion of un-mediated re-presentation

became a part of the ideological currency of the image, underpinning its documentary authority.

2. Twentieth Century Topographic Modes

One purpose of topography is to map land use, noting edifices and other social phenomena. Walter

Benjamin remarked that photographs reflect what he termed the ‘optical unconscious’, as they

include information not knowingly observed.viii The mapping of lsnd use, including buildings,

boundaries and other social phenomena, is the primary purpose of topography. Photographs are

particularly suited to recording topographic detail. But we need to consider not only the content of

the image but ways in which the photographic coding and aesthetic conventions deployed

contribute to the construction of the image and how this might influence audience interpretation.

Two developments in topographic photography in the second half of the Twentieth century are

particularly well known. First, the return to ‘new objectivity’, associated with Hilla and Bernd

Becher and their students in Dusseldorf.ix Second, the ‘New Topographics’ exhibition at George

Eastman House, Rochester (USA) in 1975 which brought together the Bechers and a group of then

youngish American photographers including Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, and Steven Shore. Working

from the 1950s onwards, the Bechers were interested in typologies, which they described as

‘families’ of objects or motifs.x The way they grouped images simultaneously facilitates

comparison between objects of similar type and identification of characteristics typical of a

category. Much of their work concerns buildings and industrial edifices. Their blocks of pictures,

each with similar distance, framing and depth of field, command attention both because of

equivalents, and of differences in detail. The style is one of detached observation. In this respect,

we have an ideal type of author-function.xi Authority emanates from precision of content and

systematic work method.

Likewise, the American new topographic photographers command attention, but in this case not

through typologies, but through extensiveness of projects and a detached objectivity that intended


to be anti-metaphoric. xii No people appear in Lewis Baltz’s 1974 series ‘The New Industrial Parks

near Irvine, California’ although human presence is implied as functional buildings centrally

dominate. Titles are clinical, citing location and address. Retrospectively, their interest in urban

sprawl and environmental degradation as settlement further expanded in the West appears as social

critique, although, such a reading emerges not so much from the photo-documentation as from

current critiques of earlier planning laxities.

3. Topographic Modes Now

Historical tendencies to view photographs as unmediated meant that the status of topography as

evidence was little examined. I am suggesting that trust in the authenticity of images does not

emanate from photo-technology (chemical or digital) but from project methodologies; furthermore,

that this was always so. That the photographer was methodical in research, and in photo-making

procedures, is central to the authority of imagery.

For instance, two English photographers recently made work using maps as the basis for selecting

observation points.xiii In Island (1997) Kate Mellor used Ordnance Survey Landranger maps to plan a

trip round Britain exploring the coast as a boundary and an area of human activity. xiv Photographs

looking out from shore were made every 50 kilometres, using a Widelux panoramic camera originally

designed for survey work. Looking out to sea is a perennial theme for artists, and writers’ accounts

of coastal travels are legion. Mellor’s approach is distinctive for at least three reasons. First, the

book includes the map, showing the grid used by her; the system is made evident. Second, the time

involved in this project, which took three and a half years to complete, indicates the commitment

with which it was pursued. Third, her photographs always include the shoreline, thereby avoiding

the romanticism of ‘looking out to sea’, indicating aspects of cultural activity, and offering

botanical and geological detail. Her interest is in human response to the maritime, and ways in

which different regional histories are inscribed at the water’s edge. The publication proceeds

clockwise round the map, not from where she lives (Yorkshire) but from south of London, that is,

from a point near to the English capital in effect acknowledging its cultural and economic

significance. We are taken on a journey through which regional differences in the lie of the land

and our use of it are revealed. Of course aesthetic and technical considerations, as well as image

content, must have influenced the precise viewing position from which each image is made. The

authority of the series emanates from the crisp documentary idiom, underpinned by evidence of a

systematic approach.

Mark Power likewise employs documentary rhetoric and a systematic approach. For A System of

Edges he took the London A-Z street map as a framework for exploring the city boundary and the

space beyond. He went to the outer edge of each of the 56 pages and photographed a place just

beyond the edge, at this point paying some attention to photographic content and composition.

The photographs show buses at the end of the line, new housing estates, and industrial legacies. He

looks outwards, his back towards the urban centre. Often there is little sense of this location as

peripheral, which leads us to wonder why this was determined as boundary. xv As with Mellor’s

work, the system is made evident through including a map, with photo-locations, in the exhibition.

The photographs are exhibited in geographic order; the viewer experiences a virtual orbital walk!

This situates the work in terms of location and social context. Flat print tones enhance a feeling of

the banality. But pictures operate metaphorically as well as in terms of content and context.


Power remarks that, although he had a structure, it was only once photography was completed that

he realised that the project was about social identity, about inclusion/exclusion and the

significance of being in – or beyond - London.xvi He adds that he remembers as a child regretting

not being able to claim to have been born in London; he is from Harpenden, Hertfordshire, a couple

of miles too far north! However methodical, there is always some respect in which our research

relates to ourselves.

Re-photography is likewise systematic, in this case, drawing on historical photos. A site is re-visited

after a period of time, in effect, recording cultural geographic change. A we ll-known example is

Second View (1984).xvii Mark Klett and associates spent much of the 1970s collecting nineteenth

century photographs of the American West, noting dates, determining time of year, visiting sites,

seeking the original viewpoints and re-photographing. They explored issues, such as accessibility,

movement of light, effects of weather, which influenced and limited the achievements of their

predecessors; also ways in which light and shade lent drama to the original images. The project is

extensive, and painstaking. It can be a long wait until shadows indicate the ‘correct’ time of day.

The photographs demonstrate manifest changes in geography and social use. Some examples are

surprising. For instance, where we might have expected increased human habitation we may find

the opposite. In some cases, despite repeated attempts, they found themselves unable to re-

produce the original image due, for instance, to climate change. William Henry Jackson’s famous

1873 crucifix of snow, (Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado) refused to reappear! Third View,

completed in 2000, involved a further set of visits to more than 110 sites, using audiotapes and

digital video as well as still photography. Sounds and video offer a further sense of how earlier

occupants may have experienced places. Klett’s introduction to this extension project includes a

section on ‘fieldwork and methods’ in which he outlines procedures and discusses interpretation.

Such explicitness is common in the social science, but less so in the visual arts. There are many

other examples of research using re-photographic methodologies. In 1997 Mike Seaborne led a

project documenting change along the edge of the Thames, based on a panorama made for the Port

of London authority in 1937.xviii In 2001, Jem Southam re-photographed the Bristol Docks

duplicating his own photographs from the Mid-Eighties.

Southam normally revisits sites regularly over a period of time up to five years, documenting the

same place at different times of day and year.xix Through revisiting he develops an intimate

familiarity with the characteristics of particular locations and seasonal change. Care, detail and

repetition lend authority to the work. The scale to which pictures are printed contributes to our

sense of a particular landscape – for instance, the smaller-scale intimacy of a pond in the woods

contrasts with expansive views at rivermouths out towards the sea. Botanical and geological detail

is revealed, as are effects of light and weather. He is not interested in the sharp light of summer

nor in exploring poetics of shadow play; his landscape stories are not melodramatic. Picture titles

log location and date and the grouping of images invites us to examine minute environmental detail.

If, as cultural theorists such as Doreen Massey have argued, places are sites of multiple and diverse

histories then Southam, as story-teller, offers one perspective on change in particular places.

Ingrid Pollard similarly makes repeated visits to particular regions and sites; her fieldwork includes

interviewing people and shadowing them at work, as well as researching social history, botanics and

geologies. The form and context of installation through which her results are made public is

integral to projects. For example, work from a residency in Lee Valley Park, East London in 1994,

included soil samples within the frames mounted alongside photographic panoramas; also portraits

of park rangers, their sites of work and tools used. The exhibition, titled Hidden Histories,


Heritage Stories, also included installation of found objects, and a fictional account of an

Eighteenth Century black worker based at the mill that was actually in the park, and later became a

gin distillery. The juxtaposition of black and white photographs with samples and stories indicates

the diversity of sources and findings; it also reflected her view of place as site of competing stories,

experiences and perspectives. The exhibition was in the foyer of the park visitor centre, thereby

inter-woven with current usage, and encouraging local audiences to reflect upon their own

environment and well-being.xx Whilst her approach as a researcher is systematic, her findings are

not presented just as conventional ‘straight’ photographs; in this respect it has an affinity with the

inter-disciplinarity of cultural geography. As a photo-researcher, a combination of system,

fieldwork and intuition underpins her approach.

Danish artist, Olafur Eliasson, is known for kinetic light sculptures and ambitious light installations

(including The Weather Project - the ‘sun’ - at Tate Modern, 2004).xxi He also makes photographic

series, like Southam, and, indeed, the Bechers, using repetition to detail change or difference.

Gallery installations block together separately framed images. One series shows a series of fronts of

buildings in Reykjavik (Iceland), developing from landscape format images on the left across to

portrait format frames to the right. Our attention is drawn not only to individual facades depicted,

but also to geometric difference as the frame of the picture echoes the shape of each edifice. A

further series is constituted through a set of panoramas, unusually integrating black and white and

muted colour images; the subtlety of change means minor differences come to seem highly

significant. Both series have to have been meticulously researched and planned, not only in terms

of sites, season and source materials, but also in terms of the grammar of gallery presentation.

4. On the Authority of the Topographic

My investigative starting point for this paper was an interest in the relative fluidity of digital

technologies and the implications of this for topographic photography. Prints can be adjusted,

materials online can be downloaded and changed, and now digital backs are available for large

format and survey cameras (although, they are not cheap!). Of course there are implications for

authenticity, and visual trickery is increasingly easy. But, in thinking about this I concluded that

the fixity or fluidity of the image is not the main consideration. As I have argued, the authority of

topographic photography is primarily founded in methodology, in evidence of a systematic approach

to research and of the integrity of the artist-photographer as researcher. The photographer’s

ability to deploy photographic codes, aesthetic conventions, and the semiotics of scale and titling

within the context of gallery installation and book or website publication, enhances the sense of

careful consideration thereby lending further authority to stories told. Earlier twentieth century

work was similarly systematic, but limited attention was paid to this; perhaps the documentary

directness then associated with photographs seemed sufficient guarantee. The scepticism with

which we now view evidential photography is welcome as it encourages us to further examine the

ontological basis of photographic practices – although I’m not certain where that leaves geographers

and other whose practice often seems to take topographic photography at face value.


Appendix

This paper is an abbreviated version of a paper prepared for presentation at the annual conference

of the Society for Photographic Education (Chicago, March 2006). My thanks to colleagues in Art

History, University of Plymouth, and at Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, for

opportunities to present and discuss earlier drafts of the full paper.

About the Author

Liz Wells B Sc. (Soc), Dip Film, MA; FRSA.

Liz Wells is curator of Facing East, contemporary landscape photography from Baltic Areas (U.K. tour, 2004 -2006). Landscape publications include Liz Wells, et al, Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now, (2000). She is editor of The Photography Reader (2003); Photography: A Critical Introduction (2004, 3r d ed.). She is working on a book on landscape photography for I B Tauris, and on an exhibition, Uneasy Spaces, for 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York, Autumn 2006.

Director, research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts

Principal Lecturer, Media Arts, University of Plymouth,

i Alex Hartley, Don’t want to be a part of your world was at Victoria Miro Gallery, London Sept/Oct 2005. Review: Liz Wells (2005) ‘Uncertainties of the Topographic?’ Source 45, Winter. Also see www.capefarewell.com; ii It draws upon a larger project in which I am re-appraising landscape photography as cultural intervention: Liz Wells, Land Matters (working title), forthcoming 2007, London: I B Tauris. iii See, for instance, Tim Cresswell (2003) ‘Landscape and the Obliteration of Practice’ in Kay Anderson et al (2003) Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage iv cf. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993. v See his introduction in W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) Landscape and Power Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press vi Denis E Cosgrove (2003) ‘Landscape and the European Sense of Sight – Eyeing Nature’ in Kay Anderson et al op cit p249 vii Oddly, within the social sciences, only limited attention has been paid to the photograph as ideologically imbued, even though the questions relating to spatial relations, for which photographs are being articulated as evidence, are themselves always qualified. Even within more recent – and more radical – cultural geographical investigations, with honourable exceptions, the photographic tends to be taken at face value. Such exceptions include the work of Denis Cosgrove or Stephen Daniels, both of whom problematise the visual in landscape practices. viii Walter Benjamin (1931) ‘A Short History of Photography’ in (1979) One Way Street. London: New Left Books


ix ‘New Objectivity’ generally references the ‘straight’ aesthetics and interest in everyday objects and social situations central to the visual arts in Europe in the 1920s/30s, especially in Germany. x www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm x i Here I am drawing upon Max Weber’s notion of ideal types and Foucault’s discussion of the author-function. Max Weber (1964) The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation. Glencoe: Free Press. Michel Foucault (1969) ‘What is an Author?’ in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood eds. (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford: Blackwell. xii The exhibition title reference both previous (nineteenth century) topographers, and new (radical) vision. xiii These examples rest on the accuracy of cartography, necessarily taking maps at face value. But this is not an issue as questions investigated relate to human activity and social values, and do not rest on micro geographic precision. xiv Kate Mellor (1997) Island. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing. The project was based on Ordnance Survey Landranger series of maps, which she borrowed from public libraries; she generally used one map per location, about 50 of them used in total. (Source: email from artist, January 2006) www.kate.mellor.com Kate Mellor lectures at University of Bradford. x v The A-Z has been regularly revised since the first edition in 1936; places once beyond the boundary have become incorporated. xvi Mark Power, Peripheral Visions, conference, University of Brighton, 29 October 2005. Mark Power is Professor of Photography, University of Brighton, and a member of Magnum Photographers. www.markpower.co.uk xvii Mark Klett et al (1984) Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Mark Klett et al (2004) Third Views, Second Sights. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press. http://thirdview.org Mark Klett is Regents Professor of Photography, Arizona State University at Tempe xviii Charles Craig, Graham Diprose and Mike Seaborne 1997-99, London’s Riverscape Lost and Found. Exhibited variously including at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, 2004. Mike Seaborne is curator of photographs at the Museum of London, xix Jem Southam (2005) Landscape Stories. NY: Princeton Architectural Press. Jem Southam is Professor of Photography, University of Plymouth. www.archphoto.it/Flash/SOUTHAMFL.htm x x Ingrid Pollard (1994) Hidden Histories, Heritage Stories. London: Lee Valley Park. Ingrid Pollard recently completed a three-year AHRC-funded research fellowship at London South Bank University. www.autograph.abp.co.uk x x i www.olafureliasson.ne/photography/

Documents

Landscape, Geography, and Topographic Photography Liz Wells