Reflections on Chapter 2

The chapter was a mix of reading and exercises ranging around the themes of discovery; exploration, and journey; the photographer on the move, observing and commenting on what he or she sees.

The first exercise was to read Joel Snyder's essay Territorial Photography. I contrasted the approach of Watkins - positive, harmonious, believing on the Manifest Destiny - with that of O'Sullivan - large scale 'raw' landscapes, man as insignificant. Yet both more than capable photographers in the technical sense as the analysis of a photograph from each shows.

As a complete contrast, I used exercise 2.2 Explore a Road to view a topic in contemporary  suburbia. It was a test of observation; how could I conjure up a series of images on what is by any means a very commonplace scene: a suburban road. The answer seemed to be to accept the inevitability of the norm in the sense of the subject, but to view it in different ways using a range of angles in the camera; and a contrast in terms of time of day and of weather. The road was treated as a static object rather than a route to anywhere simply because it actually doesn't lead anywhere in particular. It joins the dots.

The film The Road was, in my view, essentially about the personal relationship between man and son; the journey was subservient. How they got to the sea (and indeed, why) was not the point. It was a journey of emotion rather than of physicality.

Typology photography was the subject for Exercise 2.3. I am unsure of the motives of so called typology photographers. It is rather like a lot of modern art, there to tease the viewer as much as say something (or perhaps teasing the viewer is what it is saying!). The Bechers were more interested in form, almost a categorisation of industrial structures and hence sought to exclude any extraneous detail. Dull skies only would do for them. The work of others like Baltz seemed to be the antidote to the picturesque, a sort of reminder that the world most of us occupy on a day to day basis is humdrum, boring and lacking visual stimulation. There is a link here with the Explore a Road project except that my focus was to accept the essential uniformity of the subject-matter and tease out some differentiation whereas Baltz et al. sought to emphasise the bland nature of their subjects.

Appropriation was discussed in Exercise 2.4. This confounded two distinct topics:

• The concept of using Google Street View  and similar to create a piece of work;
• Actual copies of other artists' work.

The first, I argue, is not really appropriation as the images are sought, chosen and presented from a vast public store of imagery. It is no different in context to taking a camera, choosing a subject, and deciding how to present that subject. Artists who practise the second would probably argue that they are doing the same and, arguably, some such as Glenn Brown are. It is difficult to see that this applies to the likes of Sturtevant who aim to reproduce exactly the original. 

This exercise provided an opportunity to explore some concepts covered in an Assignment covered in Understanding Visual Culture.

Exercise 2.5 provided a stimulus for the Assignment. The brief observations of Richard Long struck a chord with my observations on a section of Wales Coast Path. This was furthered by reading and writing on Edgelands in Exercise 2.6. This led me to consider whether the steelworks at Port Talbot can be viewed as Edgelands, and to enjoin on the contemporary story of the future of a town and how it contrasts with the surrounding landscape. I used the walk between Porthcawl and Port Talbot to observe some of the contradictions in the Assignment.

Exercise 2.6 Edgelands

The exercise is to read and record responses to two chapters from Farley, P. and Roberts, M.S. (2011)  Edgelands; Journeys into England's True Wilderness. London: Vintage Books

Power

"There are no signposts leading to the edgelands, no motorway signs with speed-legible Transport font and preordained background colour pointing us towards their fastnesses. Edgelands aren’t sites. They don’t behave like castles or bird reserves or historic market towns. Nobody asks, “Are we there yet?”

But there ‘are other kinds of signs, and none truer or more emphatic than the sight of cooling towers in the distance. Looming grey elephantine hulks, they designate the in-betweenness of the landscape you are passing through. Inland cooling towers declare our coal-fired stations. They are part of the edgelands, but in a sense atypical of them; in the great interfacial zones, so much goes unnoticed, but a power station is difficult to miss or even to take for granted as part of a familiar journey"

Thus, Farley and Roberts open the chapter. They continue with an almost poetic description of cooling towers:

"Cooling towers distort our sense of scale in the English landscape. They also introduce a new spectrum of available visible effects to this thing called the countryside."

They discuss the conflicting emotions that cooling towers adduce: 'brutal, dirty, ugly', yet up close one can admire the hyperberloid structure; architectural beauty disguises functional ugliness:

"They do bear one of the hallmarks of edgelands buildings — a function we can’t live without, but don’t want to live with."

We want the benefits of proximity in terms of the services, but want the physical entity to be out of sight. This is, of course the root of all nimbyism: no-one denies the need for a new school, hospital, railway line, mobile phone mast, electricity transmission, wind turbine airport but they don't want them near them, thank you. It is the paradox of developmental planning. I shall examine this concept in respect of Port Talbot steelworks; a dominating yet curiously attractive site that pollutes the local town and is out of kilter with the surrounding landscape - if it were not here no-one would invent it - yet has become the stuff of national identity, strategic need, and pride in historical heritage.

Wire

In this chapter, the authors  reflect on the nature of chain link and similar fences - the iconic sight of people camped outside Greenham Common. They tell of people being shadowed by vehicles on the inside of the fence while they walk outside. Deterrence is the aim. I had an identical experience while walking around Hinkley Point.

They move on to the habit of leaving flowers by roadside, and the reaction of Councils to move the memorial after wards, as there are memorial sites. As the authors point out:

"But for those grieving relatives, a memorial is not the point. The place is the point."

The chapters are written monotonically, almost deadbeat style; there is something rather resigned, doleful, about the musings; a sense of inevitability that should not really be an inevitability but unclear as to what the solutions might be. They have given me some ideas of how to discuss Port Talbot steelworks in the Assignment.

Exercise 2.5 Text in Art

The exercise is to write down 12-24 brief observations during a short walk or journey in a similar manner to Richard Long's 'textworks'. The work below is typical:

Available from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-two-straight-twelve-mile-walks-on-dartmoor-england-1980-t03161. Accessed on 18 May 2016.

Long seeks to provide description and intuition by his narrative. He evidently has empathy with nature, and observatory powers. He respects basic shapes, especially circles (Tate Modern, undated) and as the above he intertwines location with experience. Other works incorporate other senses, notably sound and some look for a theme, such as colour in White Light Walk:

Richard Long White Light Walk 1987. Available from http://www.richardlong.org/Textworks/2011textworks/22.html. Accessed on 18 May 2016

My walk from Porthcawl to Port Talbot is the journey I wish to use for Assignment 2 (NB it is the first of the two days that is discussed here). Two themes came to mind while walking: the interplay of uses of this stretch of coast often in close juxtaposition; and the contrast between the decaying and threatened industrial landscape and the leisure based renewal. It has led me to view these as a series of binary contrasts as set out below:

Coney Leisure Park and Port Talbot Steelworks – Escapism and Trepidation

Coney Leisure Park and Port Talbot Steelworks – Closed and open on a Saturday morning  (paradoxically)

Apartments at The Rest and houses in Margam - New and Traditional

Bluebells at Craig Fawr and train at the Steelworks – Nature and Enterprise

Gorsedd Stone Circle in sight of the steelworks – Ancient and Modern

Gorsedd Stone Circle in sight of the steelworks – Not what it seems (the steelworks predate the circle..)

Woods in Craig Fawr and tunnel under M4 – beauty and sublime

Porthcawl Harbour  and under the M4 - Maintained and neglected

Sheep grazing in field next to M4 with sound – contentment and focused

Walkers at Kenfig Burrows and rubbish tip on Margam Moors – idyllic and unattractive

Transport Café and Porthcawl harbour –the is and the will be

Plastic path along the beach and the Plaza – funded and unfunded

Farming and industry – sheep grazing in sight of steelworks

The Actors on the fresco and The Boys playing in the woods – the heritage and the future

Reference:

Tate Modern, (undated) Richard Long, biography. Available from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-long-1525. Accessed on 18 May 2016

Exercise 2.4 Is appropriation appropriate?

Read the following:

Geoff Dyer's article on photographers using street view;
Article on photography meets textiles on weareoca.com;

Article on Who's afraid of appropriation? on weareoca.com;

Dyer's article points us to the work of Wolf, who has combed through Google Street View to find images taken by the street cars: 'altercations and accidents, pissings and pukings, fights and fatalities.' And people reacting to the cars as they passed with a single finger salute - one of Wolf's works is called FY). 

Rafman also used  Street View to generate some more random images. Rafman insists that "it's the act of framing itself that gives things meaning". He probably has to say this as his art is created entirely in his home - he needs never step to of his front door as Google Street View has done the hard lifting.

The OCA articles are on a slightly different tack: the appropriation of art work by other artists. Tapestry as an Art Form has been popularized by Grayson Perry among others. Perry's Vanity of Small Differences is especially well known:

Grayson Perry: Vanity of Small Differences Avaialble from http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCeZtW9_BFXE2M6iN3bpKLADaVraX5WOJIcrHTa2dp3yzwhM5u. Accessed on 17 May 2016

 Marc Quinn used a photograph of a rioter to create a tapestry thereof. 

The final article focuses more specifically on the professionalism of appropriation by artists very directly of other artists' work. The article mentions the case of Cariou v Prince. Prince created Canal Zone, a series incorporating Cariou's photographs of a Rastafarian community. Prince transformed the photographs as below:

Available from http://greg.org/archive/canal_zone_collage_rprince.jpg. Accessed on 17 May 2016

After an appeal, the two settled. The Second Circuit judged that 25 of 30 images were  'transformative' to a 'reasonalbe observer' and therefore fair use. Prince was not obliged to say he was commenting on the previous work as his work presented a new aesthetic.

That is the background. The second part of the exercise is to look at artists who appropriate and respond.

I discussed this subject at length, including six examples, in Assignment Two Understanding Visual Culture. Revisiting the assignment, and reading the above, it seems the key variables are type and degree of appropriation:

Type of appropriation

Using photographs of Google Steet View seems to me to be qualitiatively different from appropriation the work of other artists; the former is publicly available and, crucially, was not designed to be an art work. Empty Room and Beyond The Pleasure Principle both used props that were generally available - the former as a trompe l'œil, the latter as a suggestive sculpture. Similarly, images from Google Street View ('GSV') may be copied and pasted. Below is a GSV of my street - note how the camera itself features as a shadow in the image, and the blurring of number plates so as to protect IDs:




Whatever the merits or demerits of these works as art (and Claire's comment on Empty Room is apposite in this respect), it seems to me that it is difficult to see these as any more appropriation than the use of cameras by photographers or brushes by  painters; they are props.

Degree of appropriation

 

There is a difference between the appropriation demonstrated by  Glenn Brown's Death Disco and Sherrie Levine's La Fortune and that by Sturtevant's Bicycle Wheel. Sturtevant's is an exact copy of Duchamp's work; she claims that, despite this, her work is a 'leap from image to concept, whatever that means. Perhaps she is almost cocking a snook at Duchamp cocking a snook at the Art Establishment - if she can copy Duchamp, what is so clever about his work? Levine and Brown, on the other hand, seek another aesthetic. Brown adduces strong reaction - complete bullshit. It's not art, it's tracing to quote one tweet - but he defends himself by saying that he has an idea of what art he wishes to produce and then uses art by others to create a reproduction along the lines of his concept. Levine's work creates an altogether reality - one stripped of the dreamy context of Man Ray's original. Quite simply, one concludes that the further the appropriation is from the original, then the more the appropriating artist can justify his or her work. 

 

It is difficult to know quite why artists appropriate; probably a variety of reasons. Sturtevant was evasive on the question, Lucas openly said she was broke so used what was available to her. The difficulty for those whose appropriations deviate little from an original is to answer quite what they seek to achieve. Appropriations challenge the notion that defining a work as art requires that it:

"...is done so superlatively well that we all but forget to ask what the work is supposed to be, for the sheer admiration of the way it is done" (Gombrich 1974, p477).

Reference:

 
Gombrich (1974) The Story of Art 12th edition Phaidon Press London.

 

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 

Exercise 2.2: Explore a road

The exercise is in two parts:

1. Sequence of images
 

This part of the exercise is to make a short series of photographs about a road near me. The obvious choice for me is Craven Way, near Bristol: an unremarkable suburban road that abuts our house. I selected a 200m section of its approximately one kilometre length.

The brief is wide: 'think about something that is familiar in a different way'. I took images both of the road as a subject in its own right, and in its functional role as a conduit for private and public use and as a location for services. There are themes within the sequence, as set out below, with explanations included:

The exercise requires a digital contact sheet, something I have never heard of before. Looking the term up, turns out it is no more than a compilation of the images in one place; arguably clicking on the link to the album on Flickr suffices, but I was interested to see Photoshop performs an automated contact sheet thus:

A criticism of this approach is that the series appears rather scatter gun and non contextual and it is true that I set out with no conception of what I was trying to achieve (as per instructions), but iarguably that simply reflects what a suburban road is; Hardly an object of beauty that serves functions for the local populace; in part I have tried to make some more picturesque images; in part tried to identify the characteristics, both done using some unusual viewpoints. The road in the mist and at night emphasises the quietness of suburbia at times; the people boarding a bus is mundane but using a different perspective.

Road Movie

I watched The Road, one of the movie mentioned in the relevant section of the course guide.

This is a movie that is difficult to categorize; it is in parts horrific, spiritual, tense, and dramatic. The context - two people struggling to survive in a post apocalyptic US - is sci-fi, yet overlain with a deeply personal story of trust and bonding built between father and son, but previously lost between man and (assumed) wife. We are never told their names, nor that of the man's partner, who, in a series of flashbacks is shown to have lost the will to live, eventually succumbing to walking out on her husband and son after urging them to go south. The lakc of identity and the desaturated filming enhance the sublimeness of the scenery as man and boy head to the coast, dodging the 'bad guys' in several places. The boy needs constant reassurance that he and Papa are the 'good guys', a reassurance that is damaged near the end as Papa forces a man to strip and leaves him naked in the cold.

So what is it to do with road? In my opinion, not a lot. Roads feature principally as the backdrop - the assumed method of reaching the coast, and of providing sources of sustenance in abandoned buildings, examples below:
 

As well as providing the assumed salvation by providing the route south to the coast, the road is a place of danger as they meet scavengers in several places. Near the end, the 'good guy' whose family take in Boy after Father dies, advises Boy that if he wishes to remain then he needs to keep off the road, and its attendant dangers.  The road thus becomes a necessary evil.

In reality though, much of the movie is literally off road. Man and boy meet Eli, an old man, and they walk together for a while on what is no more than a forest track. This is rather curious as the only navigation that we know they have is a road map, far too small a scale to use for tracks, just one example of where the viewer needs to suspend belief. One scene where they discover people in a cellar occurs in a house in the middle of a forest. The road therefore becomes a bit part in a bigger personal story of survival.

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.