Exercise 3.2 Postcard Views

The first part of this exercise is to evaluate the merits of the images on 6-12 postcards (there are 8 below) and consider whether the images bear any relation to our own experience of the places depicted.

 

Guatemala

  

 

Tutankhamun

 

 

Victoria Falls, Zambia

  

King's College, Cambridge

The eight postcards are set out above. They have one thing in common: I have been to the places. But, in a way this is strange because the idea of sending postcards is to show people who may not have been to those places where you are. To a large degree this function has been taken over by use of smart phone cameras to take images - typically 'selfies' so one and one's friends/relations can be IN the picture and actively participating in the 'scene' - and post using social media. This has advantage of immediacy and personalisation. Instead of 'we arrived yesterday, hotel is lovely, went for walk, tour guide is great' written on the reverse of a postcard the front of which has a nice image of our destination and received not infrequently after we returned home, we send selfies of us in the hotel room, on the city wall, and grinning next to the local guide. Those clearly do, by definition, bear a lot of relation to our experience of the places. It might not be quite 'experience' in the sense Godwin was referring to, but it is personal...

One has therefore to question whether an exercise in contemporary photographic practice that focusses on what is a de facto old fashioned method of communicating is of relevance. The notes to the exercise give it away: 'if you do not have any [postcards] borrow some from other people'. Says it all, really.

But let us rewind 10 years or so to a time when the main form of communication from holiday destinations was the scenic postcard, as above. 

Let's deal with the trivial first; evidently the images will not necessarily reflect our experience because of the weather. We saw in the previous exercise how drab low cloud skies do little for the scenery; Iceland doesn't have a lot of sunny days so we can safely say the first postcard is the exception rather than the rule, though the day I was near a geyser was fine. Also, the Golden Gate image and Victoria Falls postcards are actually very similar to images I took, as follows:

I could of course posted my images on social media instead of buying the postcards...

The Crete and North Devon postcards are of a slightly different genre: the mini image of several scenes on one postcard. These hardly reflect my experience because some of the images are not of places I even know in Crete, or have visited in North Devon. But that is hardly the point: they present a rounded picture of the area to the recipient. The North Devon images go a step further as they are taken some time in the past, thus evoking a sense of the 'soft, warm blanket of sentiment' that Godwin refers to.

The aerial view of King's College chapel is another sub genre: the image that ordinary person cannot take - the unique perspective almost. And that is just about the beginning and end of its contribution to the subject: the unusual view.

The last two images do, I think, work at a more subtle level. Tutankhamun's death mask is the symbol of the experience of visiting the Upper Nile; it is the ultimate touristy viewing experience, similar perhaps to the Crown Jewels. It is not about place at all, but entirely about what the place (Luxor) means in ancient history. 

The Guatemala image is, I think, a fine picture that is quite evocative. Cynically, one could say that someone has got a family to put some traditional clothing on and stand close to a peaceful lake so that a postcard of 'traditional Guatemala' can be produced. It might bear little relation to what I saw, but it looks good and, importantly, it could be what I experienced. It actually wasn't but I experienced plenty that was very similar. The postcard works because it provides a flavour of the experience; selective and possibly contrived to be sure, but you don't sell the country by taking images of gun battles  in Guatemala City, or the appalling litter problem in many villages. And therein is, I think, the problem with Godwin's approach: postcards are not really designed to reflect an experience but to give a favourable taste of the area to an audience that is most likely unfamiliar with it. 

 Secondly, we are asked to comment on Graham Clarke's quote:

“… the landscape photograph implies the act of looking as a privileged observer so that, in one sense, the photographer of landscapes is always the tourist, and invariably the outsider. Francis Frith’s images of Egypt, for example, for all their concern with foreign lands, retain the perspective of an Englishman looking out over the land. Above all, landscape photography insists on the land as spectacle and involves an element of pleasure."

This is clearly a memorable phrase, as I knew exactly where to find it in Clarke's book (Clarke, 1997, p 73) and had highlighted it myself when reading on a previous course.
 
Clarke is a perspicacious writer; he understands the deeper essence of what photography is about and this quote is typical. A problem with quoting short pieces is losing the context, or even implying a context the author did not mean. Not in this case, as Clarke (ibid) continues that:

 "The image is an analogue of of those attributes we associate with a rural existence, so that to look at a landscape is often to enter precisely into an alternative world of possibilities"

Back to alternative reality again - it is uncanny how often this theme has arisen already in this course.

The problem of course is reconciling Clarke's view with the Edgelands philosophy, or the work of The New Typographers that were discussed in the previous section. Remember Baltz:  

"For me, a work of art is something that is interesting to think about, rather than to look at".  

And his monochrome images of suburban landscapes is aimed at engendering thought  - he leaves beauty to others, in his own words. In one sense they align: both approaches seek to discover an 'alternative world' but Clarke's is an idealistic, pleasuarable alternative that is accessible because it is unusual, exceptional in some way, whereas Baltz seeks to find meaning from  the everyday, the mundane: 'make use of the hand you are dealt with' (Baltz, 2012).

What Clarke is driving at is that landscape photography has a nuance that is its own, that landscape photography 'is framed within its conventions and codes' (ibid). These codes distance the photographer from his or her subject and imply an element of formality and, presumably, objectivity; the photographer can therefore only ever be on the landscape, never in it, and hence will seek the landscape as a spectacle as this approach is where the codes come into force.

I agree with Clarke here, for the reason that photography has to be a little distant from merely being subject-matter. Or at least if it is the latter, then form goes. The previous Assignment is a good example. Tutor says: Port Talbot Steelworks is an excellent choice of subject matter, giving you plenty of scope to explore some of the themes outlined in the learning log. But adds further: The variety between angle of view and focal length across the set compromises how well the images work together in depicting the journey.....From the images I can see via Flickr, some of the shots look either a little too saturated, de-saturated, overly processed (sharpened). 

Comments were taken on board, but still raises the broader question of which has primacy: subject-matter or presentation. They are not mutually exclusive but raising the issue of presentation at all suggests landscape photography does indeed have some 'minimum' codes that its serious practitioners must adhere to; or at the very least, cannot ignore entirely. As a former human geographer, though, I would argue that photography has to compromise somewhat if it wishes to broaden its reach. It is all very well quoting Doreen Massey, but she was an acute observer and interpreter of the human landscape, not a photographer. 

There is a risk of doing neither what I would call 'interpretive observation' nor 'photography' very well because of a perceived need to do both. I explore this dilemma in a reflective post at the end of this chapter.



References:

Baltz (2012) Tate Shots, video accessible from http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-lewis-baltz. Accessed on 29 June 2016.

Clarke (2007) The Photograph. Oxford University Press. Oxford.