The Land

The Land

A survey in words and images of the major exhibition of landscape photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and thecritics’ response to it. The exhibition was selected by Bill Brandt and organized by Mark Haworth-Booth.

All quotations except for those from the critics, are excerpted from the catalogue of the exhibition, © Gordon Fraser Gallery, Ltd., 1975.

THE EXHIBITION:

The photographers of modern times have informed us of the physical appearance of the ends of the earth, applied the unique scrutiny of the camera to places of mystery and awe, and within the last ten years have revolutionised our consciousness of the planet by showing it to us from the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft. This is the first exhibition to attempt to bring together classics from this wealth of achievement. Two hundred works were chosen by the British photographer whose contribution has been among the most brilliant in landscape photography—Bill Brandt.

Special sections of the exhibition are devoted to such masters of creative photography as Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, with key works from internationally celebrated talents of the stature of Mario Giacomelli, Brett Weston, Wynn Bullock, Hiroshi Hamaya, Takeji Iwamiya, Harry Callahan, Minor White, Eliot Porter and Raymond Moore.

The rare entries into landscape photography by photographers usually identified with quite different subject matter are represented by magnificent prints from Man Ray, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson and Lartigue. Colour photography of recent years forms a large section in the exhibition. We also introduce several young photographers of outstanding promise to a larger public, and another section will reveal the striking landscape images to be found in the archives of archaeologists and geologists, the files of newspapers and the books of explorers.

—from the announcement for The Land, 20th Century Landscape Photographs

We look at a thing and think we have seen it and yet what we see is only after what our prejudices tell us should be seen, or what our desires want to see. Very rarely are we able to free our minds of thought and emotions and just see for the simple pleasure of seeing, and so long as we fail to do this, so long will the essence of things be hidden from us.

—Bill Brandt

The once coherent iconography of landscape within the mind is today fragmented and shattered. The camera’s lens has soared above the earth’s surface in Gemini II and snapped the globe, its oceans, rivers, land, mountains, plain and desert, sparkling miraculously from afar, thrilling as though just tossed from the hand of Michaelangelo’s God the Father. It has hovered closer in the air showing us clouds, fields, furrows, mounds, barrows, ranges, and peaks. It has eloquently pleaded the cause of conservation, eroded soil, dead fish floating in the polluted waters, six-lane highways tearing regardless through hill and dale, the ravaging of pit head and slag heap. It has close-focused onto the hidden beauty of pebble and seashell, pine cone and fern.

—Dr. Roy Strong, Director, Victoria & Albert Museum

. . . and men go forth, and admire lofty mountains and broad seas, and roaring torrents, and the ocean, and the course of stars, and forget themselves.

St. Augustine, The Confessions

In his account of the Renaissance Burckhardt describes the poet Petrarch as the first modern man to climb a mountain for pleasure. He climbed Mont Ventoux, near Avignon. Reaching the summit he looked across the panorama towards his native Bologna. He read St. Augustine’s words to his brother and then would say no more.

The sense of landscape is based on displacement from the land. Continually new channels of feeling are cut back to the land in images. We live in a symbolic landscape wherever we live, language breeds metaphors and similes to keep us in that landscape. To quote a favourite saying of Bertrand Russell’s, ‘Love of the mountains is virtue, love of the sea is wisdom’.

—Mark Haworth-Booth

THE CRITICS:

In the twentieth century, our vision of reality is photographic. Art ignores this at the peril of becoming irrelevant and photography bears the additional burden of justifying the artistic vision. This is a recognition of the technical nature of our reconstruction in thought of our relations with reality. The alternative is to shift the emphasis from the major purpose of the work of art to its means of achieving its aim, which is to frustrate its purpose and to reduce it to the mere exercise of style. True, art is style, but it is not style alone. In a sense, even the most stylish photographer asserts this proposition, since a photograph requires something before the lens of the camera, something, however much it may never before have been isolated and so seen, independent of the process that reveals it and yet intimately related to the technical means employed for its revelation.

There is an aesthetic that runs through the whole exhibition which probably accounts for some of the dyspeptic views taken of it. There is a frank acceptance of the idea that one might as well use the camera with all the competence at our disposal as well as use eye and directing brain. The eye might guide the lens but the lens sees what the brain conceives as independent of the eye. “One experiences this optic unconscious with the help of the camera”. Benjamin has written, “just as one learns of the impulsive-unconscious through psycho-analysis. Structure, cell-tissue, with which technology and medicine strive to come to terms—all this is far more relevant to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. But at the same time the photograph opens up the physiognomical aspects of pictorial worlds existing in the minutest detail, sufficiently clear to appear in waking dreams. Now, grown large and definable, these visions demonstrate that the relationship between magic and technique is through and through a historical variable”.

Seen together, aerial maps of river estuaries and road systems, feathers, fern leaves, branching blood vessels, nerve ganglia, electron micrographs of crystals and the treedike patterns of electrical discharge^figures are connected, although they are vastly different in place, origin, and scale. Their similarity of form is by no means accidental.

As patterns of energy'gathering and energy'distribution, they are similar graphs generated by similar processes.

—Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape of Art & Science

it is by mixing up intellectual and spiritual associations with things, and only so that they have any importance to our minds,

things are nothing but what the mind constitutes them, nothing

thus, this humble habitation becomes a shrine of continued worship . . .

be it but the fragment of a rock, a decayed branch, a simple leaf—

by an infusion: an object of intense interest, a relic, priceless as memory itself

—Jonathan Williams

—Toni del Renzio, Art and Artists

If there is a key to their way of seeing it is the first picture in the show. What does it represent? Taken in the Antarctic in 1970 it is of a blizzard over a flat terrain of snow. From this void the world emerges by degrees. The horizon shows itself grey on white, a faint line dividing the land from the sky; and shadows appear on the earth, faint unevenness of snow. This is the beginning, a primal void of light; equally it is the empty page on which the first traces of a drawing show themselves. From these few lines a representation of the land emerges. As the journey through other pictures unfolds, the view clears to reveal intricate patterns of landscape; mountains stand in dark silhouette against the sky and the sky as a dark ground to the clouds.

In this scheme of things the world’s surface is a ground for drawing; not just any drawing, but that of strong contrasts and repetitions which keep the figure on the surface. So, in many of these photographs the image integrates with the flatness of the paper. That is to say; the world is seen as a pattern or ornament before it is seen as substance and space. The search for the picture precedes the inspection of the world; or, the world is inspected as a source for pictures.

—Ian Jeffrey

And this perhaps is the ultimate meaning of the wilderness and its preservation—to remind an increasingly urbanized humanity of the delicacy and vulnerability of all the living species of tree and plant, of animal and insect—with which man has to share his shrinking planet... if, somewhere in his community, he leaves a place for silence, he may find the wilderness a great teacher of the kind of planetary modesty man most needs if his human order is to survive.

—Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth

You sat on the earth as on a raft, listening to music that was not of the earth, but which ruled and arranged it. Man should be the harp articulate. When your cords were tense . . . Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. ... A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel... I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me ... : All that was ripest and fairest in the wildness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is unrepentant as Greece.

—Henry David Thoreau

The real problem of the exhibition ... I suspect, is the way it embodies the conflict between our intuitive sense of landscape and the images which obsess landscape photographers. Personal responses to landscape vary of course, but it seems possible to infer what economists would call a consistent preference—set from isolated clues: the notion of a ‘beauty spot’, for example; or the fact that people seem to crave high vantage points; or even the kinds of picture postcards which continue to sell in huge numbers. Taken together, they convey a sense of landscape that is couched in terms of scale, perspective, colour and the patterning of elemental masses of hills, clouds, water.

—John Naughton, New Statesman

Man has no part in the undefiled locales charted here, except in the form of the minuscule silhouettes who leave their spoor behind them like a line of neat stitching as they trail across the snow in Bradford Washburn’s Climbers on East Ridge of the Doldenhorn.

Here they seem utterly subservient to the dumbfounding contours and textures of a mountainside coated with snow and caressed by vaporous cloud, mere yardsticks with which to gauge the sheer immensity of nature at its most grandiose.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, two farmers are permitted to punctuate the pared-down geometry of Gianni BerengoGardin’s Ploughing in Tuscany, but they are no more nor less important than the other solitary inhabitants of this austere exercise in furrowed planes—a horse and a tree. . . .

But this seeming denial of a human presence is counteracted throughout the exhibition by metaphorical reminders of the body. Robert Doisneau does it with lighthearted humour in his close-up of two breast-like humps in the snow, and makes sure that nobody misses the joke by calling his picture Seins de Glace.

Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. It will not even perish by the flames of fire. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals. . . .You can count your money and burn it within the nod of a buffalo’s head, but only the Great Spirit can count the grains of sand and the blades of grass of these plains. As a present to you, we will give you anything we have that you can take with you; but the land, never.

—Blackfeet Chieftain

Plotinus the classical visionary whose understanding of reality has been integrated into both Christian and Islamic metaphysics said: ‘And if anyone asks nature for what end she produces (IloLet) if she consents to hear the questioner and to speak, she will say: “You must not question me; you must understand, and yourself be silent, just as I am silent and am not accustomed to speak. What then must you understand? That the thing produced arises out of my contemplation (0exjt¿x)> silence, and my natural insight (theorema), and I too am born of a similar contemplation, and have the nature of a lover of contemplation”.’Eunead, III, 8.4.

—Keith Critchlow

These, however, are only the most superficial examples of pervasive need to equate rocks with thighs, caves with wombs, sea with strands of hair, and sand dunes with the slope of a belly or hip. Sensuous, heterosexual and yet immune from any suspicion of demeaning lust, these references act as a constant reminder that photographs—for all their apparent objectivity, their testaments to the camera’s mechanical skill and accuracy—are always informed by the men and women who take them.

—Richard Cork, London Evening Standard

Judging by . . . ‘The Land’, twentieth century landscape photographs, the role of the landscape painter of earlier centuries has not been replaced. These pictures, some bizarre, some masterly, some improbable and nearly all fascinating cling for their overall effect more to a specific inquisitiveness into the precise nature of the world than into an interpretation of its significance; they have more to do with geology than with art. It must be said that photography and geology are apparently excellent companions and that their relationship will undoubtedly prove to be a significant aspect of twentieth century knowledge, but it would appear, on this evidence at least, that this knowledge will be more one of information than of a heightening of visual awareness. In other words that the eye may be shown things that it might otherwise not have physically seen or recognised but it will do little to educate the eye to looking at familiar sights with a more profound understanding. These photographs are, quite simply, more conceptual than perceptual.

Reflections from ‘ ‘Appalachia’ ’ (In honor of Delius’ Centenary: 1962)

dawn songs in the dews of young orange trees; and ranging orisons; and wordless longings

sung in tranquillity’s waters sliding in sun’s light;

and benisons sung in these trees . . .

in these, yes, it is the ‘ah-ness’, yes, it is the course of adrenalin, but, it is the lens opening of Frederick Delius’ luminous eye: f/stop open— all things measureless lucidities, my eyes so in tune: atonement, aUone-ment is atonement,

what is meant by not being able to focus two eyes . . .

they lie on the horizon, they lie on the great St. John’s River’s waters in the monocular sunlight

three miles wide lid to lid

—Jonathan Williams

Some speak of a return to Nature— I wonder where they could have been?

-Frederick Sommer

—Christopher Drake, TheTatler

One of the most important qualities about land is its rhythm, and this is a quality which the camera seems peculiarly incapable of bringing out. Even though it may be manipulated to focus with varying degrees of clarity on different zones, it cannot simplify, to stress the underlying movement of a piece of land. Paul Nash could convey the spirit of a place, more poetically and more powerfully, in a simple watercolour than did any of these technically superb photographs.

—Fenella Crichton, Studio International

Brandt as a photographer is unquestionably an artist. So are Stieglitz and Adams, but though some are represented here who have achieved it elsewhere, no one else quite succeeds in capturing the spirit that took Sir Francis Bacon out into the rain in his open coach ‘to receive the benefits of Irrigation, which he was wont to say was very wholesome because of the Nitre in the Aire and the Universali Spirit of the World’.

—John McEwen, Spectator