Assignment One: Beauty and the sublime

The aim of the Assignment is to produce 6-12 photographs conveying my interpretation of beauty and/or sublime within the context of landscape. The terms may be supported, questioned or subverted.

Although the brief specifically mentions that the images selected need not be in same place or location, I wanted to comment on a range of images taken close together geographically and in time. The 11 were photographed in one day on a fifteen mile section of South West Coast Path from Admiral's Hard in Plymouth to Warren Point. The landscape is diverse: ten miles through the largest city on the south coast of England, five along a coast line of low cliffs, bays and beaches. The images are set out on Flickr, including comments on each image as to how and why they were selected:

The series reflects my interest in coastlines: they offer huge contrasts of scenery in a very short distance and I wished to demonstrate how the sublime and beautiful coexist and complement one another. The other, more fortunate, reason for this portfolio was the variability of the weather over the few hours of the walk: heavy showers and high winds interspersed with sunshine. The portfolio is designed to show how the changing landscape and the weather interact to demonstrate the concepts from both angles. To quote Clarke (1997, p73):

"...landscape photography insists on the land as a spectacle.....to look at landscape is often to enter precisely into an alternative world of possibilities."

The images depicting beauty in this portfolio are the archetypal landscapes designed to catch the viewer's attention: familiar subject-matter including architecture and natural scenery; a discreet human element; sunsets; low lighting; one image uses a filter applied to generate a sense of the past. They may not 'work', but the attempt is there. They reflect me as the 'tourist', directing the audience to view the scenes in a particular way rather as Gilpin did, openly admitting that he could not help but change nature in his sketches if it failed to quite fit with his picturesque rules. (Alexander 2015, p65).

The images both reinforce and extend the familiarity that is inherent in our concept of beauty (Perry, 2014, p14). It is perhaps a curious paradox that beautiful in the landscape photography sense incorporates both a sense of the normal and the familiar, but not TOO normal. not TOO familiar; hence the mantra of 'early in the morning' or 'late in the evening'. Catch the low light, use the sun at its most gentle. Alexander (ibid, p61) proposes that some cultural heritage or even primeval force may be a driver in our desire to 'reach for the camera' at sunset. It might of course be more prosaic: Freeman (2007, p121) points to colour theory that we like complementary colours, of which blue and orange are an example and demonstrated in the fifth image in the series. In a similarly paradoxical way, the images of Radford Castle and Hooe Lake demonstrates our reinforcement of the historical element of our cultural landscape, the latter enhanced (perhaps) by the use of a sepia filter.

The sublime is more difficult to define, not least because the concept as used in landscape photography derived from a time when the world was relatively undiscovered. Ansel Adams and others published images of undiscovered worlds invoking a sense of wonder and awe to their previously uninitiated audiences; nowadays those places are accessible to many, if not physically then by virtue of the screen in one form or another. The concept of the sublime is not in universal use: when I showed the 11 images to a small non random selection of people requesting that they each identify the sublime images, I was met with bemusement. One quoted 'sublime cover drive' as the only use of the word within his lexicon. Nowadays, sublime in the context of visual culture refers either to virtual reality (horror, sci-fi) or to photojournalism exposing atrocities (Freeman, 2010, p46). In the sense of the undiscovered, sublime is perhaps more akin now to concepts such as 'dark matter' or 'gravitational waves' or even, at the opposite end of the spectrum, to nanotechnology; the concept has moved from a world view to micro and macro views. 

This would appear to leave the concept of sublime as now somewhat redundant in respect of images of landscapes; a conclusion enhanced by the difficulty, as set out in the comments made on some of the images, that there is no binary distinction between the two. As Freeman (2010, p42) points out, there is a 'fuzzy boundary to the sublime where it slides off into sentimental fantasy'. Sunsets might be beautiful, but they ought also to inspire at least some awe. It is this fuzziness that I wanted to incorporate in the project. It would have been easier to select images that fit the criteria, that are obviously 'beautiful' or 'sublime' according to the textbook definitions, but it seemed more challenging to select a group of images with a commonality and apply the concepts thereto.


References:

Alexander, J.A.P. (2015) Perspectives on Place: Theory and Practice in Landscape Photography. Bloomsbury. London.

Clarke, Graham (1997) The Photograph. Oxford University Press. Oxford.

Freeman, Michael (2007) The Photographer's Eye. Ilex. Lewes, Sussex.

Freeman, Michael (2010) The Photographer's Mind. Ilex. Lewes, Sussex.

Perry, Grayson Playing to the Gallery. Penguin. London