Exercise 2.3 Typologies

"For me, a work of art is something that is interesting to think about, rather then to look at". (Lewis Baltz)

Read the Guardian article on Typologies by Sean O'Hagan and watched Lewis Baltz's video:


In 1975, William Jenkins curated a group show of American landscape photography, called New Topographics:Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape:

"The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal." (O'Hagan)

The  images were mostly monochrome images of bland buildings, walls, empty streets, trailer parks, and industrial equipment (by the Bechers, the only non US contributors).  Frank Gohlke (one of the contributors) recalled that no-one liked the exhibition. Perhaps, O'Hagan speculates, the negativity arose because the photographers were working against the Zeitgeist of traditional nature photography, presenting the mundane, the every day, the 'man-altered' as an aesthetic in direct contrast to the colourful, the picturesque, the 'natural'. They seem deliberately to be presenting the ordinary as dull, uniform and banal - boredom presented in a boring way. There is a similarity with the negative publicity Roger Fry's 1910 London exhibition of Manet and the Post-Impressionists received (Howells and Negreiros, 2012, p38). His exhibition also went against the grain of presenting art as something to think about rather then look at, to quote Baltz.

Yet Baltz does not dismiss the beautiful imagery of others; it is just not what he does, he explains. His interest is in what is the 'overwhelmingly dominant scenery' around him - ignored, he considers by others. His is a more openly analytical approach to the landscape: 'This is the hand you are dealt with, so look at it.', he says.  

Baltz contrasts photography with other art forms; photography is deductive, he claims. Other art forms begin with a blank page, an empty theatre, a lump of clay, and have to create something therefrom. The photographer, by contrast:

"begins with a world that is perhaps overfull and needs to sort out from that world what is meaningful."

This chimes with the approach taken by Liz Wells (2011). She mentions Doreen Massey, a human geographer who argued against static notions of space (source: Wikipedia), Indeed, Baltz's comment could equally be applied to the human geographer.

The Bechers are one of the practitioners in the exhibition. They are renowned for presenting industrial archetypes in functional typologies, such as this arrangement of water towers:

Bernd and Hilla Becher Wasserturne. Available from https://paddle8.com/work/bernd-hilla-becher/27519-wasserturne-water-towers. Accessed on 25 April 2016

The Bechers evidently focussed on the structural typology, encouraging the viewer to compare and contrast the formality of structures that performed the same function. They were interested in recording the details of the different designs, indeed to highlight the need to preserve the structures (source: Wikipedia). This is rather different to the aims of Baltz and others, who were more interested in the social and cultural context; arguably it was a confluence of styles rather than aesthetics that brought the Bechers. 

The Bechers did set some of their industrial scenery in context, as below, but not in the context that questions the reasoning for the location, or the impact on the landscape (both physical and social).

Available from https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/jpg429/BerndHillaBecher.jpg. Accessed on 25 April 2016

The typological approach clearly added a different approach to landscape photography - a more inclusive style that acknowledged the human impact on the world around us. When prominent scientists are warning that mankind's impact on the environment amounts in effect to a collective suicide note then it seems especially pertinent. But I have two riders to this:

1. I am not sure why Baltz and others choose to make the mundane appear uninteresting; there is no more need to photograph trailer parks in black and white, or, as the Bechers chose to do, photograph structures in dull days, that to photograph in colour. There seems to be an attempt to over compensate for the perception of traditional landscape photography as colourful and picturesque, a deliberate statement of the anti;
2. In doing so, they lose the context. If you wish to focus on the social, the cultural, the human, it seems to me that you need explanation and context, else a photograph of a doorway risks being seen as just that and not spurring the conscience of the viewer.

References:

Howells, Richard and Negreiros, Joaquim (2012),  Visual Culture. Polity Press. Cambridge

Wells Liz (2011) Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. London. I.B.Tauris