Exercise 2.1 Territorial Photography

We are asked firstly to read Joel Snyder's essay Territorial Photography (accessed from OCA student website) and make notes; secondly to find and evaluate two photographs mentioned by Snyder (but not in his article) to demonstrate his points

THE ESSAY

Early photography was consumed by a desire to be appear different from handmade prints because it was appealing to a burgeoning middle class infatuated with a 'culure of technological progress'. Photographers could distinguish themselves by carving out a distinctive field of activity:

"Theirs was the territory of the unimagined, the earthbound, and the factual."

But there is a paradox that early landscape photography has been discussed in aesthetic terms, whereas there were distinct practices, as evidenced by American western landscape photography.

Early landscape photography was essentially a reflection of the pictorial genre of landscape painters; there was no market for the products of landscape photographers and the product was essentially one produced by those who had time to experiment with the new technology for a small audience of like-minded people. It was, in a word, amateur. Snyder argues that the establishment of photographic publishing houses broadened the base of practitioners to those with less education and an eye for the market: photography in the 1850s professionalized and photographers provided many series of prints made very much with the market in mind. Photographs were deliberately produced to look clear, sharp and presented in high gloss; they were supposed to look mass-produced, this is what differentiated them from handmade art.

The cognoscenti were alive to the distinction: 

"Painting and the graphic arts were conceived as representing the the realm of the imaginative, cognitive and the ideal, while photography was, depending on the interest of the writer, consigned or elevated to the realm of the factual, the material, the physically real".

Bourdieu was scornful of the new practice's pretence to be art and concerned that the mere fact of its mass production capabilities would usurp the artistic; his was one of the first of a number of similar arguments that photography is 'recording':

“In conferring upon photography a guarantee of realism, society is merely confirming itself in the tautological certainty that an image of the real in which is a true to representation of objectivity is really objective”. (Bourdieu, 1990) 

The photographer could get noticed only by virtue of his (mostly) capability of producing a 'real' image; the aesthetic arose from the subject, not the photographer. Snyder points out that this placed photographers in a double bind: on the one hand to produce something that was indelibly part of the photographic craft; on the other attractive to the audience. 

Watkins, Snyder argues, succeeded in marrying these disparate aims by merging 'technological virtuosity' with 'picturesque and sublime modes of landscape depiction'. His huge negatives gave rise to commercially successful photographs. Furthermore, Snyder continues, Watkins effectively set the conventions for how landscapes were to be viewed pictorially. There was a positive feedback mechanism: photography's position as objective outsider to the artistic process set parameters that were used by painters such as Bierstadt, and this in turn became the basis for how Watkins looked at nature. He reinforced the expectations of how his audience expected the landscape to look. His Yosemite series addresses the expectations of picturesque as evidenced by this image that emphasises familiarity yet accessibility:

Sentinel (View down the Valley) 1861 Available from http://media.mutualart.com/Images/2010_09/13/0012/954960/129287957749567954_c0bfd251-4e9f-43a6-900d-6177bc4a0381_175838.Jpeg. Accessed on 9 April 2016

Watkins worked on commission for the Californian State Geological Society. His was not a mission to be controversial: his images suggested harmony between the industrial and the natural; using smooth mid tones to mitigate any ugly manifestations of the man-made; he was an early adopter of photographic manipulation. Watkins railroad pictures similarly harmonize the landscape with the manifestations of progress:

Carleton Watkins Cape Horn near Celililo 1867. Available from http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/hb/hb_2005.100.109.jpg. Accessed on 9 April 2016.

Snyder contrasts the work of Watkins - a photographer who sought to reinforce positive views of the landscape and the impact of human exploitation thereof - with that of Timothy H. O'Sullivan. O'Sullivan's work arose principally in late 1860s and 1870s and the main body of work arose as an expeditionary photographer. He took many images of the Great Basin area of the arid west. To quote Snyder:

"They portray a bleak, inhospitable land, a godforsaken, anaesthetising landscape." 

Timothy H. O'Sullivan Sand Dunes near Carson City, Nevada Territory, 1867. Available from http://www.clevelandart.org/art/2002.45. Accessed on 9 April 2016.

 The context of O'Sullivan's work is difficult to place - as discussed previously, Krauss claimed his work was essentially scientific, but hers was generic point, using O'Sullivan as an example of a practitioner whose work occupied a very different 'discursive space' to that of a painter.

The image above is typical of O'Sullivan's work: it emphasizes the vastness, the emptiness, the inhospitability of the place. Humans seem to be insignificant as demonstrated by the small scale of the wagon and horses against the background of the dunes. Snyder cites other images in which human figures 'serve to underscore the unhappiness of the relation between human and the barren landscape'. His images are 'an awed stare into a landscape that is unmarked, unmeasured, and wild', in contrast to Watkins' photographs. They may be viewed as sublime, terra incognita as opposed to the familiar and comforting of Watkins' work. O'Sullivan introduced his audience to a new world: pictorialized 'No Trespassing Signs'.

EVALUATION OF TWO PHOTOGRAPHS

Given that O'Sullivan and Watkins provided the main point of discussion in Snyder's essay, it seems apposite to select  one image from each that is not featured in the essay.

Carleton Watkins Trestle on Central Pacific Railroad 1877 Available from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carleton_Watkins_%28American_-_Trestle_on_Central_Pacific_Railroad_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg. Accessed on 10 April 2016

This Watkins image is typical of his railroad images that sought to 'harmonize the landscape with industrial progress', to quote Snyder. It is a big picture: the sweep of the bridge into the distance leads the eye to the mountains further on. And it was literally big in the mould of many of Watkins' images: The Getty Museum description points out that Watkins 'trimmed many inches' off the picture with a second aim: to focus on the human figures. The workers are mainly Chinese, recruited to carry out the dangerous construction work from Chinese farms. Their coolie hats contrast with that of the (Caucasian) foreman overseeing activity.

Watkins clearly had an eye for what works when carrying out his cropping as the above overlay shows. The epicentre of the golden spiral is on the corner of the building, as is a junction of the rule of thirds grid, the upper line of which follows the edge of the valley. It is a very correct image geometrically, adding to the sense of order and naturalness that characterized Watkins' work. In the same way that Snyder notes when discussing the image of Cape Horn above, there is:

"an equilibrium suggested by this picture, a balance between the controlled regularity of the the rails and the immensity of the land."

There is nothing controversial to the European eye in the image: the bridge is nearly complete; it is evidently a civil engineering success that blends the natural with the inherent exploitation of both the landscape and the construction workers. The image represents what Warner Marien (1997) calls the 'corporate sublime'. Watkins is non judgemental; he was an entrepreneur keen on development so, as Snyder points out, was keen to to present an idyllic view of the American landscape but one that highlighted its development potential.

 

Timothy H. O'Sullivan 1873 Cañon de Chelle. Walls of the Grand Cañon about 1200 Feet in Height.
Available from http://americanart.si.edu/eyelevel/images/osullivan_canon_de_chelle.jpg. Accessed on 10 April 2016.

Whereas Watkins' image encapsulates the 'corporate sublime', O'Sullivan's is characteristic of the more traditional genre of the sublime: big country, raw in appearance, designed to capture the immensity of the landscape. O'Sullivan includes the sky in this image such that the buttes  are photographed in their entirety; he even adds the approximate height in the title s as to leave his audience in no doubt as to the size of what they are viewing. There are no figures but the smallness of the white rocks acts as a contrast  to the enormity of the surrounding landscape and add a sense of scale. 

O'Sullivan shares either a natural or calculate ability to take geometrically sound images as set out below:

The epicentre of the golden spiral is in the shaded area at the entrance to the valley, the right hand vertical rule of thirds line follows the left of the group of three buttes, the lower third is the foreground. O'Sullivan handles the light very well: the contrast between light and shade adds to the sublime feeling. 

It is easy to contrast O'Sullivan as the photographer who takes nature in its raw, pre naturalized state as Snyder calls it, with Watkins' more harmonized images. Snyder claims that O'Sullivan's aim was 'to furnish pictures of an area that resisted understanding in familiar terms'. This may be imbuing more to the photographer's aims than is the case. O'Sullivan was sponsored by Clarence King on a geological survey of uncharted areas of the interior. As Snyder (2002) himself points out in another article, King asked O'Sullivan to take images that gave a 'sense of the area', not necessarily a scientific or evidential document (Alexander, 2015, p21). O'Sullivan may therefore be simply doing as asked. He saw an environment that was hot and dry, stark, big, barren, dominated geologically by straight verticals. Commentators such as Snyder observe that O'Sullivan's images rarely contained humans, yet that may be no more than a natural consequence of the environment itself.

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

Bourdieu, Pierre (1990) The Social definition of photography. Reproduced in Evans, Jessica and Hall, Stuart (2012) Visual culture: the reader. Sage publications. London.

Marien, Warner (1997) quoted in Wells, Liz (ed.) Photography: a Critical Introduction, 3rd edition. Routledge. London.

Snyder, Joel  (2002) in Mitchell, W.J.T. Landscape and Power 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.